Embrace the Chaos
Trump will be an agent of chaos, this is not necessarily bad
Noah Smith warns that a second Trump term will lead to chaos
He says it like this is a bad thing. It may not be.
A few disclaimers. I don’t live in the US, I live in Japan. Also I’m not a US citizen and therefore chaos in the US is not necessarily going to impact me too badly (obviously if chaos in the US emboldens the Chicoms or Norks that’s not the case). Also FWIW my 2016 view of Trump was “at least he’s not Hillary”, because IMHO her email server was quite simply disqualifying. Not just because of the way I’m sure nation state entities read her emails, but because by that act she put her personal short term convenience and self-interest ahead of her country’s long term interest.
Anyway back to Trump in 2024 and Noah’s article. Noah explains why he doesn’t suffer form TDS by stating the things he thought Trump did well. Interestingly there is little overlap between what he thought Trump did well and what I think he did well. Smith totally ignores the Abraham accords and the judicial appointments which were IMHO Trump’s most important accomplishents.
Smith also misses a lot of the reasons why Trump has support, as ably articulated by Bret Stephens in the NY Slimes (archive)
Noah Smith is firmly in the “Trump is an insurrectionist” camp, which is facially wrong. Sarah Hoyt explains this well in a post from late 2022. Smith is also effectively in the “2020 election was totaly not frauded” camp which I consider to be equally wrong. As various people have found, it has been impossible to prove fraud to a level that courts will accept. But circustancial evidence is widespread starting with the way that so many critical parts of the process seem to have been impossible to properly audit.
This opinion of Trump, and Smith’s related general trust of the various administrative agencies, means he is bound to fear a new Trump term for precisely the reasons I welcome it.
Noah writes:
In his first term, Trump pitted himself against the FBI, which he now wants to defund. His campaign pledges include a promise to defund the Justice Department and the intelligence services, as well as various federal agencies. Weakening the intelligence services would certainly reduce our ability to defend ourselves against relentless espionage or even sabotage by the People’s Republic of China.
But the institution that Trump would likely struggle against the most is the U.S. Military.
…
Trump reportedly kept looking for generals who would be more loyal to him personally, rather than to the U.S. as a country. He largely failed to find any. Mark Milley, his top general during the turbulent events of 2020 and early 2021, feared that Trump would assume dictatorial power, and worked to prevent this from happening
From my point of view Trump failed to properly identify just how in the tank for the (generally Democrat) establishment the executive branch was in 2016. As a result he was in fact regularly stabbed in the back by his officials. Trump didn’t pit himself against the FBI, the FBI pitted itself against Trump and his appointees. Milley literally picked up the phone and told the PRC to keep cool. The president is constitutionally the Commander in Chief. Failure to obey his orders is in fact, definitionally insubordination/mutiny unless he orders something that is itself unconstitutional/illegal. The fact that the Pentagon at various points simply lied to him about the status of US forces in Syria/Iraq is actually insubordination. It doesn’t matter whether he was wanting something stupid and overrode advice, the chain of command is clear.
Noah thinks this is fine. I do not. This establishment entitlement has to be eliminated. If it isn’t the US will become as poorly governed as the EU, where the unelected eurocrats control far far too much and face no democratic scrutiny whatsoever.
Sarah Hoyt has somewhere summed up her current support if Trump by “He fights” and that is something he will need to do if he wins the election because there is no doubt in my mind that many people in the federal government believe the same as Noah and they will therefore be finding ways to frustrate Trump from the day he gets elected.
This means a bureacratic civil war.
BUT
This was one reason I didn’t want Trump to run. I would have preferred DeSantis for a number of reasons that start with the fact that he seems a better manager of political underlings. He also seems better able to play the legal, bureaucratic game and he simply doesn’t have all the baggage that Trump has. Hence he might have managed to reform the deep state without as much overt conflict. But it seems like this is not going to happen in 2024. Maybe in 2028 DeSantis will do better.
Anyway back to Trump.
I don’t agree with his apparent views on Russia and I am extremely concerned that he will leave Ukraine in the lurch but apart from that I expect his foreign policy to be a lot more muscular and positive than that by Resident Biden and his feckless morons. Also arguably Russia is a European problem and the Europeans need to get serious about solving it themselves instead of running to Daddy America.
If he causes chaos in the Middle East that’s almost certainly a good thing. The Iranians and their proxies are already causing plenty of chaos and the Biden morons are entirely failing to react in ways that will deter this. Likewise the PRC. I am certain that Trump will defend Taiwan with actual forces not words.
Businessmen understand the concept of creative destruction. Bureaucrats fear it. Assuming Trump has plans to ride the chaos, it’s sounding better and better to me
Does this author--a non U.S. citizen living in Japan--have a balanced, dispassionate perspective? Or is his opinion truncated by having no skin in the game? And when he finger-points to the E.U.s dependency on "Daddy America", does he realize the extent to which the U.S. contributes to the security of Japan?