Winston Churchill once said, and I believe it was Rahm Emanuel who famously repeated, that one should never let a good crisis go to waste.
As awful as it sounds, there is a kernel of truth in the idea that in politics (and probably almost every other facet of life), nothing big gets done in most cases unless people have the fear of God put into them.
Inertia rules the physical world, and while human beings have agency that rolling balls and ballistic rockets do not, experience shows that most people and organizations tend to do the same things over and over until they clearly don’t work, and then continue doing those things until there is no alternative.
What can’t go on forever won’t. But it will go on far past the point where you would think that a sane person would change direction.
“This whole impulse that we now have to urgently fix our problems … it’s not only a Trump phenomenon,” @joergkukies explains, adding that Germany “has been overly dependent on Russia for energy, on the United States for security, and on China for exports and imports.”… pic.twitter.com/sG2OoyyIDo
— Semafor (@semafor) April 23, 2025
I got to thinking about this when I saw this clip of the German Finance Minister Jörg Kukies explaining that the chaos seen in Washington is hardly unique. There is an urgency in most Western countries that fundamental problems must be addressed because the alternative is disaster.
He also referred to the horrific economic stagnation in Europe and their dependence on Russia for energy and the United States for defense. All of these have been known problems for decades now and nothing was done to rectify them–in fact, the Germans actually laughed at Trump–literally–when he warned them that their dependence on Russian gas would bite them in the butt.
Relying on Russia was easy, right up to the moment it was disastrous.
Markets, and lots of ordinary people, are feeling whiplash because Trump is so unpredictable and is moving at the speed of a whirling dervish. I get uncomfortable–he has so many spinning plates on poles that one is left waiting to see when or if they all come crashing down.
And they may. I don’t know whether Trump’s strategy for dealing with multiple crises at once–runaway federal spending, the flood of illegal immigrants, left-wing cabals in our government, and corruption found everywhere–will result in all of them being tamed or not.
Conventional wisdom says that any president should focus on at most three major issues in order to ensure or at least maximize the chances of making lasting change. Every president has limited political capital, and spending it on many things buys you little or nothing on any of them. Purchase three high quality items rather than 10 pieces of rickety crap.
Trump is trying to fix it all at once, intensely aware that his window of opportunity is short, and the looming crises are numerous and existential.
Trump has courted chaos, I believe, not just because he thrives in chaotic environments and has an uncanny ability to win against all the odds. I think he realizes that a number of the problems he has identified as critical to fix are not “ripe” for fixing–the disaster that is imminent has yet to strike–and he wants to address them before the worst happens.
All societies rebel at that, and democracies most of all. That’s why we get things like the mortgage-backed security crisis–everything seemed great until it didn’t.
I think–I am guessing–that Trump is courting the sense of crisis to generate momentum for fixing them, and trying to keep his political opponents confused about how to fight him on so many fronts. After all, they have even less political capital to spend and too many things they need to protect.
Trump is trying to blow up the old, corrupt order in Washington and transnational politics. That has Washington and Wall Street spooked.
And, to be honest, it frightens a lot of ordinary people. Nobody wants the crises to keep popping up, but watching the old blow up without being sure of what the new will look like is scary.
Trump is going to stay the course, keeping the chaos going, because it is a powerful tool to make change. Whether you think that the price in chaos is worth the potential rewards or not depends on how inclined you are to trust Trump.
Personally, as you all likely know, I am cautiously optimistic. I don’t think Trump is going to win all the battles he chooses, but I think it is likely he will win more than we could expect from any other president.
But I see the danger; if those spinning plates lose momentum, Trump could lose them all and leave a lot of broken china. Which will be one really big crisis indeed.
