Trump is back in the White House, and he’s taking a wrecking ball to everything, everywhere, all at once. Are you getting déjà vu? Ironically, Trump being re-elected means we’re finally back in “precedented times” after a true political and cultural rollercoaster over the last few years. But if Trump’s first three weeks in office have been any indication, the ride is only going to get bumpier.
Is there a way to make sense of all the chaos? I think so, but it starts with internalizing a phrase about American politics from Nicco Mele, a longtime personal and professional mentor of mine:
Rule Nº 1: It will get crazier.Rule Nº 1 has held up remarkably well since I first started following politics closely in 2015, galvanized by Trump’s first presidential campaign, which he launched by attacking Mexican immigrants like me. Little did I know things would only get crazier.
Here are just a few things that happened since then. In 2016, a reality TV show host vanquished some of the most established names in the Republican Party to earn the GOP’s presidential nomination; in 2017, he was sworn in as president after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College in an upset. Trump was so unpopular that, in 2018, Democrats swore in a US Senator from Alabama (!) and came within 2.5% of winning a Senate seat in Texas. In 2019, Trump was impeached for the first time for abusing his office by pressuring an ally nation to generate compromising information on a political rival.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic sent the world into a tailspin, and Joe Biden won the presidency by promising a return to normalcy. Early in 2021, Democrats flipped the Senate by winning dual runoff elections in Georgia; the next day, Trump and his supporters sabotaged the peaceful transition of power by attempting a violent insurrection at the Capitol while Congress was formally certifying the presidential election results. (For those keeping count, that led to Trump’s second impeachment.)
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on motivated reasoning, undoing decades of established precedent. Elon Musk bought Twitter. And, after experiencing no legal consequences for attempting to undermine America’s constitutional order, Trump announced he would run for president for a third time. In 2023, for the first time ever, the House of Representatives ousted its speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, through a motion to vacate. We also had the whole George Santos side plot where he was expelled from Congress after less than a year for having completely made up his entire résumé.
In 2024, the GOP nominated a convicted felon as its presidential candidate and the sitting president made a last-minute decision to not seek reelection after having already won the Democratic primary, leaving his vice president scrambling to throw a campaign together barely 100 days out from election day. Republicans won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, sending Trump back to the White House.
In 2025, the incoming administration wasted no time handing the keys to the federal government to the richest man on Earth and letting him take a sledgehammer to any program he personally dislikes, while Trump fires off Executive Orders that have nothing to do with his main campaign promise of combatting inflation.
And trust me: it will get crazier. In today’s attention economy, public opinion is shaped by social media algorithms that incentivize demagoguery and are agnostic toward truth. Combine that with our two-party, first-past-the-post political system that generally discourages moderation, add in the fact that it is much easier to break things than it is to fix them, and you can see why Rule Nº 1 has yet to fail me.
If you’re interested in my commentary on current events or if you just want to keep up with what’s going on without being glued to each news cycle, this Substack is for you. Through these posts, I’ll share my thoughts on having an unaccountable billionaire with too many conflicts of interests to count in charge of the federal government1 (it’s bad); the GOP’s ever-less-subtle flirtation with conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, and radical Christian nationalists (also bad); and foreign policy that prioritizes Trump’s unpredictable whims over America’s standing in the world (take a guess). I’m also open to delving into topics that readers are interested in as the next four years unfold.
I hope you’ll subscribe to get future posts straight to your inbox—until then, remember Rule Nº 1!
The same conclusion applies whether that description made you think of Trump or Musk.
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