The Chaos Is The Point
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, already beginning to lose sight of what’s important in the flurry of attacks by the new Trump Administration, that’s the entire point.
The rapid fire assault on the institutions of the United States is in full swing! As many warned before the strategic leaking of Project 2025 in the latter days of the Trump Campaign, the renewed Trump Administration is not the one we knew before. Today, we face a force resurgent, a more organized instrument; their first flimsy attempts at overwhelming the norms and institutions of US politics seem just that in hindsight, clumsy and immature.
In the first 10 days of the Trump Administration, the entirety of the boundary-stretching set during the 2016-2020 administration has been dimmed to the forgotten past. A flurry of hundreds of executive orders, memorandums, public proclamations, and news blasts have left the general belief in the infallibility of Liberal institutions in tatters. Wherever you look - so long as you aren’t looking too far to the Left - the mainstream “resistance” Democrats are offering no such thing as the ideological barriers they impressed in ink prove entirely futile against an administration which is willing to simply carry white-out.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed now: the complete whiteout created by news and alerts and senselessness is the point, the core of consolidating power elsewhere. You are meant to feel defeated and powerless, that despite the counter-lawsuits and filings being thrown up ad hoc and en masse there is no hope of ultimately stopping the rapid on-ramping of oligarchy and isolation embodied by the political elite.
But while you look at DEIA initiatives, the Civil Rights Act’s command of equal opportunity in employment is being destroyed wholesale; many focus on the issue of LGBTQ+ Rights while the real goal is the defanging of protections for anyone who was or should be uplifted by the passage of the Act.
While we look primarily on the action of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across every major city, discuss Dr. Phil documenting the round-up of alleged criminals for deportation, we are ignoring the actual brutality that is forceful removal of a person from their homes; the networks ripped apart, the trauma of family members disappeared from their work, school, or local grocery. We don’t see how already the “aperture is widening” to include immigrants who simply don’t have paperwork that the current Administration recognizes. Boundaries continue to be stretched.
While we discuss the freeze of funding across the board, experience in real-time the failures of crucial systems across healthcare, education, childcare, banking, food and housing assistance, we are distracted from how this will once more push boundaries that many of us take for granted. We will not remember what was lost when they return a fraction of what we had before. And although the memorandum freezing all federal funding has been rescinded as of this morning, much of the damage in this regard has largely been done.
The core of the issue is that none of us really know what is going on any more. With every lawsuit and challenge, opportunities are created to either curtail or empower the executive, a set of arbitrary boundaries to be constructed around the new norm. Whether things are being enacted as legislated or proclaimed, whether the legal hurdles and institutions we have trusted as checks on executive overreach will prove effective at all this time, is a completely open question.
We have seen this before, even in our own country, time and time again. We can expect crackdowns on dissent, the mass roundup of problematic populations for first deportation, and then work programs. The infrastructure built under all executives since the War on Terror was launched two decades ago has been for this exact moment: the lessening of executive oversight to pursue wars; the construction of migrant detention facilities for adult and child alike; the militarization of the Southern Border and investment in universal surveillance across all states and borders; the complete overtaking of crucial judicial, legislative, and journalistic oversight by industry loyalists and ideological sycophants.
The chaos is the point. The complete disarray of all agencies - governmental and otherwise - and the complete flexibility of structures as now embodied by the aggressive Trump Administration is meant to stir up hostility and confusion and instability. You are supposed to waste your time and energy trying to wrap your head around the sudden multitude of issues seemingly aimed at you, intended to instead sink into despair and stop paying attention altogether. And that is what you mustn’t do.
Instead, seek out those speaking to your problems and use your own voice to empower others. We all have so much more in common than otherwise and it is in the interest of those sowing division to inflict as many indignities upon you and your peers as possible. They wish to isolate you, to make you feel that nobody could understand your situation or that your opinion, perspective, or experience are no longer valid. Precisely the inverse is true; now is a time of universal targeting of the general population, a period of warning in which we are all expected to get in line and shut up.
What comes next will be much worse.
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