Trump Will Break the Federal Government. The Washington Monthly Can Fix It.

Donald Trump is not good at running the federal government.

We know this from the incompetence and cruelty that defined his first term. Judges blocked more than three-quarters of his attempted deregulation orders. Stingy health insurance rules led to Americans being uninsured. He separated migrant children from their parents, yet illegal border crossings rose during his first three years. He politicized the response to hurricanes, treating Texans hit by Harvey (who can vote for president) better than Puerto Ricans hit by Maria (who can’t). He politicized the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Nothing during the current transition suggests Trump has learned anything about public administration. His antipathy towards expertise has intensified with his demand for obedience.

Bad as it was, in the last go-round, Trump was sometimes hemmed in by cooler heads. Three Senate Republicans thwarted the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, most notably the late John McCain. Cabinet secretaries waved him off from abruptly canceling the North American Free Trade Agreement, and he later settled for minor treaty changes. The pandemic response would have been worse if the legendary public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci was forced to resign and replaced with a MAGA lunatic.

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The time will come, sooner than you may think, when level-headed people will get to work fixing what’s broken. Those people need good ideas to win elections and govern.

That’s where the Washington Monthly comes in.

For over 50 years, the Monthly has been diagnosing what isn’t working in Washington and how to make it work. We’re needed now more than ever.

Trump is on the verge of breaking the bones of our federal government.

For Trump’s second term, public health posts have gone to conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and phony pill peddler Dr. Mehmet Oz. Kennedy even wrote a bestseller attacking Fauci as part of his crackpot portfolio.

Two billionaires with zero government management experience but lots of half-baked concepts, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have been tapped to develop radical plans to slash the federal government.

Matt Gaetz’s nomination for Attorney General died, but otherwise, congressional Republicans seem ready to give Trump whoever he wants.

Beyond its fear of angering Trump, the Republican Party—as it becomes more dependent on voters without college degrees—appears to be adopting anti-expertise as a fundamental tenet.

According to exit poll data over the last four presidential elections, Republican performance among diploma-holders has worsened. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost college grads by 2 points. Trump lost them by 10 in 2016, 14 in 2020, and 13 in 2024. But Trump has offset that loss with significant inroads with non-college grads. Romney lost those voters by four points, while Trump has won them in his elections—only by two in 2020 but by a whopping 14 this year.

Andrew Van Dam, data journalist for The Washington Post, recently explored how the education divide polarizes America, creating an opening for Republicans to wage war on expertise. Van Dam concluded, “As education polarization has increased, the Republican Party has stepped up its attacks on scientific and academic expertise and the facts it produces.” The logical endpoint of the war on expertise is a bear-eating, brain-wormed crackpot running the Department of Health and Human Services.

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The Democratic Party’s challenge is to prove policymakers can manage government better than a band of blowhards.

The time will come to pick up the pieces of Trump’s next mess. The time to get ready for that moment is now, with forward-looking policy ideas that address existing problems in the American economy and federal bureaucracy and anticipate the wreckage that’s soon to come.

Ideas are the business of the Washington Monthly. When you donate to the Washington Monthly, you are helping generate the ideas that future leaders will use to make Washington work the way it should.

Look ahead to the next four years of the Trump administration, and everything looks bleak. But the Trump Era will end. And if the next generation of responsible leaders that follow Trump will deliver for the American people, they must be armed with the best ideas possible.

If they read the Washington Monthly, they will. Donate now. For $50, you’ll get a complimentary subscription to our print magazine. There’s never been a better time to subscribe.

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