It’s almost hard to believe now, but in the not too distant past, there have been presidents who actually labored quite intensely to not be in the news any more than was necessary. President Barack Obama, in fact, seemed to actually want his presidency ensconced in relative calm. If you wanted to know what happened at the presidential briefing, you had to either go to it, wait for those who went to it to report on it, or chill out until the White House published a transcript. It was only after Trump came to power in 2016 that the briefings became must-see TV on cable news—and even then, only because the White House had turned them into a daily train wreck.
Times have changed. Whereas TNR’s Matt Ford once famously compared Trump’s first term to the episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes, its second iteration has become a dull monotony. Just about everything this White House does is rooted in the president’s desire to get revenge on his perceived enemies, his quest for self-aggrandizement, and the extreme limitations that arise when your best days—from a pure cognition standpoint—are well behind you. Nowadays, there are only really seven types of Trump story, and they’re all bad.
Tariffs: Of all the kindnesses that the Supreme Court has bestowed on Trump, its February decision to strike down the president’s retaliatory tariffs stands out as advice that should have been heeded: “Hey, don’t do this, you are screwing up the economy.” Trump forsook this wise counsel and continues to wake up on random mornings with the yen for imposing tariffs willy-nilly. This week he imposed 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods because our neighbors to the north had the temerity to fight back in the trade war Trump started. He followed that up with an announcement that he was going to put a ten percent tariff on 80 other nations. It’s always impossible to gauge whether Trump intends to stick with a tariff fight. After all, it’s in this arena that “Trump Always Chickens Out” was born. But behind the trade war pyrotechnics, the government has handed back approximately $50 billion in refunds to firms buffeted by the president’s tariff regime. Have you seen any of that money yet?
The War in Iran: As I’ve explained at length, Trump’s decision to wade into an unwinnable foreign war after limply cosplaying as The One Guy Smart Enough to Do That was born from the fact that he’s a dumb asshole who needed a distraction from a cratering economy and the daily effluvia of the Epstein news cycle. But even I thought that the backslappery that arose from the memorandum of understanding that briefly put an end to hostilities might be a sign that the administration understood it had a much-needed off-ramp. Color me naïve: We’re now back in the big muddy, talking about war crimes and taking over Kharg Island, as the president recoils from public inquiry and his congressional allies fret about their political futures. The only question left is the one asked by TNR contributor Joe Cirincione: Can Trump lose the same war twice?
ICE Violence: Too many members of the media treated the exile of Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem as a credible sign that the administration had overreached in its violent assault on American cities. But the White House’s bloodthirsty deportation machine suffered little if any lull, and ICE is back to its wanton ways, with new high-profile killings at the hand of Trump’s goons in Texas, Florida, and Maine—the latter of which may prove to regalvanize support for Senator Susan Collins’s future Democratic opponent. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant reminds us, the violence is a feature, not a bug. And now, Trump’s FBI has decided to turn a blind eye to investigating those responsible. Far from a drawdown, this looks like the administration is giving carte blanche to the agency to kill at will.
Self-enrichment: Trump spent last year becoming a world-class kleptocrat, on the back of self-dealing exploits too numerous to recount (though I did offer readers what I thought were the worst of the bunch). Estimates as to how much his bread got buttered by all the grift and graft are nearly as varied. The New York Times totaled up about $1.4 billion in takings, but this is the low end—financial disclosures released at the end of June put the total at $2.2 billion, while Democratic researchers on the House Oversight Committee estimate that this figure rises to “$9.7 billion when the value of Trump’s digital assets is factored in” to the equation. Regardless, Trump is still lining his pockets, with new schemes including Kazakh tungsten, Pentagon baksheesh, and what appears to be a pay-to-pardon scheme.
Voter Suppression: When Trump isn’t trying to steal your money, he’s well-nigh obsessed with stealing your vote, a subject that was supposed to serve as the (very) loose framework for his recent prime-time ramble. The president’s monomaniacal desire to see the SAVE Act—his signature voter suppression bill—pass muster has peppered the headlines with updates on the latest weird scheme to somehow enact it over the objections of all the Democratic lawmakers and not a few of their GOP colleagues. Not long ago, Trump was trying to sneak it through the reconciliation process; now Republicans have backdoored voter ID restrictions into a congressional stock-trading-ban bill. It’s clear that Trump would love to rig the upcoming midterms, though it’s not clear how he will accomplish this. It’s a bad sign for the GOP that many of the networks opted to not broadcast his prime-time rant. Perhaps the media is finally coming around to the reality that Republican claims of mass voter fraud are an obvious fiction.
Bad Renovations: Millions now living may not recall that it was once possible to go several years without thinking about the Reflecting Pool. Thanks to Trump, we’re now getting daily updates about algal blooms, phantasmal vandalism, and dubious criminal cases that only show how the administration’s Stasi-like authoritarianism can be extended almost everywhere. The real vandal, as TNR’s Michael Tomasky wrote, is Trump, whose desperate efforts to leave a mark in D.C. have led to a demolished East Wing, a hollowed-out Kennedy Center, and an Oval Office decorated with Temu gold wall appliqués. Still, as Tim Noah points out, it all does serve a grand purpose: funneling taxpayer dollars to Trump’s cronies.
Everyone’s Getting Sicker: Trump’s second term isn’t without its success stories—if you are the measles virus, anyway. As Axios reported this week, the “U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295—a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker that compiles state and local health data.” This news comes hard on the heels of another public health crisis that also serves as a metaphor for the Trump presidency: the record number of cyclospora infection cases that have turned this into Explosive Diarrhea Summer. This is part and parcel of the long tail of DOGE’s effort to denude the government of its public health capabilities; we see this manifesting in our struggle to contain New World screwworm at home and Ebola abroad. And let’s remember: In the event of a Covid-style pandemic, the adults who were in the room during Trump’s first term have been replaced by quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who make the titular character from “Storm”—Tim Minchin’s seminal song about pseudoscience—look like C. Everett Koop.
There are, of course, two and a half more years of this presidency. Is it possible that an eighth Trump story emerges? For once, I’m rooting against variety—we need Trump to discover a new thing to fail at like we need a hole in the head. Let us instead work in our own ways to bring a future of relative calm and solemnity back to these lands. We all would rather be getting different push alerts from the ones we’re getting now. I know there’s one in particular that I’m really looking forward to, and it’s definitely not whatever my readers at the FBI think it is.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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