Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen
People should know.
I remember getting to autumn of 2019 and thinking we might be home free.
That was a long way to have come from the sense of dread that pervaded liberal politics three years earlier.
If you work in government, or cover it closely for a living, you gain real appreciation for the fact that the systems that allow most Americans to lead carefree lives are simultaneously robust and fragile.
I use the term “carefree” advisedly. Many people are deprived. Many people live close enough to the brink to be anxious about it. But they don’t tend to worry that their food supply will fill with poison or planes will fall out of the sky. Or, at least, they didn’t
Unless you have fanatical priors—unless you basically hate the concept of social welfare—the closer you get to government, the more appreciation you have for the people who make the wheels turn: the career civil servants and their managers and the subset of political leaders who take stewarding these agencies seriously.
Things could be better, obviously. More efficient, more modern—it’s a giant enterprise. But it’s hard to be cavalier about reform or efficiency when you grasp how load-bearing it all is. How easily a bit of carelessness or greed might result in environmental or financial ruin—or planes literally falling out of the sky.
This is more or less what Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk is about, but most competent congressional or policy reporters could’ve told you the same thing in broad strokes.
So when a greedy but incompetent and vindictive crook won the presidency by accident in 2016, on the back of a ramshackle campaign, and without a real plan to transition to government, most people in and around politics understood it was a dangerous situation.
Then, for a long time, we averted outright disaster. Barack Obama bequeathed Trump a strong economy. Trump’s cabinet was decidedly B-list, but competent enough to resist and talk him out of obvious blunders. In 2019, Democrats took control of Congress, giving all of us more eyes on the street. They didn’t conduct oversight as aggressively as they should have, but they did more than zero, and when they caught Trump corrupting foreign policy to cheat in his re-election campaign, they impeached him for it.
For a moment there it seemed like we might get through four full years without experiencing a generational calamity.
Then the novel coronavirus escaped containment efforts in Wuhan, China, Trump ignored it in pursuit of some Potemkin soybean deal with Xi Jinping, and a million Americans died. Trump lost the election, but attempted a coup d’etat, culminating in a violent insurrection at the Capitol.
We should be generous enough to note that there was no easy way to contain a respiratory infection as contagious as COVID-19—it could easily have become a global pandemic even if the administration in Washington had been both competent and prepared to work in concert with Chinese officials to stop the spread. But Trump’s failures are easily responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths.
So the thing we worried about in November 2016 came to pass.
That’s an n of one. Not nearly enough data to derive the odds of calamity over time as a function of incompetence. And a global pandemic feels at least a little bit fluky. But even with all the advantages others provided him, Trump only made it through three of his first four years before facing a huge, consequential challenge, and he promptly fucked it up.
We are only 19 months into Donald Trump’s second term, and the tail risk is clearly much larger.