Everything is Breaking

Now Trump sent troops to Portland. And more from the trenches of the war against America.

So now Trump has declared Portland “War ravaged” and ordered troops to the city and to ICE facilities nationwide, authorizing “Full Force, if necessary.” Portland is actually nowhere on the list of most violent cities in America, but it does have a caricatured image as a progressive haven, so it’s an excellent foil.

Local leaders are howling, protesters are gathering, and there is every prospect for mayhem. But the strategy is to keep such nonsense coming so that people tune out or do not even notice as the country’s institutions are being shredded and democratic foundations undermined. So here’s what else is going on.

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As Congress hurtles toward a funding deadline, the White House is preparing to use a government shutdown as pretext to implement the ambitions of Project 2025: strip the federal government to its bones, leaving only defense, immigration, and law enforcement intact. Under Trump’s plan the Labor Department would halt most functions and fire thousands, national parks would close, and IRS help lines might vanish permanently. Immigration raids and National Guard deployments would continue. The only agencies to run smoothly would be the Pentagon and Homeland Security, fattened under Trump’s $4.1 trillion tax and immigration package.

Meanwhile, in coming days more than 100,000 federal workers will formally quit under Trump’s deferred resignation program — the largest mass resignation in American history. In total, as many as 275,000 civilian employees are expected to leave government service through buyouts, early retirements, and forced attrition.

The administration insists this is efficiency but the net effect is chaos: fewer protections for veterans, weaker emergency response, shuttered parks, abandoned functions across government. Americans should prepare for more dysfunction at government offices — say, the IRS or Social Security. Employees describe months of fear and intimidation: FEMA staff, Veterans Administration workers, USDA scientists and veterans who loved their jobs but fled under constant threat of cuts and firings.

And then there’s USAID. Anyone wondering how many people are dying around the world because of this assault should read Nicholas Kristoff’s invaluable reporting from Africa (which contains priceless stories of waste as well, such as the hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent destroying millions of condoms that the US no longer wants to distribute).

And this hollowing out of government is inseparable from Trump’s war on reason. Fresh off unfounded claims that Tylenol and vaccines cause autism, he stood at the UN General Assembly last week mocking climate change as a “green scam” and sneering at “huge, terrible windmills.” He rambled about escalators and refurbishment contracts, slandered allies, and congratulated himself for ending wars that have no not ended.

The strategy is unmistakable: undermine evidence, delegitimize expertise, hollow out institutions, and exalt force. Empower the president to do anything – including to tax the American people with tariffs – which is illegal – then lie about where the “revenue” is coming from, and finally assume the politicized Supreme Court will find a way to validate it.

That’s why it doesn’t even matter what is the truth about Portland, Oregon.

How can this be? Why don’t the people rebel?

I would point us to a fascinating article in Tablet from 2021 in which Alana Newhouse published a widely discussed manifesto, “Everything is Broken,” in which she argued that the sense of collapse across American life—from medicine and media to education and culture—could be explained by what she called the Flatness Aesthetic. Born of neoliberal economics in the 1970s and supercharged by Silicon Valley’s fixation on speed and frictionlessness, flatness makes everything feel the same: every voice equal, every experience interchangeable, nothing rooted, nothing lasting. What began as convenience soon became a cultural and political operating system in which Progressive activists, she contended, used this infrastructure to capture major institutions and enforce conformity, while ordinary Americans showed in their consumer behavior that they did not share the new orthodoxy. Her conclusion was to re-embracing friction, excellence, individuality, and the messy creativity that once animated American life.

I suppose the most charitable conceivable attitude toward Trumpism is that it somehow stems from this very real displeasure with where things were headed. I cannot countenance the burning down of the American house, but obviously there are those who would disagree.

Meanwhile, it has become clear to me that absurdity in the way all this is communicated is not a bug (resulting, say, from Trumpian illiteracy) but a feature of a strategy to aggressively promote and distribute bullshit. I decided to consult Trump’s account on Truth Social and to analyze three random offerings.

So, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Saturday morning: “At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Here’s my analysis.

• The opening clause is plainly a lie. Noem did not initiate anything.

• “Secretary of War” is not the official name of the Secretary of Defense, even if it was announced on social media. The term is used just to annoy reasonable Americans and to project a fake toughness whose very vulgarity is precisely the point. Next it will be the “Secretary of Kicking Ass.”

• “Troops” and “Facilities” should not be capitalized. They’re common nouns which in English are loewr-case. “War ravaged“ shouldn’t be capitalized either, but it should be hyphenated. Also, Portland is not “war-ravaged.” Gaza and Ukraine and war-ravaged.

• “Antifa” are not domestic terrorists, and the U.S. has no such legal designation.

Nice! Remember, these seeming errors are on purpose, to drive you mad, or make you tune out. Next up, Trump writes: “Pregnant Women, DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON, BREAK UP THE MMR SHOT INTO THREE TOTALLY SEPARATE SHOTS (NOT MIXED!), TAKE CHICKEN P SHOT SEPARATELY, TAKE HEPATITAS B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER, AND, IMPORTANTLY, TAKE VACCINE IN 5 SEPARATE MEDICAL VISITS! President DJT”

Problems:

• Tylenol (acetaminophen or paracetemol) is generally safe in pregnancy and for children at standard doses. Advising against it “for virtually any reason” is false.

• MMR vaccine cannot safely or legally be split into three shots; combined dosing is standard.

• Hepatitis B at age 12 are medically unsound.

Spacing vaccines across five visits prolongs disease risk with no benefit. Which is not surprising, since Trump (to say the least) is not a doctor. He appears influenced by RFK Jr., who very much not a physician nor a scientist.

And last but not least: “JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI. Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts. He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

• Alleging crimes is legally risky. If you wrote this, you’d be sued.

• Country, Head, Grand Jury, Nation are common nouns. Not capitalized.

I was fascinated by the cartoonish labelling of this sappy bureaucrat as “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to.” So as a public service, here’s a list of names that actually might fit the bill (other than, obviously, the twice-impeached president himself).

1. Benedict Arnold – Revolutionary War general who betrayed the U.S. by defecting to Britain.

2. Jefferson Davis – President of the Confederacy, leading the rebellion to preserve slavery.

3. Robert E. Lee – Confederate general who waged war against the Union to defend slavery.

4. John Wilkes Booth – Assassin of Abraham Lincoln, destabilizing postwar America.

5. Joseph McCarthy – Senator whose Red Scare destroyed careers and reputations.

6. Al Capone – Crime boss whose bootlegging and violence exemplified organized crime.

7. Charles Manson – Cult leader whose followers committed multiple murders.

8. Timothy McVeigh – Domestic terrorist who bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168.

9. Ted Bundy – Convicted of murdering multiple young women in the 1970s (ultimately confessed to 30 killings). Executed in 1989.

10. John Wayne Gacy – Convicted of murdering 33 boys and young men in the 1970s; buried many of them under his house in Chicago. Executed in 1994.

Surely Trump knows all this. So here, in my view, is the secret sauce that explains it all. Even those among his supporters who can recognize it for what it is are so enamored of the destruction of Brand America that they rejoice in annoying the others. This is actually the point. My only message to them is that they are not merely annoying the Progressives they so loathe (but that actually resemble them in their nihilism). They are alienating much of the American center, which is the source of American exceptionalism and wealth. That’s why everything is breaking.