In the first seven months of his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has made unprecedented changes to the way the American government operates. He has launched an extraordinary and erratic tariff scheme, eliminated U.S. foreign aid programs, upended U.S. alliances, and waged war on the administrative state. He has detained and deported scores of foreign students and scholars for their political views; strong-armed universities, law firms, corporations, and media outlets into doing his bidding; and emasculated the government’s regulatory agencies. He has deployed the U.S. National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., purportedly to fight disorder and crime, and threatened to send the military to Chicago, New York City, and beyond.

All of this has led some observers to conclude that Trump is seeking a new way of governing in pursuit of a radical and disruptive agenda. In foreign relations, trade, energy, and immigration, a variety of news outlets and think tanks have declared that Trump aims to enact a policy revolution. One Brookings article, for example, declared that the president “has thought big” and staked his administration “on large-scale policy shifts.”

But Trump is not pursuing a governingagenda. He is pursuing “ungoverning”: the comprehensive and intentional destruction of state capacity. As we described in Foreign Affairs in late January, ungoverning is rare in the history of politics. Authoritarians generally want to take over a state so they can use it, not so they can destroy it. They need loyalty and select for it, but they also need competence. Trump, by contrast, shreds regular procedures, shrugs off the expertise needed to bring policies to life, and promotes administrative incompetence in order to eliminate any authority other than himself. None of his decisions are about slashing bureaucratic red tape or privatizing parts of the state. Instead, he issues capricious commands and negotiates deals that serve his whims. From his first days back in the White House, Trump made it clear that he will reward anyone who breaks the law in support of him. It is why he pardoned all the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists, declaring later that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The speed at which the Trump administration has pursued ungoverning is astonishing. It gives the impression that a lot is happening and that Trump will let nothing stand in his way. New episodes of the Trump show drop at a dizzying pace: he posted on social media over 2,000 times in the first four months of his second term. The chaos is real, as is the destruction. Trump’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was fired after less than a month, for instance, and four other top CDC leaders promptly resigned. But in the end, it is likely to also leave the leader ineffective and breed discontent.

WEAPONIZED INCOMPETENCE

Ungoverning was not the theme of Trump’s campaign. Instead, the president promised—and continues to promise—that he would lead a grand national revival by bringing down costs and limiting immigration. But even in Trump’s first term, one could discern Trump’s philosophy of ungoverning in his attack on expertise and regular process. As we argued in Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos (October 2024), ungoverning has become the core logic of the Republican Party that Trump now dominates. It is thus not surprising that Trump’s second-term agenda centers on tearing Washington apart.

His appointments provide cases-in-points. It can seem as if the only requirement to gain an appointment in the Trump administration is personal submission. But that is only part of the story. Trump’s appointees are not only required to be submissive; they must also be incompetent. Critical posts, such as director of National Intelligence and director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have gone to people without experience or expertise—in these two cases, Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, respectively. Many of these appointees do not know how to manage large organizations. They do not possess subject-specific knowledge, so they cannot offer good advice. They cannot explain. They cannot effectively implement policy.

For this administration, these deficiencies are not defects. The appointees are chosen precisely because they are patently inappropriate to the position—to shock, to undo, and to make every decision turn on the president’s will. Consider Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Before being tapped for his current role, Hegseth was a Fox News host. His only executive experience was heading a nonprofit, which he ran into the ground. His incompetence shows: in March 2025, Hegseth shared classified information about U.S. military operations in Yemen with his spouse, his brother, and a journalist. This scandal caused the Trump administration some embarrassment. But the violation of national security did not cost Hegseth his job, because Hegseth’s failures are key to his allure. Trump has also stood by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a conspiracy theorist, even as Kennedy fired the 17 members of the expert panel that advises the CDC on vaccines.

Prizing incompetence over expertise also explains the sweeping powers Trump gave to the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was not about cutting $2 trillion from the deficit, as Musk originally promised, or $1 trillion, as he later pledged, or even $150 billion, the amount he finally settled on. Instead, DOGE was the sharp end of a battering ram directed at the so-called deep state, which includes both essential operations, such as tax collection, and apolitical employees, such as the National Weather Service scientists who gather weather data. Its purpose was to hollow out the administration.

L’ÉTAT, C’EST MOI

Along with dismantling the apparatus of the state, ungoverning involves bending or repurposing administrative functions to serve a leader’s will. The coercive power of the state becomes a tool for investigating, prosecuting, and punishing critics. Consider how the Trump loyalist Bill Pulte, who is in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is using his authority. He has investigated Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump wants to replace, for mortgage fraud. Pulte is also probing Adam Schiff, a Trump opponent and member of Congress. And he is investigating New York Attorney General Letitia James, who previously prosecuted Trump. The investigatory power of the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department and the colossal power of the military are also being remade into means for Trump to go after his critics.

Ungoverning also dissolves the branches of government and unifies the separation of powers into a single office—or more accurately, a single person. It is not about creating what some constitutional scholars call a “unitary presidency”: an executive branch that responds to the president’s directives. It is about creating a strongman. This motivation explains Trump’s reliance on executive orders, which signal not only policy shifts but also the necessity of personal command. As Trump once put it, “I alone can fix it.” Through his sweeping executive actions, Trump is showing that he is not a partner with Congress, executing its laws. He is the law. That is why Trump’s executive orders seem designed to humiliate Congress, which is supposed to be the U.S. government’s preeminent branch, as illustrated by the fact that it is established by Article One of the Constitution. By this standard, even if the Supreme Court eventually overturns some of his decisions, such as unilaterally canceling almost $5 billion in U.S. foreign aid funding, Trump will have made his point. He has the power to do what he wants.

To disregard constitutional constraints, Trump has repeatedly cast the United States as under attack. In May, by describing impoverished migrants’ efforts to move to his country as a “predatory incursion,” Trump was able to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president the power to apprehend, restrain, secure, and remove all inhabitants he deems to be subjects of a “hostile nation.” Although this power was ultimately overturned by a federal court, under this pretext, the president sent over 200 Venezuelans to a gulag in El Salvador, beyond the reach of U.S. law. The Trump administration has used the same approach with trade policy. The Constitution vests Congress with the power to impose or withdraw tariffs. But Congress delegated that power to the executive under certain “emergency” conditions. By declaring the trade deficit a “national emergency,” a classic legislative power became Trump’s personal tool. Several courts have now found that Trump’s emergency tariffs are unconstitutional. Yet they have stayed their decisions pending appeal, so the tariffs live on.

Ungoverning dissolves the branches of government.

Ungoverning’s most elemental attack focuses on facts. Facts are stubborn things: they often get in the way of what people want to do. The powerful will thus deny facts, and when they can, erase them. They will fire the economist working as a career civil servant at the Bureau of Labor Statistics when they don’t like the information in the most recent jobs report—as Trump did in August. Or consider the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Trump signed into law in July. Although the megabill contained hundreds of separate provisions, including cuts to Medicaid and nutrition support as well increased allocations for border security, at its heart was a raft of tax cuts touching on individual income, business depreciation allowances, charitable giving, overtime pay, and more. This naturally made the cost of the bill a central concern to legislators of both parties. After the Congressional Budget Office, in an analysis required by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, estimated the bill would add $2.4 trillion in deficit spending over a ten year period, the White House disparaged its estimates without offering any analysis of its own—calling the CBO the “Crooked Budget Office.” Effective decision-making requires a grasp of basic relevant facts. Ungoverning destroys the informational infrastructure on which all good decisions depend.

Even among Trump’s critics, there remains a nearly irresistible tendency to normalize the Trump administration by assuming that its goal is to implement policy, however radical. The problem for Trump is that any policy, conservative or liberal, would constrain his power. To govern is to empower policies, after all, not persons. To change policy in an effective and enduring way requires marshaling the tools of an administrative state. But those tools in turn ask for consistency and commitment—in other words, not changing one’s mind constantly—which limit the leader’s will. The wild oscillations in Trump’s tariffs on China are indicative. Since January 2025, he moved the rate to 30.7 percent, then to 40.7 percent, then up to 50.7 percent, and then up to 135.3 percent. Then, he slashed it to 57.6 percent. That is the result of empowering one person’s mood, not a policy.

To be sure, even if it is chaotic, ungoverning has a constituency. The wealthy win tax-cut extensions. Corporations profit from the evisceration of the government’s regulatory power. Republican officials who curry Trump’s favor win reelection. But ungoverning’s most seductive appeal is a claim that often goes unstated and lies just beneath the surface of Trump’s rhetoric. This is a claim about the kind of power the country needs. At this point in its history, the theory goes, the United States requires a willful and largely unaccountable power to impose changes that leaders with more delicate sensibilities and procedural scruples cannot ever accomplish. Only a president who threatens the destruction of NATO can successfully pressure Europe to pay more for its collective defense. Only a powerful will can disrupt the World Trade Organization and impose a trading regime that truly benefits the United States. Ending unauthorized immigration requires a leader unworried about legal formalities. And disrupting the liberal elite consensus on cultural issues demands a president powerful enough to get what he wants. The strongman, in short, promises to do what the slow workings of constitutional government and the conventional policy process cannot.

BREAKING POINT

American politics was once utterly predictable. Every four years, the country had an election. Each time, either a Democrat or a Republican won. And although Democrats and Republicans had different priorities, American citizens could expect some continuity of governance, especially in foreign policy. Both parties, after all, supported U.S. global leadership. As a result, even when they had sharp disagreements with their predecessors, presidents were careful not to change too much, too quickly. U.S. President Barack Obama, for example, was a longtime critic of the Iraq invasion, but he nonetheless kept his predecessor’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, for the first two and a half years of his presidency. He did not want to introduce unpredictability and chaos.

Trump has ended that tradition. In his desire to weaken the state and rebuild it around him, he has made chaos the new standard. The range of future possibilities for Washington is thus wide. It is reasonable to wonder if there will even be a regular presidential election in 2028. Trump, after all, has flirted with the idea of seeking a third term; his official store sells “Trump 2028” hats. The worst-case scenarios seem more plausible than ever before.

For some Americans, fed up with the status quo, such destruction may seem exciting. According to a recent Pew survey, 32 percent of U.S. respondents agreed with the idea that rule by a strong leader or the military is a good way of governing. (By contrast, only eight percent of Swedes agreed.) But such voters may quickly develop buyer’s remorse and turn on the president. Ungoverners will not prove capable of managing the economy, of steering policy in a prudent way, or of generally delivering results. To defeat them, however, opponents have to offer more than rejection and condemnation. They have to offer a promise that inspires popular faith in a government that can govern.

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