Inertia and institutional damage in politics

This is because the state is a stable self-regulating system. The state can persist without and even despite a dysfunctional chief executive, in the normal case: as we saw during Obama’s presidency, a highly motivated chief executive (regardless of their actual goals) is constantly fighting against established resistance (both elected and unelected) and must be clever in order to make changes. Those changes are liable to be subverted or rolled back, regardless of their content. (No president has been less politically radical than Obama, whose legacy is primarily one of expanding the logic of the neoliberal order supported by a quarter decade of previous administrations, and yet he nevertheless encountered enormous amounts of friction — from people and institutions fully ideologically aligned with him. Friction does not need rational justification.)

The primary danger of a Trump presidency is that he could be convinced (by staff or media) to order a single military action — say, to nuke a foreign country. He has control over the nuclear football, so he could, and nobody has legal grounds to stop him. Luckily, two years on, this hasn’t happened yet — which means that the people trying to control his behavior are not dumb, crazy, or desperate enough to do so. I wish these cat-herders luck: low-grade embarassment and no lasting impact is the best result we can reasonably expect from this administration.

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