Remember what it was like? The daily outrages, the migraine-inducing stupidity, wild news cycles churning day and night? Donald Trump isn’t even back in office yet. But he is already reminding America of the chaos he wreaked for four years and previewing what’s to come for the next four.
In the 10 days since defeating Kamala Harris, Trump has rolled out a motley crew of prospective administrative appointees, some of whom are so crazy and unqualified that even some Republicans have expressed reservations. There’s the Fox News host, Pete Hegseth, for defense secretary. There’s Matt Gaetz, who was seemingly nominated as attorney general on impulse on a plane ride—despite a House investigation into allegations he had sex with a minor, among other matters. And, on Thursday, there was anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as Health and Human Services secretary. The misconduct allegations against these three warrant weeks-long news cycles on their own, even before you get to the dangerous ways they’d wield their power.
Speaking of dangerous: There’s Tom Homan—an architect of Trump’s inhumane first term family separation policy—as “border czar.” There’s Stephen Miller, who also wants to crack down on legal immigration, getting ready to direct White House policy. And there’s Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as the two heads of a “department” that will ostensibly focus on making the government more efficient—but that may serve more as a way for Musk to skirt regulations and for Trump to wrest power from the administrative state.
All of this was announced on Trump’s TruthSocial page—marking the return of his governance-by-tweet.
It wasn’t only the administration and Cabinet announcements: Trump has, in recent days, pressured the Senate to allow recess appointments, which would further weaken the legislative check on his power, and “joked” about Congress allowing him to seek a third term: “I suspect I won’t be running again,” he told House Republicans, “unless you do something.” Accompanying him for that victory lap through Washington was Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and one of Trump’s most powerful advisers, who made his surreal debut over the past week and a half as a quasi-statesman—participating in the president-elect’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and meeting with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani.
After a period of relative calm under Joe Biden, political amnesia appears to have set in among many Americans, who seem to recall the depravity and derangement of Trump’s first term as little more than “mean tweets” in an otherwise productive presidency. But these wild opening days of the transition should jog the public’s memory: The Trump Show is loud, loony, and always on.
The next four years won’t just be a test of our democracy—they’ll be a test of our endurance.
