Ask Yourselves What Could Possibly Go Wrong

The very fine people are at it again.

As Donald Trump is sworn in as president for a second time, the peculiar anxiety of our current moment is that we know very little about what is going to happen next.

I can see I’m not the only person to think this. I just got in my e-mail a newsletter from Matt Yglesias stating that “No One Knows What Trump Is Going to Do.” He gives a lot of complicated reasons, but the basic situation is simple. The whole American political system has been re-organized as the vehicle for the personal whims of a single man, and at this point, there are no apparent institutional, political, or cultural counterbalances to those whims.

We don’t know what will happen because it is all going to happen in the mind of a man with no convictions, values, or loyalties. It is inherently unpredictable. So we have to contemplate all possibilities, with no real way of assessing the likelihood of any outcome.

We need to ask ourselves what 77 million voters failed to ask themselves last November: What could possibly go wrong?

The Man-in-the-Middle Presidency

First, though, a final note about outgoing president, Joe Biden.

The selling point for Biden is that he was “The Man in the Middle,” a cautious politician trying to straddle the fence between opposing sides. It gave him a certain predictability and the assurance that his administration would be guided by normal politics, only more so.

But it was also the key to the failures of his administration: His normal mode was to do everything in half-measures and delays. His support for Ukraine dribbled out slowly and reluctantly, with a lot of self-deterrence in an unnecessary fear of Russian escalation, never giving them what they needed to get the upper hand. This is why the Ukrainians look back on his administration with understandable bitterness. His Attorney General was so slow at authorizing an investigation into Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection that the whole case got bogged down in delays and eventually was canceled after Trump’s re-election—despite special counsel Jack Smith’s confidence that he had sufficient evidence for a conviction. The Biden administration’s slow pace gave them the worst of both worlds: Trump got to endlessly complain about his martyrdom, while still getting off scot-free.

The most recent symbol of this is the TikTok ban, which was delayed until literally the last day of Biden’s administration, so that Trump could swoop in and lift the ban (on his own conditions; see more on that below) and pose as the savior of millions of young internet addicts.

If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you set out to ban TikTok, ban TikTok.

Finally, Biden initially promised he would not run for re-election and that he would just be a transition to the next generation of leadership. And he eventually did not run again—but only after waiting too long and giving his vice-president too little time to turn his failing campaign around.

In this, as in everything, he was the Man in the Middle, taking half-measures instead of making bold decisions, and that is what doomed his presidency to failure on what Biden himself regarded as the most important issue: safeguarding democracy against the threat from Donald Trump.

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Losing Our Shirts for Principles

Now to return to the nature of that threat.

I described 2024 as the year the guardrails fell. We saw that with the courts and with the voters. Since the election, and particularly in the weeks leading up to the inauguration, we have seen it with everything else.

We saw this just before the election when two billionaire sponsors of big newspapers—Jeff Bezos for the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong for the LA Times—spiked their own papers’ endorsements of Harris rather than risk Trump’s anger if he won. The result at the Washington Post has been a mass exodus of reporters and commentators. Since then, it has become clear that none of the big media companies will stick their necks out.

In December, ABC paid $15 million to settle a bogus defamation suit filed by Trump, and now there are reports that Paramount, the owner of CBS, is planning to settle an even more bogus Trump suit: Trump has sued them because he didn’t like the way they edited an interview—an absolutely open-and-shut case that should have been laughed out of court in its first five minutes. Paramount would almost certainly prevail, so why pay millions more to Trump while selling out their news division?

Here's why:

CBS parent Paramount Global has a very big bit of business pending—selling itself to Skydance, a deal that requires the transfer of broadcast licenses from one to the other. The transfers must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick for Commissioner, has said publicly the FCC will give the proposed merger a closer look, indicating that editorial fairness would be considered.

Meanwhile, a conservative group called the Center for American Rights filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission objecting to the transfers for, among other things, CBS “track record of ideological bias and news manipulation.”…

Trump himself has called for the broadcast licenses to be revoked, something departing FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel condemned in final remarks as she dismissed a series of complaints. “The action we take makes clear two things. First, the FCC should not be the president’s speech police. Second, the FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief,” she said.

Actually, what these cases make clear is that FCC licensing should not exist. It is an instrument for the abuse of power that has been waiting for the president to come along who would have no compunction about abusing it.

The same thing is more widely true about all of the power government has over the economy. This has always provided a vast potential for abuse, but never before—with the possible exception of FDR—have we had a president willing to explore that potential quite so shamelessly.

This explains a paradox that has been bothering some people. It seems that someone like Jeff Bezos has so much money he can afford to take on big fights and stand up to a bully like Trump. But it depends on how you look at it. Sometimes having more money just means having more to lose and can make you more afraid. (In intellectual movements, I’ve seen the same thing with status instead of money. The person seemingly in the most high-status position is often the most timid and conformist, because that’s how he got into that position.) In this case, just as Paramount wants a merger and Trump can hold this over their heads, Jeff Bezos finally built his own reusable rockets and doesn’t want to get shut out of government contracts by his business rival, Trump’s “First Buddy” Elon Musk.

This is why I never expected the billionaires to stick their necks out, and it’s why I expected well ahead of time that the big mainstream media outlets would all fold. If you want to know why, re-read the boardroom scene in The Fountainhead. “Are we losing our shirts for principles or something?” That scene. Part 4, Chapter XVI—go re-read it, because you’re living through it.

Oh, and I promised to return to the Tik-Tok ban. Remember that TikTok was banned because it is Chinese-government-controlled media, used to engage in propaganda in the US. But now Trump, who makes such a big show of wanting to oppose China, says he will lift the ban. Here’s one reason:

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is among the tech executives cozying up to Trump as he retakes the White House. Chew plans to attend Trump’s “victory rally” in Washington on Sunday, The Post previously reported, and has been invited to sit on the dais on Monday as Trump is sworn into office, alongside tech leaders such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chair of Amazon.

Incidentally, this gives the lie to Trump’s populist claptrap about the people versus “the elites.” Because the weather is cold today—though no colder than Obama’s inauguration in 2009—Trump moved the inauguration indoors. That means his billionaire cronies get to attend—but ordinary supporters were left literally out in the cold. There’s some pretty clear symbolism there about who really counts and who doesn’t.

Here’s the other reason Trump is reversing himself on Tik-Tok.

Trump said he would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

“I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up,” he wrote on Truth Social.

It’s not entirely clear what 50% ownership for “the United States” means, but it sounds like he wants Tik-Tok to become state-owned media.

If you’re keeping track, here’s where we’re at.

The big television companies and newspapers are kowtowing to Trump. (The New York Times went so far as to give a big interview to ridiculous court intellectual Curtis Yarvin. More on that some other time.)

The big social media companies are owned by Trump cronies like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who has recently made his own MAGA transmogrification, accompanied by a whole new MMA-inspired public image as a kind of cut-rate, Kirkland brand Elon Musk.

And if you want to sell books, instead, Amazon is in the hands of another Trump favor-seeker.

If you are in the ideas business, as I am, you are now looking at a bigger and more impenetrable MAGA dominion over the media business than the left ever had in the heyday of the “mainstream media.”

And let me be very clear about something. This is not my projection of what might happen. It’s not a worst-case scenario for four years from now. It’s something that has already happened between the election and the inauguration.

And if you’re saying: Oh, well, you can still go out and start up a Substack—remember that Marc Andreessen is a major investor in Substack, and he is another one of these Silicon Valley lemmings who has gone MAGA. Yes, there are other alternatives to Substack, and you can bet that I am ready for them. But what guys like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban learned long ago is that you can go ahead and let the small publications write their articles for an audience of intellectuals. The populist authoritarians are far more concerned with controlling the mass media—what people see in the big newspapers and on television and now on social media, which is where the overwhelming majority of people get their news.

Faced with the threat of government retaliation from a president unconstrained by political principles, the big guys aren’t going to lose their shirts for principles—so that privilege will devolve onto us little guys.

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The Concentration of Powers

Here’s another thing that is not a projection of the future, but a reality already accomplished before the inauguration. Donald Trump now faces no real opposition from or oversight by Congress.

I had held out hope a few months ago, particularly when Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for Attorney General, that Trump’s worst appointees would not make it through Senate confirmation. But it is clear by now that Senate Republicans intend to confirm the comically unqualified drunkard Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, and there is little chance they will show any resistance to the rest of Trump’s anti-cabinet.

But it gets worse. Not only is Congress failing to offer resistance to Trump’s appointments, they are allowing him to dictate congressional appointments.

Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday removed Representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio from the helm of the House Intelligence Committee, in a shake-up that signaled he intends to align the pivotal national security panel more closely with President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Turner, who emerged from a meeting with the speaker on Wednesday afternoon looking furious, has told people that Mr. Johnson informed him his ouster was the result of a request from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to a person familiar with those conversations.

Turner was removed partly because he has criticized Trump in the past, but also because of this: “He has also been a leading proponent of supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, breaking with the ‘America First’ stance of the president-elect and many others in his party.”

We cannot rely on the separation of powers. Nor can we rely on the Democratic Party, but I’m hoping you already knew that. RFK, Jr., is expected to get the votes of several Democratic senators, including Bernie Sanders. Same for Tulsi Gabbard. Eight Democratic senators voted to advance the Laken Riley Act, which enables a more draconian immigration police state, giving the government the power to detain illegal immigrants indefinitely for charges as small as a shoplifting. The labor unions are making nice with Trump because they favor restrictions on immigration and free trade.

My sense is that many Democrats are so shaken by the prospect of losing the blue-collar vote—being the voice of the “proletariat” is so central to their identity—that they will adopt a bunch of key MAGA policies just to appease “the working man.” And it’s worth remembering how many of the worst elements of Trump’s agenda were borrowed from the old platform of the Democrats to begin with.

The upshot is that at this point, we have to assume the only guardrails and counterbalances to Donald Trump’s power are the ones in Trump’s own brain—and we know they’re not there.

That is what I find uniquely disturbing about this moment. It is what has been literally keeping me up at night—which is not normal. After thirty years of writing about politics, I am able to take the long view, and not much still gets to me. But I’ve never seen an environment in which there are no limits, no guardrails, no checks on the insanity. Everything is up to Donald Trump’s whims, and anything can happen.

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The Emperor of Greenland

I won’t try now to make predictions, because my point is that this is what we can’t do. But that in itself is kind of terrifying, the prospect of a president unbound by the pressures from his party, the opposition, the press, the other branches of government—even from the public.

There has been some discussion about whether or not Donald Trump has an electoral “mandate.” Certainly, if you just look at the vote totals, 49.9% of the vote is not a mandate. But people are increasingly acting as if he does have a mandate, and that’s why I think the old approach is wrong. Just under 50% of the vote doesn’t seem like a mandate—unless a candidate gets that after doing and saying things what would previously have been completely unacceptable, things that would previously have limited him to less than 5% of the vote.

So it’s not about having a majority. It’s about the sense that he has broken through all the old norms and standards and brought us into a new era in which we don’t know what, if anything, is still unacceptable.

For crying out loud, Elon Musk just did a straight-up sieg heil salute at a Trump rally. (See the image at the top of this newsletter, but definitely follow that link.) Ten years ago, maybe even five, he could never have shown his face in public again after that. Today, I can guarantee you that he will face no immediate consequences, and I would even bet some Trump supporters start doing Nazi salutes ironically to show their defiance of “the elites.” (And then, if history is any guide, they will start doing it unironically.)

In the day after the election, I embraced the possibility of a more optimistic scenario. Maybe the wheels will start to come off, Trump will face opposition from Congress and the courts, his policies will turn out to be unpopular, he will do a lot less than he threatened. And maybe some of that will still be true. But the lack of effective opposition to Trump so far requires us to ask what happens if he can actually do whatever he wants.

It is time to ask ourselves what is the worst that could happen.

The symbol of this, in my mind, is Greenland. All of Trump’s talk about annexing Canada, taking back the Panama Canal, and taking over Greenland might seem like typical bluster, like distractions from the real issues. But an update from Claire Berlinski woke me up on this. She links to an article from Robert Kagan arguing that the collapse of Ukraine would be a debacle far worse than the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and warning Trump not to let it happen. But Claire—correctly, I think—views this as naïve.

Whereas Kagan hopes Trump will be loath to superintend over a strategic and moral catastrophe that would make him a loser forever in the eyes of a profoundly diminished America, Trump has already priced that in and figured out how he’ll avoid that. He reckons that acquiring Panama and Greenland—and for God’s sake, Canada—will distract Americans from their loss.

In this interpretation, Trump shares Putin’s vision of a world carved up into imperial zones of interest, with the United States becoming Greater America—through purchase or conquest, or perhaps nuclear blackmail—to compensate for the loss of its global power. He has either agreed to this with Putin explicitly, or he is counting on Putin to understand the implicit quid pro quo. His base, he reckons, will be so thrilled to be Greenland’s new imperial overlords that they’ll forget all about the destruction of Ukraine.

This explains Trump’s whole approach. It explains why he’s appeasing our enemies and antagonizing our allies. It’s because he does not view them as allies but as vassals to be exploited as part of his empire. It’s a brutal, primitive, Medieval view of the world.

I would add that by targeting Greenland, a Danish territory, Trump is literally trying to carve off a part of Europe. Europe is used to not having to be a great power, because it has the protection of a great power, the US. But under Trump, they have to realize that America is now one of the great powers looking to carve off chunks of Europe for itself.

Or as I would tell the Europeans, Europe needs to either become one of the great powers or get carved up by them. They certainly have the ability to do so, but it’s doubtful they can summon the will.

My friend Jack Wakeland thinks I’m overanalyzing Trump with all that stuff about a “medieval” mindset: “This is idiocracy, not imperialism.” But he really sums up the vast diminishment of American power and the loser mentality behind this.

The United States already exercises a loosely united and coordinated foreign policy for THE ENTIRE FREE WORD. Trump proposes to withdraw to Greenland and Panama.

When our friends and allies speak of the rules-based international order, they are speaking of the AMERICAN order.

He’s the head of a gigantic organization that includes half of the land and sea area of the globe, and he thinks his job is to get title to a ditch in the jungle and a frozen wasteland. And he’ll do that by severing all the ties that other American leaders painstaking built over the past 75 years of undivided efforts—all of the ties on which this world-wide leadership was built.

Trump is forfeiting his position of Leader of the Free World to become Emperor of Greenland.

If we ask what can possibly go wrong, this is what can go wrong: the destruction of decades of world order and two and a half centuries of the American system.

It may not all happen, but it’s definitely possible. Some of it is already under way, and there is no way of predicting how far it can go.