Understanding Chaos

 

In math, chaos theory involves the study of how small factors influence the behavior of systems, the so-called butterfly effect. This non-linear dynamic idea analyzes the effects of systems moving from stability to instability with random outcomes. In politics, there is the absurd belief that disorder leads to strength. Toward that end, there is support for fascism, white nationalism, and even violence to “shake things up,” if for no other reason than to upset the status quo.

Chaos Theory explained:  Clear yet?

When chaos is your goal, your job is simple. A screaming toddler can bring chaos to almost any situation. Elect a person with an explosive temper and a reactional mindset, who sees the world only as a series of simple transactions, and the ensuing mayhem is assured.

Screaming toddler brings chaos

Add to that mixture, an unelected bored billionaire with no constituency, and chaos surely follows. Motivate that co-president with access to the government departments who are a major source of revenue for his businesses, and he will be like a spoiled kid in a candy store. If that billionaire is someone who grew up with white privilege in apartheid South Africa, who better to go after the racist boogeyman of DEI? Now give that chaos objective the cover story of eliminating waste in government and everybody is happy. Well, maybe not everybody.

Waste in government has been around since the beginning of, well, government. You can’t swing a dead cat around any government agency without hitting some wasteful spending. I’ve personally worked for city, county, state, and federal governments and always saw money wasted in one form or another. I also worked for General Motors and saw the same thing.

Since Donald Trump sees everything as transactional with winners and losers and lacks the emotional stability and skillset to solve a problem, his approach is predictable. Break out the wrecking ball, tear everything down, and start over. This works fine in real estate where you have a structure in disrepair. The simple solution is to raze the building and construct something bigger and better. The problem with our new landlord is that he is demolishing the building while it is still occupied. His psychopathy can’t be bothered with a little carnage and destruction.

Sherman's March Through Georgia

This president has begun his second term with a Sherman marching through Georgia attitude filled with spectacle, chaos, confusion, and abuse of power. His executive orders were outlined in the Project 2025 playbook and designed with shock and awe as an objective. These orders would defy common sense, were mostly unclear, and often illegal.

In his first term, he used tweets, and now he has resorted almost exclusively to Executive Orders. No more suggestions, hints, and wild rants on Twitter-X, now they are executive mandates. He has the added advantage of infallibility bestowed upon him by the Supreme Court as he cannot be held accountable outside impeachment. Even that measure could be fraught with danger and would require an invertebrate Congress to place themselves at risk. With jellyfish in the majority, impeachment is off the table

The toddler-in-charge just throws things up against the wall to see what sticks. I am reminded of the scene in The Odd Couple where Felix Unger corrects Oscar Madison who just called his dinner spaghetti. Felix tells him that it is not spaghetti but linguini. Oscar then throws the dinner plate against a nearby wall and declares, “Now it is garbage.” Today, much of what Trump “throws against the wall” also turns into garbage. Future generations will be left to clean up his mess.

Spaghetti, No, it's linguini.....Now it's garbage

Trump imposed tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico. There was outcry and mayhem. The tariff cover story was no longer about trade imbalance and jobs, it was now immigrants and fentanyl that was the problem. Both Canada and Mexico were hit with 25% tariffs even though total fentanyl seizures from Canada were 42 pounds for all of 2024, compared to 21,164 pounds from Mexico. Trump has since paused the Canada and Mexico tariffs.

The start-stop whiplash is still rippling in the marketplace. The stock market went down then back up. More chaos. The explanation for the on again off again with the Mexican and Canadian tariffs was that Trump got something in return. What he got was basically what the Mexican government promised to do under Biden and had been doing before the threat of a tariff.

While fentanyl is a scourge killing tens of thousands of Americans each year, tariffs aren’t paid by drug traffickers, they are paid by consumers. While Trump never mentioned that there would be pain associated with his immigration and tariff solutions, now he says that pain was always the plan. If these tariffs take effect and the retaliatory tariffs from these countries are put in place, they will be nothing more than a tax on consumer goods paid mostly by the middle class and poor. Billionaires won’t suffer much pain at all, oil imports were exempted so filling up their yachts won’t see much change.

Tariffs are merely revenue for the US General Fund that consumers will cover. They are just a tax by another name. Any slight reduction in income taxes would be offset by higher consumer prices. The income tax reductions for the wealthy, however, are another story. Shifting the tax burden to consumer goods while exempting selective big-ticket items, also shifts the tax burden away from the wealthy to be picked up by the non-wealthy.

Donald Trump has no ideology but does have an insatiable thirst for power and money. He has shown that he has ideas. Oh, he has so many ideas. They just pop into his genius head and his knee jerks with delight. They are just really bad ideas. These ideas are his solutions to problems, many of which are recognized by both political parties, but they are poorly considered “solutions” that do more damage than good. Other “solutions” are merely racist xenophobic red meat for a like-minded minority within the once-valid Republican party.

Chaos is the smokescreen providing cover for the wildfire beneath. When people bought into the wild promises of lowering inflation through government cost-cutting, removing immigrants from US jobs, and tariffs to bring manufacturing and industry back home, they were not told about the costs. Nobody told them their national parks would suffer. They weren’t warned that the social programs they relied on would go away. They weren’t told that controlling inflation would be forgotten in the wake of the tsunami of a man bent on revenge.

King Trump

Yes, the rogue wave of an angry man seeking reprisal and retribution on his perceived enemies has hit our shores, flowed up our mighty rivers, and destroyed all in its path. If waste in government was the tumor, most sane people would know that you break out the scalpel and remove it, you don’t eliminate it with a hand grenade. But our elected leader is not a surgeon and waste in government was never his real objective. He only needs to use a simplistic wrecking ball approach to provide the distraction for what is really happening. That is the removal of democratic principles and the establishment of his oligarchy where his financial supremacy is assured. In that light, chaos is beautiful. It is so good to be king.