The anarchic administration

 About two weeks ago, I read Regime Change, the account by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan  Swann of Trump's first year in office. I did not take any notes, and my brain, as usual, has far too many demands upon it, and I don't think I can write a review that would do it justice now. I can however draw on the general impressions that it left me with that shed a lot of light on the horrible flaw at the heart of the Trump administration, one that will keep it from doing almost anything effectively for the next two years plus.

Our whole system of government is based upon respect for certain impartial principles embodied in our constitution and our laws.  They were stated very clearly in those documents.  They include the distribution of power among three different branches of government, the explicit affirmation of certain rights enjoyed by the people, and the limitations on the authority of prosecutors and police.  The constitution didn't lay out corresponding principles for international affairs, but the nation developed a set of  such principles during the twentieth century.  As embodied in Wilson's Fourteen Points and FDR's Atlantic Charter, they included respect for the sovereignty of nations, the renunciation of force except in self-defense, and the natural alliance among nations that shared our democratic values.  The commitment to these values at home and abroad cannot, of course, ensure that our government will always respect them.  The whole drama of US history revolves around the attempt to live up to the ideals that the founders bequeathed to us--something of which human beings are not consistently able to do.  They can however try.  The Trump Administration differs from any other in US history because Trump has no commitment whatever to any of these values, or to any legal, institutional or foreign policy traditions.  Like so many members of his and my generation, he believes that history started with him, and it's job is to make his imagined world come to life.  That is a world without law or impartial values, in which he can use all the power he has to reward friends, punish enemies, change the way the public thinks about important national issues, enrich himself and his family, seize power and resources in foreign countries, and, for reasons that I'm not sure anyone fully understands, openly favor Vladimir Putin and Russia over Victor Zelensky and Ukraine and leave every traditional American ally on its own.

Trump meanwhile is such an egomaniac that it is almost impossible to work for him.  He will not read or educate himself about anything, and he will not accept any advice that he is wrong on any issue.  Two things paralyze most of the people working for him.  The first is fear of losing his own favor.  Trump publicly ordered Pam Bondi to go more quickly about indicting the officials who he thought had treated him unfairly in the last eight years, and when she still didn't, he fired her. But the second--and this may be even more frightening--is the fear of MAGA influencers, with their hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, turning against them.  Influencer Laura Loomer can walk into the White House, tell Trump that high officials of his National Security Council staff are disloyal in some way, and count on him firing them, as Regime Change documents.  J.D. Vance is Trump's heir apparent, but Trump keeps enough speculation going about Marco Rubio as a possible alternative to keep Vance looking over his shoulder.  Nearly all his senior economic advisers, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, opposed elements of Trump's tariff policies, but they could not shake his certainty that tariffs would do what he thought they would.  He did have to back off from his trade war because of a threatened collapse in the financial markets, but he never really changed his mind.  Not surprisingly, in this frustrating environment, subordinates often take their anger out on each other, and the book details a number of out-of-control shouting matches among cabinet members and others.  It's another feature of this kind of environment that it encourages individuals to leak their side of the story to the press.  This book must have drawn on a great many of them.  Some of them will briefly oppose one of his ideas, but he can make them endorse almost anything, such as the idea of taking over the Gaza Strip, removing its population, and turning it into a Mediterranean resort.  

Trump has developed a remarkable political strategy, based upon money, which Haberman and Swan describe in some detail.  The key figures in it are two long-time Republican operatives, Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaCivita, who ran the 2004 campaign along with Susie Wiles, now his chief of staff. The key to Trump's machine, of course, is money, the enormous sums that have poured into his campaign coffers from big oil, big tech, and anyone else who needs to stay in the good graces of the federal government, which is of course just about any major institution.  It is not clear whether Trump's new crypto-generated fortune is going into campaigns also.  Yet it seems that this strategy is about to meet with spectacular failure in the midterm elections.  The American people are so disgusted with the economic picture that they are going once again to exercise their fundamental right to remove the ruling party from power, certainly in the House and very likely in the Senate as well.  This will make ten out of the last eleven elections (beginning in 2006) in which either a house of Congress or the White House has changed hands.  And just today, the Washington Post reports that Trump is angry at these strategists because of the prospects of a big loss, making them vulnerable to intrigues against them by other ins the administration.  LaCivita and James Blair, a political director, have just been caught receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars for work on behalf of the pro-Russian Serbian government of the Serb territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Trump, in one of his frequent panics, announced on Truth Social nine days ago that LaCivita and Blair "do not work for me, other than as outside consultants."  Staffers are speculating that Wiles might give up her position after the midterms, and Stephen Miller, housing official Bill Pulte (the father of the failed mortgage fraud cases against Adam Schiff and Letitia James), and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin top contenders to replace her.  Trump apparently chose the now-departed Katie Zacharia as his new press secretary without consulting Wiles.  This is the kind of medieval court politics that inevitably dominates an organization run by a hopeless narcissist with no commitment to any higher goals or principles and no respect for actual facts.

Based on Haberman and Swan's book, there is only one kind of project that really commands Trump's sustained attention: the destruction or remodeling of old buildings and monuments and the erection of new ones.  Here, too, he has created his own playbook.  He destroyed the old East Wing of the White House without even informing Congress, using multi-million dollar donations from businessmen who depend on government cooperation to pay for its reconstruction.  He has called French President Emile Macron to compare the dimensions of his planned Triumphal Arch across Memorial Bridge to the one in Paris.  He kills time in the Oval Office showing almost any visitor plans for these projects.  Having left his mark on New York and Atlantic City, he is determined to do the same in Washington, and this time he doesn't have to borrow the money from banks.  The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were authorized in 1911 and 1934 by presidents (Taft and Franklin Roosevelt) who wanted to commemorate the founding giants of their own political parties. Trump won't glorify anyone but himself.

I found only one moment in the whole book in which Trump did anything somewhat admirable.  On September 27, 2025, Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff, Trump's special envoys who have combined Middle East diplomacy with big-time private deal-making, had reached a cease-fire agreement on Gaza, but they had warned Susie Wiles that Netanyahu, who functions as another one of Trump's major foreign policy advisers, would call Trump to try to back out of it.  When he did, Trump put them on the call as well, and at least one of them apparently shared what he heard with the authors.  I quote:

          "Bellowing, Trump told Netanyahu he was sick of his antics. I've done everything to protect you.  You better fucking go along with this.  It's been going on for too fucking long. Everybody's sick of you, Bibi, Trump said.  All the Jews are sick of you.  Even the two Jews on this call are sick of you, Trump added, referring to Kushner and Witkoff.  You can't back out of this.  I'm the best friend Israel ever had.  everybody hates you, and I've stood by you, he continued to shout. I'm telling you, Trump yelled, this is a great deal for Israel."

          Netanyahu caved in.  Of course, the deal has turned out to be a sham: Israel has continued destroying buildings of all kinds in Gaza and has killed 1,505 Palestinians according to the Gaza Health Ministry since the deal was reached, and refuses to withdraw from Gaza.  That perhaps shows the limits of what Trump's diplomacy can do: it can't make Putin or Netanyahu abandon their imperialist dreams and their expansionist wars, but it can get Netanyahu, at least, to pretend to step back once in a while.

         Trump has evidently lost whatever grip he had on the  American people eighteen months ago.  Yesterday Nate Silver's projections gave the Democrats a 74.6 percent chance of gaining control of the Senate, most likely by a 52-48 margin, and a 93.5 percent chance of winning the House, with a projected majority of 239-196.  Since 1840 a weak economy has invariably punished the party in power at the polls, and 2026 will be no exception.  I don't know if this will do anything to restore functioning democracy in the United States.  The Democrats are planning investigations of massive financial irregularities inside the Trump White House and Administration, and there could well be another round of impeachment.  That will continue the endless struggle between the elites of the two parties, which in my opinion the bulk of the population is sick of.  Meanwhile, more than 50 years of ceaseless attacks on our institutions and founding principles, from both sides of the aisle, have taken their toll.  We still have a lot of inspiring history upon which to draw, but I do now know if our political class still cares or knows enough about it to begin restoring a sense of common purpose and a commitment to greater ideals to our political life.

         

What a Difference 80 Years Can Make

 It has been some time since I've compared front pages of the New York Times from eighty years apart.  The eighty year cycle is key to the whole Strauss-Howe framework for history, as you know--but because we haven't gone through and successfully resolved a great crisis in 2026, as we had in 1946, this comparison illuminates the enormous differences between that time and ours.  Yesterday's front page, which I will get to in due course, seemed such an acute portrayal of where we now that I was moved to do the comparison again.  The first thing to note, as in other comparisons, is how much more news the 1946 front page contained.  It includes fifteen different news stories and a world news summary in eight columns; yesterday's six-column page has six stories, and teases for twelve more at the bottom of the page.

Two three-column headlines dominate the October 5 page.  On the left, inflation, fueled above all by skyrocketing meat prices and shortages, is the story. Mayor O'Dwyer of New York has asked President Truman to ask the FBI to investigate the "meat famine" in the city and allow imports from Argentina.  A second story under the headline reports that the Office of Price Administration, a holdover from wartime that was about to go out of business, was allowing restaurants to raise their prices on meat dishes by fifteen percent.  A third story reports that a different agency, the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, had been unable to agree on an alternative to the current wage-price stabilization plan, which was failing.  Then as now, inflation was perhaps the most serious domestic issue the country faced, and it was much more serious then.  The explosion of consumer demand and shortages raised prices by 18 percent by the end of 1946, compared to an estimated 3.7 percent this year.  That was the biggest reason for the Republican landslide in the congressional elections that were just a week away, and which, interestingly enough, did not make their way onto the October 6 front page.  A similar story is playing out this year on a lesser scale. 

The three-column headline on the right also has contemporary resonance: "Truman Again Prods Britain on 100,000 Palestine Visas; Backs Jewish State Plan."  Truman said that the proposals of the Jewish Agency for Palestine for "a viable Jewish state in control if its own immigration and economic policies in an adequate area of Palestine instead of in the whole of Palestine."  Eighty years later, as I have pointed out, the Israeli government seems to be executing a plan to extend the borders of that state to what was then the whole of Palestine.  A second story reports that the Attlee government in Britain had immediately rejected the proposal, which had generated intense Arab opposition.  Four other foreign stories, only one from wire services, occupied the rest of the three columns on the right.  An international Italian Economic Commission announced that Italy would have to pay $225 million in war reparations to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Ethiopia--a figure that the great power Council of Foreign Ministers, including those of the US, the USSR, Britain and France, would have to approve.  Another London story reported the creation of a new Ministry of Defense to coordinate Britain's three services.  In China, an unidentified force of Chinese had attacked a US Marine supply depot, and in Yugoslavia the Tito government had arrested an American United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation official as a spy.

Between the two big headlines, a Honolulu story reported the first leg of a non-stop B-29 flight from there over the North Pole to Egypt, which had already reached Alaska.  Below that, the Times reported on a speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Buffalo, New York. Fresh from his service as a Nuremberg prosecutor, Jackson warned that "there could be no permanent peace unless minorities everywhere were to have at least a minimum of civil rights."  In a related story from Tennessee, an all-white jury had acquitted twenty-three of twenty-five Negroes[sic] "accused of participating in the disorders at Columbia, Tenn., last February 25, in which two Negroes were killed and four white policemen were wounded."  And in local news, a strike meeting of sailors from the merchant marine had ended in violence blamed on Communist members, and five armed men had robbed more than $1,000 from an office of Colonial Airlines.

Yesterday a foreign story of a different kind occupied the top right-hand side of the Times front page. It told how presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have spent a good deal of their time in the Kremlin talking to Vladimir Putin about a big US-Russian energy deal involving a major donor to President Trump.  These talks have gone parallel to their efforts to stop the Russia-Ukraine war, which have gone nowhere.  Such a deal, sources say, would be a big step towards the easing of sanctions against Russia and a warming of Russian-American relations.  Two domestic stories take up the rest of the top of the page.  The first, on the left, deals with by far the biggest Times story of the last week, the lawsuit filed by a former Cornell student against seven young men for allegedly sexually assaulting her two years ago, and the way in which the case was originally handled by Cornell and local authorities.  The second, datelined Phoenix, Arizona, tells in detail of US teenagers there who are making money reselling guns to representatives of the Mexican drug cartel.  Below those two is a lighter-than-air story about the city of Philadelphia's first parallel parking championship and the contestants who have already developed an online following by posting pictures of the tight spaces they have maneuvered into.  The fifth story is about an AI algorithm which claims to measure a patient's risk of getting breast cancer from a single mammogram.  And the last deals with our forthcoming election from a framework that was not an issue in 1946: "Justices Brace for Disputes from Election," the headline reads, focusing on the Supreme Court.

In the wake of the Second World War, US readers remained keenly interested in global events, whether or not the US was directly involved in them.  They also followed the doings the federal, state and local government closely, and civil rights had already emerged as an important new issue, even before President Truman took it  up in a big way about 18 months later. They counted on the government to do something about economic distress.  Yesterday the two national affairs stories focused on corruption in high places, and the near-certainty of serious disputes over the outcome of our forthcoming elections.  The  Cornell story reflects decades of evolving social mores, and the AI story points to another big change in how we live.  The domestic and international political orders that the US had been trying to create for the first five decades of the twentieth century are gone, and we have not replaced them.  In the last twenty 25 years we have had three very serious crises to cope with: 9/11, the financial crash of 2008, and the COVID epidemic.  The government's failure to handle any of them in an inspiring fashion and the election and re-election of Donald Trump has destroyed faith in our institutions.  I don't when or how it might be restored.

Is higher ed a fraud?

        Some weeks ago, an article alerted me to a new academic novel, Lords of Serendipity, by an English prof named Randy Boyagoda.  He works now in Canada but originally came from Sri Lanka, where a good deal of the novel takes place.  Spoilers ahead! The main characters are:

        Jack Bayern, a middle-aged widower who teaches Introduction of Statistics for Non-Majors at the mythical Arcadia Tech University, which might be MIT, but I can't tell.  Jack has a daughter Katrina who is a freshman at Haven, one of the most elite schools in the Northeast. which her late mother also attended.  Jack is teaching extra sections to pay Katrina's tuition.  Katrina has a roommate from Sri Lanka called Cham, a young woman with quite a back story of her own.

         Young Allard Hamburger, a statistics grad student, is the senior Teaching Assistant in Jack's course.  His mother Patricia Hamburger conceived him out of wedlock with a professor named Martin, an astronomer, who refused to drive her to the abortion clinic where she planned to end the pregnancy. Instead she had Allard, gave up her doctoral studies, and eventually went to work at "student research services" at Haven, which is located deep in a forest.  After years of helping students, Patricia is about to be replaced by a chatbot.  Allard knows that his father, whom he has never met, is a professor at a leading university, and he is building a multi-million dollar nest egg by charging foreign students--and only foreign students--for altering their grade to a minimally acceptable 76. 

        Near the beginning of the book, Allard gets a visit from another Sri Lankan, Adi Bhopal, who paid him for a 76 several years earlier.  He now wants to go to grad school and needs a better grade, and asks Allard to sign on to a complicated scheme to give him one.  Allard refuses.  Bhopal has a side hustle of his own: tutoring would-be foreign students at American colleges from Sri Lanka and elsewhere who dream of getting into a western university and transforming their lives.  One of his tutees is a young Sri Lankan girl named Devi from a poor family there.  She knows him as Johannes.  Bhopal/Johannes commits suicide after Allard refuses to help him.  Devi perseveres on her own, but without success.

        Both Jack and his daughter fall afoul of the PC police.  In the opening meeting of his course, Jack uses an incident involving a bird of prey and a squirrel to make a point about different disciplines, and makes a veiled reference to the work of J. K. Rowling, who, in case you didn't know, is persona non grata among the woke because of her transphobia.  That leads to a threatening visit from a Dean, but he survives.  Katrina and her roommate Chan take part in a Christmas Gaudy, a play, which activist students try to turn into a pro-Palestinian demonstration.  When they try to continue the play as planned, they are invited to leave their dormitories.  The real theme of the book, however, is fraud.  Jack Bayern is the kind of old-school academic who cares about doing things right--the reason his career has never gone anywhere--and he is unlucky enough to uncover two cases of it.

         First, the suicide of Adi Bhopal leads Jack to examine the grading history in the introductory statistics course, and he discovers the extraordinary number of foreign students who received a 76 from Allard Hamburger--something which, he knows as a good statistician, cannot be a coincidence. The administration refuses to look into the matter any further or take any action.  Then, by a series of coincidences worthy of David Lodge, Jack and Professor Martin, the distinguished astronomer, find themselves working at, or with, a newly renovated university in Sri Lanka, which is being transformed by lavish funding from China.  Martin claims that his team has found a way to predict where black holes will occur, and Jack and a couple of enthusiastic grad students get the task of checking his statistical methods.  Jack finds that Martin must have been falsifying his data, that there is no other way that he could have gotten the results that he did. Once again he wants to blow the whistle, but he eventually loses his nerve, partly because he needs his new salary to keep his daughter at Haven.

I could not dismiss this last climax as over the top, because of another book I had read recently and reviewed here: How to Rule the World, by recent Stanford graduate Theo Baker.  Working for the Stanford newspaper, Baker uncovered an equally serious fraud that had helped make the career of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whom he eventually forced to resign (with a handsome severance package) from Stanford when he revealed it.  That fraud related to false data claiming to point towards a newly identified cause of Alzheimer's disease, which, if accurate, would have been worth perhaps billions of dollars.  There are professors, as the history of academia shows, who become almost too big to fail. 

The vast expansion of US higher education in the 1960s, I believe, outran the supply of really outstanding intellects.  A critical mass of mediocrity turns dedicated and original academics into outsiders, and makes way for careerists who learn by the time they are 40 that they really don't enjoy academic work that much.  Many of them become administrators, the class that now runs every major university along strict business and public relations principles.  The Ivy League and its competitors depend now on a steady stream of money from Wall Street and the tech sector, and their main function within our society is to provide the young talent that keeps those sectors going.  To attract the maximum number of students and convince their parents to pay enormous annual sums, they must keep them happy during their college years, which is why A- has become the default bad grade at most of them, and assignments have been cut back so much.  Since everyone gets the same grades, they have become irrelevant, and bright young students spend more time networking.  We need another realistic novel focusing on the top administrators and trustees of an elite school.  It could also make a great movie.

23 years of posts--a summary

 One of my sons got AI to read every post in this blog and summarize it.  I think every regular reader will enjoy the results--I certainly did. There is only one reference that I do not understand--I will have to look it up.  Here it is:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6ZgIXvBTMPUswNTjJn9q1jKlKhTz-hd/view?usp=sharing

How much is Trump responsible for?

 I spent the last week in Paris, which for me makes for days of restaurants, movies, bookstores, and museums.  When I was living in Cambridge and its environs in the 1970s this area was a lot like it, but it isn't anymore.  The break allowed me to think more clearly about the state of our own nation, and to perhaps get a better look at the great, ever-changing forest of American history, zooming backwards from that one orange-colored tree that so dominates our lives.  Yes, our country is in a terrible mess, and yes, we have a president who is truly, in his own way, beyond compare.  But how much of it is exactly his fault, and how many of our current misfortunes can we trace directly to him? It's an interesting question.

Trump cannot reasonably be blamed for the transformation of our economy over the last fifty years or so.  He was not even a key figure in making it happen, nor does he seem to me have benefited much from it before he entered politics.  The New Deal era began to die in the 1970s.  The Republican Party had never really favored it, although Eisenhower and Nixon had lived with and even expanded upon some of its achievements, but by 1976 Ronald Reagan, who believed that government was the solution not the problem, was very nearly the dominant figure in the Republican Party, and he definitely took it over four years later.  Something parallel had happened among the Democrats, where the new generation of 1974 had run against big government and special interests and had begun to replace the economic issues of previous decades with social ones.  Reagan introduced long-term peacetime fiscal irresponsibility into American government in order to make the rich richer, and the deregulation of financial markets began.  While Gordon Gecko was about as old as Donald Trump, he looms in retrospect as far more of a harbinger of things to come, since he worked in finance, not real estate.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton each took major steps to cut Reagan's deficits, and by 2000 Clinton had created a significant federal surplus, but George W. Bush immediately returned to Reagan's permanent deficits, while allowing financialization to run wild and create the housing bubble.  Barack Obama in 2009 might have revived some of the principles of the New Deal in response to the 2008 crash, but he chose not to, convinced that there was nothing fundamentally unsound about our new system.  He did cut Bush's deficits substantially--as every Democratic President since JFK had done--but he was the last Democratic president to do so.  Trump cut taxes again and the deficit ballooned again, exploding to unprecedented heights during the COVID response, and Biden did not reverse the damage.  The deficit in Biden's last fiscal year, 2024, $1.83 trillion, was nearly twice as high as the deficit in Trump's last pre-pandemic year, 2019, when it was just $984 billion.  Meanwhile the share of the richest 1 percent and ten percent of our nation has grown steadily, while the lower half of the population has been stuck at the same level.

Trump has claimed to repudiate the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, but even this is only a half truth.  The end of the Cold War under Reagan ushered in a new idea of American indispensability and supremacy, celebrated publicly by both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama.  More specifically, 9/11 unleashed an unprecedented era of American imperialism, marked by attempts to replace hostile Middle Eastern regimes with cooperative, friendly clients.  Begun by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, these attempts were continued by Obama in Libya and in Syria--but none of these initiatives left the target nation better off or turned it into a reliable friend of the US.  And now, two years into his second term, Trump has embarked upon what is turning into the biggest catastrophe yet, the attempt to complete the neoconservative agenda by removing or crippling the Islamic regime in Iran.  That was already orthodoxy among the Republican leadership thanks in large part to AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Mitch McConnell had done everything it could to try to stop Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and essentially recognized Benjamin Netanyahu, not President Obama, as his the spokesman for his preferred middle eastern policy.  And it was Biden, not Trump, who allowed Israel completely to destroy the Gaza strip and leave its population homeless after October 7.

Writing in 1997, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe had argued in their book The Fourth Turning that during the next twenty years, a great crisis would allow a new president to mobilize the nation, solve critical problems, and build a new political consensus as FDR and Lincoln had done.  Their list of possible crises included (but was not limited to) a terrorist attack, an economic crisis, and an epidemic.  All three have now come to pass, and the first two at least did produce a broad surge of renewed patriotism, but Bush II and Obama failed to deal adequately with the first two, and the third one divided the country more than ever.  Trump understood one key point.  Disastrous consensus economic and foreign policies and the failure to respond effectively to these crises had utterly discredited the leadership of the two major parties, leaving an opening for a nationally known demagogue like himself.  A large plurality of Republicans and a near-plurality of the country voted for him in 2016 not in spite of his opposition to consensus positions but because of them.   

Trump in his second term, however, has made two kinds of changes that no one else would have made.  To begin with, in foreign policy, he has treated the nation's oldest friends as enemies and even expressed designs upon the territory of Denmark and Canada.  In Ukraine he has abandoned the role of the defender of nations against aggression that the US played for most of the twentieth century.  And while the war against Iran was already part of the neoconservative playbook, he has waged it with unprecedented fecklessness, taking no account of what was going to happen, blindly following the advice of Prime Minister Netanyahu against the views of much of his own team, and doing unprecedented harm to the world economy.  He has also crippled our foreign policy establishment, eliminating USAID and ignoring the State Department, while private citizens, including his own son-in-law, take over the most important diplomatic assignments without any oversight, and all the while using this role to build up their own economic power.  We have never seen anything remotely like this before.

And at home, Trump has purposefully, consciously degraded our entire political process in an equally unprecedented fashion.  I am not merely referring to his election denialism, but to the whole tenor of politics as he practices them.  He constantly uses contemptuous language towards the whole opposition party, towards media critics, and towards anyone who gets in his way.  This is exactly the kind of language that Washington and Jefferson, who occupied the White House at the beginning and the end of an equally contentious era, warned us against.  No president--including Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War--ever used language like his towards opponents before.  Trump also has no understanding of or respect for our Constitution and how our institutions are supposed to work.  The whole idea of bureaucracies applying rules impartially is anathema to him--perhaps because he is such a chronic rule-breaker himself--and he has filled the most sensitive positions with flunkies who understand that their job is to reward his friends and punish his enemies.  He has found numerous ways to use the presidency to make money for himself.  And now he has offered every adult American $5,000 for their votes in the upcoming election.  

Strauss and Howe showed that from 1774 to about 1794, from 1861 through 1865, and from 1933 through 1945, the United States established and then re-established confidence in our institutions and in ourselves by mobilizing effectively to deal with great national problems.  They expected their (and my) generation to produce a new Lincoln or FDR who would do the same.  According to the 80-year rhythm that they identified, that process should have been completed by now.  I expect Trump to leave office in January 2029 if not sooner.  He might be replaced by someone equally disruptive.  The two parties don't seem likely to select very impressive candidates in 2028 either, and I expect at least one tech mogul to try for the White House then.  But no matter who wins, I can't at this moment imagine how they might create some new national consensus comparable to the ones that emerged from our previous great crises.  Entropy and fragmentation may have gone too far.