Trump is shooting from the hip so often that the ricochets threaten to ping him politically.
I have a friend, a smart, well-meaning neighbor who now characterizes himself as “not a moral man.” He says this with a shrug, as if it were a hall pass. Democracy? “Wrecked since Vietnam.” Institutions? “Captured” by the left. He has voted for Donald Trump twice and would do so again. The logic, such as it is, goes like this: if the system is corrupt, then breaking its norms is virtue. Apostasy is proof of sanity.
In this upside-down world, Trump’s chaos isn’t a bug; it is the feature that justifies itself.
But there’s a difference between sticking a thumb in the eye of “the establishment” and running a country. As columnist Karen Tumulty warned recently, shared norms and institutions are giving way to zero-sum politics, led by a president stretching executive authority and making an already polarized country even more so.
Once, the norm-breaking felt cathartic. In 2016 and again in 2024, Trump’s outsider act promised to cut through the molasses: government by deal, not by committee; action, not process. He pitched disruption as efficiency: cheaper goods, safer borders, more manufacturing, fewer lectures. The spectacle itself was part of the pitch. Shaking the snow globe was the point.
Then the governing began. And what a screw-up it was.
The first time around — pure bedlam. Amidst it all, more and more Americans began to wonder whether they could even budget confidently for the next batch of groceries, and that unease caught up with Trump at the end.
Eight months into his second term, the same anxiety is nipping at his heels again, with the midterms just around the corner.
Making of a non-conformist
Trump didn’t invent norm-busting. He was weaned on it. He grew up in Fred Trump’s bare-knuckle real-estate world, learning early on that rules were obstacles, publicity was oxygen, and shame was for suckers. Roy Cohn, his legal and political tutor, drilled the tactics into him: attack, never apologize, countersue, dominate the headlines. Trump absorbed the lessons whole in the 1970s and never stopped using them.
His disdain for accountability ran deeper than politics. His social life reflected the same thumb-your-nose instincts. Witness his defiantly obscene dalliances with Jeffrey Epstein, the brash bravado of the Access Hollywood tape, the constant testing of boundaries in public and private. (Who can forget Stormy Daniels?)
Breaking norms with impunity became his brand, and for a while, plenty of Americans, like my friend, convinced themselves that the disruption was worth it.
The first time was a charm – until it wasn’t
During his first term, Trump wielded power unpredictably, defiantly, and without any regard for boundaries that had constrained every recent predecessor. For four years he tested the strength of American institutions and discovered that many were weaker than anyone imagined.
He leaned on the FBI director to end an investigation, fired him when he refused, and spent months trying to derail Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference. He withheld congressionally approved aid to Ukraine while pressing its president to smear Joe Biden, steered foreign and domestic money toward his hotels and golf clubs, flouted the Hatch Act by staging a campaign rally on the White House lawn, and treated the pardon power like a loyalty program for allies who refused to turn on him.
Most damaging were the moral breaches. The family-separation policy at the southern border shocked the public conscience, and his “very fine people on both sides” defense of white-supremacist protesters in Charlottesville was a low point in presidential rhetoric. Each time, he faced public outrage but little personal consequence.
The message to Trump was unmistakable: so long as Republican lawmakers stood by him, he could bend rules and traditions to the breaking point. Even impeachment proved survivable. In 2019, the House impeached him for abuse of power over Ukraine, but the Senate acquitted.
The ultimate breach came at the end of his term, when he refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election. Every other president in U.S. history, however grudgingly, had conceded. Trump instead pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes, leaned on the Justice Department to declare fraud, and summoned supporters to Washington with the promise that January 6 would be “wild.” The result was an assault on the Capitol, the first time in American history that a defeated president’s followers had tried to block certification of his successor.
Even then, accountability evaporated. Republican leaders who had initially condemned him soon fell back in line. Trump was impeached again, this time for incitement of insurrection, but again acquitted. His followers filled the prisons; he walked away.
Yet if Trump escaped legal punishment, he did not escape political consequence.
By mid-2020, the public had grown weary of the turbulence. Polls showed only 42% of Americans thought Trump could “manage the government effectively,” and just 36% saw him as “honest and trustworthy.” Majorities said the country was on the wrong track. Swing voters, especially in suburban areas and the industrial Midwest, cited fatigue with chaos, divisiveness, and uncertainty. Joe Biden’s promise of steadiness, not just in policy, but in tone, was the sharpest possible contrast.
Exit polls confirmed forecasts: many independents and college-educated suburban voters who had backed Trump in 2016 switched sides in 2020. For them, his norm-breaking had crossed from disruptive novelty into a governing liability. Chaos, once a bragging point, had become Trump’s burden.
But he drew the wrong lesson.
Defeat neither chastened nor humbled him. On the contrary, he emerged convinced that his real mistake as president was allowing too much independence around him, too many inspectors general, career prosecutors, and Cabinet secretaries who had resisted or exposed his excesses.
Next time — and surely there would be a next time — he would insulate himself with a cordon of loyalists whose careers depended entirely on their allegiance to him.
This instinct found intellectual cover in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a sprawling blueprint for a future conservative presidency. Published midway through the Biden years, it called for dismantling civil-service protections, purging the federal bureaucracy of insufficiently loyal officials, and even firing inspectors general en masse so presidents can “have control of the people that work within government.”
In simplest terms, it was a formula for knee-capping the “administrative state,” which many conservatives believed was in thrall to left-wing “woke” values.
Where Trump had once improvised loyalty tests, Project 2025 would hard-wire them into the system.
Chaos every day in every way
Trump insists he has never read Project 2025, but that fiction hardly matters. His current White House is staffed with its chief architects, from budget director Russ Vought to education strategist Lindsey Burke to immigration enforcer Tom Homan. Their playbook is Trump’s playbook, whether or not he’s flipped through its pages, and more than half a year into his second term, he is applying its dictates to the letter.
The cleanest case study is trade. On April 2 Trump signed Executive Order 14257, declaring a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and imposing a 10% baseline tariff on nearly all imports, with “reciprocal” surcharges layered on top. Marketed as “Liberation Day,” it was the purest expression of rule-by-decree: sweeping, unilateral, and legally adventurous.
Courts reacted quickly. On May 28, the Court of International Trade struck down the tariffs, ruling that IEEPA doesn’t give the president “unbounded authority” to tax the world. On Aug. 29, the Federal Circuit went further, voting 7–4 that the law doesn’t authorize near-global tariffs at all. The Supreme Court will take the case up on Nov. 5. But for now, the duties remain in effect during appeals.
Mark this down as one more example of how Trump pushes the boundaries, pockets the gains, and leaves the legal mess to be sorted out later.
But the economic fallout is already visible. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the tariffs will shrink long-run economic growth by about 6% and cut average wages 5%, costing a middle-income family around $22,000 over time. Yale’s Budget Lab says families are already paying $2,300 to $3,800 more each year, with clothes and shoes up nearly 20% and hundreds of thousands more people likely pushed into poverty.
Trump’s handling of diplomatic and security issues has been equally slapdash: threats first, doctrine later (if ever).
At the Hague summit in June, he pressured NATO leaders to adopt a new target of 5% of GDP for defense spending — 3.5% for the military and 1.5% for broader security — by threatening not to protect their countries if they didn’t ante up. The extortion worked. Trump preened. Our allies came away wondering (once again) whether the U.S. commitment to NATO is real, or just another bargaining chip.
Administration policies toward Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin also lack coherence. Trump first grumped about Putin’s inconsistencies on Ukraine, then treated him to a red-carpet rollout in Alaska, only to get more inconsistency. American support for Kyiv has been dangled one day and bargained away the next, leaving President Zelensky and European allies to wonder if the U.S. is a partner or a bystander.
Trump cheered the U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear reactors as a total wipeout, then brushed aside contradictory U.S. intelligence even as diplomats warned of a wider war. Despite maintaining a consistently pro-Israel stance, he has muddied the particulars on Gaza, first proposing a U.S. takeover of the enclave and mass displacement of Palestinians, then suggesting only temporary and voluntary relocation with the U.S. acting as an advisor.
Though he now warns of “real starvation” in the Strip, he nonetheless nods along as Israel storms Gaza City, fueling the very catastrophe he claims to fear.
Every flip on every foreign policy issue reinforces a familiar worry among Americans that Trump simply shoots from the hip. But this perception is not ill-conceived. For this commander-in-chief, every crisis becomes a leveraging exercise, every ally a foil for theatrics. The confusion is not collateral damage. It is the method.
Meanwhile, back home, congressional oversight and bureaucratic accountability fizzle toward zero as countless executive orders extend White House control over once-independent agencies, inspectors general are dismissed helter-skelter, and the Justice Department wages a relentless campaign in the courts to legitimize further expansion of presidential power.
The entire spectacle is enough to turn Santa Claus into a cynic. On the pretense of strengthening accountability, the administration, with the help of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, is moving inexorably to strip away the buffers between presidential will and public power. Freedom itself is being made hostage to loyalty.
And let’s be clear: authoritarianism is not just about breaking arms and yanking fingernails; it is also about co-opting emotion. Perpetual crisis keeps opponents off balance while conditioning followers to equate loyalty with virtue and doubt with treason. Trump leans into these dynamics, pressuring media conglomerates to mute dissidents in deference to profit even as he dismantles liberal education under the smokescreen of antisemitism enforcement.
The Kirk killing, tragic as it was, has provided stunning proof of how emotion figures in the Trumpian equation, and how it can be exploited politically.
Immediately after the murder, polling showed that roughly two-thirds of Americans agreed that extreme rhetoric fuels violence. Trump responded quickly by demanding more emergency powers, thus reinforcing the feedback loop where fear justifies authority and authority produces more fear. The 10,000-person rally to mourn Kirk’s death quickly became a celebration of right-wing paranoia.
Even “bumbling bullies are still dangerous,” Jennifer Rubin recently reminded us online.
As a long-time journalist and one-time Supreme Court litigant in a major First Amendment case, I have a keen personal interest in Trump’s increasingly focused assault on free speech.
What makes it so alarming is how systematic and comprehensive it is fast becoming. According to late-breaking stories, reporters assigned to the Pentagon will now be forced to sign pledges not to publish even unclassified information without prior approval, a form of prior restraint that press-freedom groups rightly call un-American and which I thought was reserved for government spooks. At the same time the FCC is threatening broadcasters with license revocations over satire, while Trump pressures the Justice Department to prosecute personal political foes. Even nonprofits risk losing their tax protections under floated “terrorist” designations.
Each step narrows the space for independent voices and broadens the government’s control over what counts as legitimate speech.
No wonder growing numbers of Americans are suffering anxiety attacks. Disruption can be sold as strength for a while, but sooner or later people see it for what it is, a threat to their freedoms.
To a surprising degree, Trump is beginning to pay a price. By mid-August, Pew put his job approval at just 38%, with 6 in 10 disapproving, a slippage from earlier in the summer driven especially by independents and younger voters.
A companion Pew survey found that his signature economic program (tariffs and the “One Big Beautiful Bill”) was deeply unpopular. Gallup showed the same sour center: overall job approval hovering near 40%, with independents down to 29%.
Marquette’s poll captured the pocketbook verdict: only about one-third of Americans approve of his handling of inflation and cost of living, while two-thirds disapprove. Tariffs fared even worse, with approval running barely 37%.
Reuters/Ipsos found a majority of Americans uneasy with his push to expand presidential power — talk of troops in cities or a president’s hand on economic levers — suggesting people aren’t just rejecting what he’s doing; they’re unnerved by how he’s doing it.
Most striking, the September AP-NORC poll, conducted just before and after the Kirk shooting, showed erosion inside Trump’s own party. In June, only 3 in 10 Republicans said the country was on the wrong track. By September, that number had shot up to more than half. Among Republicans under 45, nearly two-thirds now say things are headed the wrong way. Republican women are markedly more pessimistic than men. Even many people who like Trump’s objectives now register unease about his unpredictability and the flip-flopping that threatens to defeat their aims.
This anxiety has a daily-life core. Higher prices from tariffs. Whiplash from regulatory reversals. Threats to alliances abroad. Courts ping-ponging basic questions of authority. Even the Congressional Budget Office now projects a weaker near-term economy, citing tariffs and enforcement crackdowns as drags. Chaos is not a growth strategy.
To put it simply: the line between disruption and dysfunction is delivery. If the border feels secure, prices stable, alliances coherent, and institutions predictable, some voters will tolerate the theater. But when the grocery bill soars, when headlines read like ultimatums, and when courts keep calling foul, freewheeling governance begins to look less like strength than ineptitude.
Democrats should rejoice, and tailor their counter-politics accordingly. Trump’s greatest asset, his knack for breaking norms, is turning once again into a liability.
Which brings me back to my friend, the decent man still trying to rationalize his support for MAGA’s fugue fest. He has long told himself that the system is broken, that rules no longer matter, and that Trump’s chaos is at least an honest reflection of reality. For a while, that may have made sense (kind of). But cynicism is no substitute for a reliable bottom line.
The truth is that hustles don’t scale. They thrive on surprise, intimidation, and bent rules. Government, by contrast, depends on predictability, law, and trust. When a president treats the state like a casino floor, the house eventually wins. But in this case, the “house” is chaos itself. Trump’s norm-breaking made great television for far too long. Now it is making miserable government.
And if his first term is any guide, he and the GOP may be in for an unpleasant surprise next year.