No Idea What Comes Next -- Digby

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/04/09/no-idea-what-comes-next/

They’re just winging it

Trump has admitted that he never really looks too far ahead. he has such faith in his “instincts” and “Common sense” that he just assumes that everything will go well for him no matter what. And since he always gets out overy jam, I suppose that’s not entirely irrational. But visionary? He can’t see past his own reflection in the mirror to anticipate what might come next:

Mr. Trump’s aides insist the speed at which they are working is a feature, not a bug, of the system. Move too slowly, Mr. Musk has insisted, and the bureaucracy would dig in, never to be dislodged. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand,” he said at the White House in February. “We will make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” He cited the restoration of some aid to contain Ebola, and the rehiring of workers at the National Nuclear Safety Administration who oversee nuclear weapons.

[He didn’t actually restore the ebola aid]

But it is impossible to move through the empty corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building — where U.S.A.I.D., the Environmental Protection Agency and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars all have been subject to DOGE mandates to fire many workers — without it becoming clear that there is little plan for dealing with the work left behind. U.S.A.I.D.’s doors are locked; the E.P.A. has stopped collecting some critical data; no one knows what is happening to the Wilson Center’s Cold War archive but its scholars are largely gone. Over at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, monitoring Russian and Chinese malware has taken a back seat to avoiding coming job cuts.

When the question of whether departments are looking beyond the budget line and thinking ahead to what happens when capabilities and expertise disappear gets asked, the answer is a tinge defensive. The Department of Health and Human Services has pulled back billions of dollars for monitoring Covid-19 and improving responses to future viral outbreaks. When asked, the department said: “The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and H.H.S. will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

All this suggests a failure to look around corners — which is hardly new in the American presidency. Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in June 1930, thinking they would help create jobs, then went fishing. They instead accelerated the Great Depression.

The White House insists this time the result will be the opposite. It is a huge bet, one on which not only Mr. Trump’s presidency but the fate of the global economy rests. And no one can predict where the bottom is for the markets, or where the top is for the escalation with China.

“The speed and chaos surrounding President Trump’s policy rollout have created extraordinary global economic disruption; nobody alive has ever witnessed self-induced volatility on this scale,” Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, wrote this week.

Musk thinks the federal government works pretty much the same as twitter so there’s no need for experts and the work will get done anyway. Trump doesn’t think about it at all because he doesn’t care, He just wants people to see him as a winner whether he wins or not. And he discovered that it’s not hard to convince people that he is regardless of the facts.

They are both messianic, depraved personalities and their coming together in this position is a travesty of epic proportions. They have made history and we’re all going to pay for it.