Two months into the second Trump administration, the United States is in pure chaos mode. Tens of thousands of workers are fired one week and forcibly rehired the next. Tariffs rise and fall based not on strategy but on one man’s ire. Deportations fly in the face of judicial orders, careening the country toward a constitutional crisis. The only constant is the volatility itself.
On paper, that may be surprising. A central premise of Donald Trump’s appeal is that he is an apex businessman. Same with Elon Musk. The elevator pitch: Through the sheer force of their combined savvy, America will be saved from “bankruptcy”—or worse. There aren’t many Harvard Business School case studies, though, that suggest maximum instability is the path to success.
There’s plenty of Occam’s razor at work here: The US is wobbling wildly because its president and de facto CEO are some combination of self-serving and inept. But in between and among the absurdities, something darker takes shape. Inherent in every chaotic act is a challenge. Every outrage is a test.
In the meantime, the uncertainty has international consequences. Tourism has plummeted, as potential visitors cancel their trips to a country increasingly, openly hostile to noncitizens. Europe is rearming itself in the face of a heightened potential for conflict, as Ukraine becomes the fulcrum on which decades of solidarity between the US and Europe may pivot. Allies have considered sharing less intelligence with their US counterparts, given the Trump administration’s increasingly cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin.
It’s a heel turn worthy of a WWE Monday Night RAW plotline. But the US is not in the business of selling spectacle. Its value lies in its reliability. Instead it is now erratic, unpredictable. It’s messy. International politics is a relationship business; Donald Trump seems intent on undermining America’s relationships at every turn. (Well, except toward Moscow.)
There’s the slash-and-burn approach to budgeting, a seeming race to create a minimally viable government. The operative part of a turnaround plan is the “plan” part. Firing as many people as possible as quickly as possible—without apparent consideration for actual skills or value that they bring to the role—does not qualify as a plan. It’s just more instability.
The good news is that many of those employees are being reinstated, as the gears of the judiciary have slowly begun to turn. But that reinstatement itself may prove temporary, depending on what higher courts say. And even if those workers do come back, how motivated will they be to stay now that they know how their employer views their worth?
More to the point, who would go work for the US government in its current state? Civil service doesn’t pay great, but at least you get to feel like you’re serving a higher calling with a side order of job security. The only callings being served right now are Donald Trump’s retribution tour and Elon Musk’s amateur hour AI jamboree. Eventually they’ll run out of SpaceX interns to hire.
(A quick side note: Donald Trump reportedly told transportation secretary and Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons champion Sean Duffy that he should hire Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates to work as air traffic controllers. The average starting salary for an MIT undergraduate is $126,438. The starting salary out of ATC school is $43,727. Business savvy!)
As for Musk, he secured his choke hold on the mechanics of the federal government weeks ago. But the installation of Starlink terminals at the White House, his repeated attacks against federal judges on X, his open dismissal of Congress—none of these are normal. The longer they go on, though, the more they feel like they might be.
That’s the point, really. The standardization of chaos. The steady insistence that no matter how outlandish, how dangerous, this tilt away from democracy gets, it’s actually nothing to get upset about. Attempt to remake the US government as quickly and radically as possible, because otherwise how will you know how far you can push it? Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the kakistocracy.
The good news is that there is a way out of this. The courts have already stopped DOGE at various turns and reversed some of its most extreme activities. Congress could wake up tomorrow and remember that it’s a coequal branch of government. Public pressure can remind politicians that elections aren’t decided only by whose corner the world’s richest man is in. Boundaries do exist, even if they need to be reinforced with rebar.
And then there’s the bad news, which is the likelihood that Trump and Musk will at some point stop pretending to care about any official checks on their power. Or that they already have.
The Chatroom
What do you think of chaos as a political strategy?
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WIRED Reads
- DOGE’s Dodgy Numbers Employ a Tesla Technique: Safety researchers claim Elon Musk’s auto company has a long history of potentially misleading stats. Now it looks like his government department is following suit.
- Donald Trump Held Another Million-Dollar ‘Candlelight’ Dinner—With Elon Musk in Tow: Unlike the previous fundraiser WIRED reported on, this event did not appear on President Donald Trump’s official schedule.
- ‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE: WIRED talked to actual federal auditors about how government auditing works—and how DOGE is doing the opposite.
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What Else We’re Reading
🔗 Elon Musk’s Starlink Expands Across White House Complex: Officials say that Starlink, the internet service run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, gifted access to the White House. (The New York Times)
🔗 More Than 400 Social Security Numbers, Other Private Information Revealed in JFK Files: The data belongs to former congressional staffers and others. (The Washington Post)
🔗 DOGE Stranded USAID Workers With Laptops Full of Sensitive Data: When you close down an agency … what happens to their sensitive tech? (The Verge)
The Download
Check out this week’s news episode on Uncanny Valley: DOGE Is Doing the Opposite of Government Auditing. WIRED staff writer Vittoria Elliott joined global editorial director Katie Drummond to dig into all things DOGE. Listen now.
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