On Friday, as he and Vice President JD Vance tore into Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office on live TV, President Donald Trump briefly broke the fourth wall. “This,” Trump said as he surveyed the cameras surrounding them, “is going to make great television.”
It was a moment that summed up Trump’s political project. Here he was, screaming at the leader of a free nation that had been invaded by a longtime American rival three years earlier and who, until recently, had been feted in Washington by leaders of both parties. But more than that, Trump was radically altering America’s foreign policy in real time, shifting the balance of power globally in favor of authoritarianism, and starting a chain reaction that could lead to Russia invading other neighbors and possibly even triggering World War III. It was compelling television, certainly.
Three days later, it happened again. As Trump spoke on live television Monday about the tariffs he was slapping the following day on goods from neighbors Mexico and Canada, as well as longtime trading partner China—tariffs that pretty much every expert agrees risk hurtling America into recession—you could watch, in the bottom right corner of Fox News’s feed, the stock market plummet. Over the course of 20 seconds, the market fell by three points per second; by the end of the day, more than $3 trillion—the total gains for the first two months of the year—had been wiped out. It was, to be fair, pretty great television—particularly once the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme was added.
Trump’s experience as the decade-long host of The Apprentice, where he played the straight-talking rich boss, has always been crucial to understanding both his appeal and his approach to politics. He sees the presidency as a television show, and his decisions are often driven by the desire to make good television above all else. This can lend a sense of unreality to his presidency, as if what we’re watching either isn’t real or is an exaggerated version of reality.
Of course, what we’ve been watching these past six weeks is all too real. The question is why so many Americans fell for this carnival-barker act a second time. How could we have possibly underestimated Trump again?
Trump may see this as television, but the two examples above have real consequences that were felt almost immediately. Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine—the U.S. has since suspended both military aid and intelligence sharing that has been crucial to the nation’s survival—has undoubtedly cost lives already. It has empowered belligerent Russian despot Vladimir Putin, imperiled the countries on Ukraine’s border—including NATO allies—and made the threat of world war higher than it has been since the collapse of the USSR. In the short term, Trump’s tariffs have caused the stock market to plunge, and in the long term they could trigger a recession and economically isolate the U.S.
There are many similar actions occurring simultaneously. Trump and allies—particularly Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been given the power to remake vast sections of the federal bureaucracy, and Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget—have fired tens of thousands of federal workers, are preparing to fire hundreds of thousands more, and have already all but shuttered two departments, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A mass deportation machine is slowly revving up, with one internment camp—Guantánamo Bay—already in existence and more likely on the way.
All of this is very shocking. It is also not surprising. Trump campaigned on all of it. He has spent years wooing Putin and, from the moment Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, argued that the U.S. should do nothing to help it survive. If he has one clear economic belief, it is that tariffs work and are good (he’s wrong on both counts). Many of the purges of the government that are being carried out by Musk and Vought were laid out in the Heritage Foundation–led Project 2025, a planning document literally written by Vought as a blueprint for a second Trump administration. For that matter, we already lived through this nerve-racking show once. The second is more of the same, only much worse.
Democrats historically have underrated Trump as a politician because he is a buffoon. But if he is good at anything, it is campaigning. Even with a presidential record punctuated by an unnecessarily deadly pandemic and an attempted insurrection, Trump was able to convince enough voters that a second spell in the White House would be just fine. Many simply believed that he was all talk. He surely wouldn’t risk economic suicide by implementing nineteenth-century means in the twenty-first century. Others were wooed by his penchant for bombastic statements about how great everything would be once we stopped wasting money helping a small nation fend off a larger one.
To be fair, many Democrats did warn about all of this. But many voters didn’t believe them because these things do sound kind of crazy. Surely, Trump wouldn’t impose tariffs that could plunge the country into recession. Surely, he wouldn’t abandon Ukraine to Putin and risk a wider war in Europe. Surely, he wouldn’t follow the Project 2025 roadmap for purging the federal workforce and destroying entire government agencies. These are just things that politicians say to get elected, right?
But the second Trump administration is playing out exactly the way that Trump and his allies promised it would. It is chaotic and painful and cruel. It is causing devastation at home and abroad. And we all have to face the reality that this is happening right now, and that it is all going to get much worse.
