Consistently hiring personally-loyal non-competent people with sketchy, crime-adjacent backgrounds, with histories of highly flexible loony tune views, isn’t an accident.
It isn’t at all difficult to recognize. It shouldn’t be hard to understand either. It is a very effective way to centralize power by replacing institutions with pawns.
Nor is the chaos being inflicted on those same institutions by targeted and random decrees. That many are vague and unbalancing is intentional. The aim isn’t to improve them, right-size them, or accomplish any national mission, etc. That would be a disaster if that was his goal. It is to kill any resistance to Trump in a way the constitution really has no effective response for.
As his power centralizes he will use his increased power to go after the next level of “threats” to his unmitigated power.
Where this stops, isn’t predictable. But given the chance, he won’t stop.
Regardless of your politics, it is an interesting historical moment, and worth seeing clearly. Trump is largely competently centralizing power to a degree we have not seen since Washington was given the greenfield mandate in which to oversee the raising up of our Constitutional institutions. An ironic difference from now.
If you want to understand the challenges and means of accruing power (with non-partisan, non-current-event nuance, and as it applies in any form of government), I recommend:
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics [0]
It says “Dictator’s” but the book covers every type of government and the principles and resulting plays apply to all.
