In All the President’s Men, Deep Throat tells the reporters to “follow the money”—a hint that the criminal conspiracy they’re investigating came from the top.
President Donald Trump has flipped that script. His second administration isn’t a story about how dirty trails all lead up to one grand schemer, but rather that there’s no scheme at all. In the absence of a plan—even a nefarious one—the immense power of the federal government is getting distributed to all the president’s radical men.
In March, I wrote that there were three agendas at work in this administration: Trump’s (and a collection of low-talent cling-ons like Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth) driven solely by power, money and retribution; the “Heritage faction”—led by Office of Management and Budget head and project 2025 veteran Russell Vought—who fantasized about slashing their way to a bare bones, Christian-inspired federal government; and a “tech right” cabal represented by Elon Musk aiming for a total collapse of the system, so it could be replaced by a high tech hierarchy.
Back then, the three forces were aligned: Trump was preening, Musk was DOGEing targets that Vought selected and the tech-right were tenting their figures and cackling in the shadows. But parasitic relationships among erratic parties tend to be unstable, and lo, the situation soon collapsed: Musk was booted, and without his frenetic funnel cloud sucking up all the air, the agendas of the other extremists that Trump had invited into his administration rose to the surface.
What has now emerged is different, totally novel and more than a little frightening.
The Trump presidency has become a platform: a plug-and-play for a motley assortment of militants with bizarre individual axes to grind who would never sniff this amount of power in any other government. Trump doesn’t run an administration so much as he hosts one: he has no durable policy objectives or vision, so as long as users pay the entry fee—in the form of furthering the flattery, money and vengeance for which he endlessly lusts—they can do what they want.
And the best and brightest, these are not.
Vought is a self-described “Chistian nationalist” and far-right fanatic with a history of shocking even Trump administration officials with his extreme ideas.
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller was described by former senate colleagues as “a fringe figure, ideological and a bit scary,” while a former White House colleague said: “He is a horrible human being … someone who has gone all in, down the rabbit hole, on extremism.”
Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro is an economist and get-rich-quick flim-flamist loathed by colleagues and excoriated by Trump veteran Larry Kudlow and George W. Bush’s top economist Greg Mankiw for his fundamental misunderstandings of economics. He’s so far on the margins of his profession that he had to attribute supportive quotes for his ideas to a fictitious scholar, “Ron Vara”— an anagram of his name.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist and noted conspiracy theorist who apparently doesn’t believe in germ theory, the basis for treating infectious disease for the past 150 years.
These are the people given free rein to architect sweeping policies that are shaping not just the country, but the world.
Vought implemented an illegal freeze on an eye-popping $400 billion in federal funds—likely responsible for some of America’s profound economic struggles—and drove the cruel, needless destruction of USAID that researchers estimate will cause 14 million deaths by 2030 (what was that about a Nobel Peace Prize, Don?).
Miller is the architect of the vindictive deportation campaign that has accomplished plenty of Fox News photo ops, judicial outrage and doctored social media videos—along with sexual abuse, assault, torture and Soviet-style secret police tactics—and yet resulted in fewer deportations that Presidents Joe Biden or Barack Obama achieved.
Navarro’s tariff scheme became Trump’s “Liberation Day” and all of its successor tariffs that are driving inflation, dragging the economy and nearly caused a global financial meltdown.
And Kennedy is taking Trump’s directive to “go wild on health” literally by steadily strangling access to vaccines. He’s even trying to kill off mRNA vaccine research—one of the genuine accomplishments of the first Trump administration via Operation Warp Speed.
As if having fringe zealots “go wild” on health, trade, security and the entire federal government weren’t enough, we have conspiracy theorists, bigotry peddlers and far-right fringe groupies leading key functions in law enforcement, defense and foreign policy.
Our ship of state? It is now a ship of fools, the besotted captain set on plunder, the crew nervously eyeing the approaching reefs.
Matt Robison is a writer, podcast host and former congressional staffer.
The views in this article are the writer’s own.
