Nothing good will come of the chaos being created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking-ball to institutions, agencies and programmes.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to: gut the federal work force; withhold billions of dollars for medical and scientific research; eliminate foreign aid programmes; dismantle governmental health institutions; slash programmes that provide healthcare and food to the poor and disabled; wreak havoc in international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then re-imposing tariffs based on whim or personal vendetta; and create fear in cities across the country with the dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement by hiring thousands of unvetted individuals, many with an ideological bent who are eager for a gun and badge to carry out their agenda.
And this is only a partial list of the Trump administration’s destruction.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in some areas. Waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programmes or agencies that have existed for decades.
And there can be hesitancy to terminate programmes that have outlived their usefulness or never had their intended impact.
But needed reforms are best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has not only done significant damage to government, but has also eroded the public’s trust.
The wholesale gutting of staff, cutting of research grants, elimination of programmes and exaggerated claims made in denigrating these programmes cannot easily be remedied by the next administration.
Expertise has been lost, unmet needs will multiply and some elected officials will be hesitant to re-establish or provide funding for programmes that the current administration has successfully convinced many voters are wasteful.
Look at what’s been lost.
By attempting to discredit vaccines’ effectiveness and shaking public confidence in them, largely eradicated childhood diseases may resurge.
In eliminating programmes that provide food benefits to the poor, suffering will extend to America’s farmers who are also often direct beneficiaries.
Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and contribute to eroding trust in the US as a reliable trading partner.
The resulting loss of US standing around the world has already led to some governments to look to China.
While’s Trump’s disruptive and destructive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind President George W Bush’s approach to the Middle East.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to neo-conservative ideologues.
Convinced that reforming or tweaking would never uproot the region’s fundamental problems, they chose to apply a wrecking ball – to blow it up and then rebuild “the new Middle East”.
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality.
They were going to remove Saddam, install a government that met US criteria and, as they poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East”.
When their failure became clear, they latched onto the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy.
They tried to convince us that their mess was intentional and necessary and that the growing violence and instability were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” they were helping to usher into existence.
But there was no “logic”, and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos”. The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran, and weakened Arab “republics” that destabilised the region.
We’re now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration.
The enormous damage they’ve done will take a generation or more to rebuild. So far, the Trump crowd hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for their destruction.
In part that’s because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Trump’s base, still under his sway, continue to believe that the mess isn’t real or will easily and quickly be fixed.
But like in the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed.
Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and regain the lost trust.
But it can be done.
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