At one point during his first term, I wrote that Donald Trump “is like a toddler in the china shop. He knows the value of nothing but destroys everything that he can reach.”
It was, of course, a metaphor for his horribly harmful policies and behaviors then, but Trump has now brought the image to concrete life in his second term. He has wantonly destroyed the historic East Wing of the White House in order to build a Big Beautiful Ballroom where it once stood. This very visible physical act stands in well for the less visible but even more pernicious damage being done by his policies in his first year back in office.
Mr. Trump is not taking out the trash. He is bringing it.
For his second act he has been bludgeoning American institutions and ideals in equal measure.  He has been a wrecking ball of terror sitting in the most powerful seat in the land. He has been aided and abetted by an unholy trinity of docile Republican leadership in Washington, a shockingly supine U.S. Supreme Court, and a MAGA following still blinded to its own undoing by their fear and anger at those “others” they worry are taking the nation from its rightful white Christian “owners.”
Instead of two major political parties, we are down to only one that works in the interests of the citizens who have elected their representatives. Instead of our Constitutionally-designed three branches of government acting as checks against each other’s overstepping rights and duties, we have only one effective branch operating largely only to further enrich the president, his family, and the nation’s oligarchs, while sowing hate and division amongst the vast majority of the population to disable political opposition.
Consider the wreckage of 2025 alone. Trump and his minions have eviscerated the Rule of Law, the required bulwark against tyranny without which democracies cannot exist. To lead the Nation’s agencies designed to implement and enforce the laws of the land, he has appointed fellow destroyers to tear apart the missions earlier Congresses gave them to protect the public interest. The Environmental Protection Agency, established by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970, would today be more accurately named The Environmental Destruction Agency. The federal Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), now under the control of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., would be aptly titled The Department of Fantasy Medicine and Ancient Remedies. The Department of Education? The Sandbox Department of Sandbagging.
But in his most dramatic moves against the Rule of Law, Trump has pardoned the convicted January 6 invaders of the U.S. Capitol, including those who assaulted police officers, as well as close political allies who helped him engineer the attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. At the same time he has transmogrified the U.S. Department of Justice into his Office of Vengeance, led by Trump acolyte Pam Bondi. She has been the president’s handmaiden in bringing frivolous criminal cases against his perceived enemies, including the former FBI director, his own former national security advisor, and the current attorney general of New York State who filed and won a recent fraud case against Trump.
Meanwhile, he has been trashing the lives of the people, including his supporters’.  Apparently to protect Trump from the release of the Epstein files, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson sent its members on a several-weeks paid vacation while the Congress shut down the federal government, costing millions of government workers their paychecks. The shutdown resulted when Republicans refused to include extensions of the expiring Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health care insurance subsidies in the new federal budget1. Without these subsidies, the annual insurance premiums for the 24 million poor, older, and middle-class Americans could more than double in 2026 on average, effectively denying an estimate four million people their health care insurance. Hence their health care. Hence their health.
The vast majority of Americans enrolled in the ACA insurance program are from states that supported Trump in the 2024 election. In 2025 these enrollees outnumber those who live in states that supported Kamala Harris by about a four-to-one margin.
The shutdown also meant that beginning Nov. 1, the federal government stopped sending the monthly checks for food assistance to some 42 million poor Americans, including 16 million children. In the face of federal court orders since, ordering the Trump Administration to reinstate full payment of SNAP2 benefits, also known as food stamps, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to stay the lower court orders. As of this writing, the Supreme Court has done so twice, without explanation. And in the face of some states’ efforts to pay the full benefits in the short term, the Administration has threatened those states with financial penalties if they do not “undo” those payments.
And as if to add insult to injury, inflation is rising. In his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to end inflation–the key issue in the 2024 presidential election–starting on his first day back in office. Instead, he has implemented policies that have raised prices on everything from groceries to electricity to cars. His inflationary policies include his presumptively illegal tariffs on virtually all imports from other nations, and his radical deportation policies, which have not only broken up families and rousted undocumented immigrants from long established lives as productive neighbors, but also roughed up American citizens presumed illegal based upon skin color. A less noticed consequence is to have raised the prices of American farm goods as many of these are picked and processed by immigrant workers no longer available to farmers. In August the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an astonishing 38.9 percent increase in the wholesale prices of dry and fresh vegetables from June to July alone.
Since the beginning of 2025, inflation has been growing faster than after-tax pay for lower- and middle-income households.
The catalogue of consequences from Trump’s trashing seems endless.  He has illegally withdrawn funds for programs created and funded by Congress, including foreign aid. He has also done so with medical and other scientific research and forced out many of the top researchers working for and with such agencies as Kennedy’s DHHS, and thereby substantially weakened the Nation’s position as the leading research country in the world. He has invented law enforcement “emergencies” in many of our cities so that he could “justify” illegally invading them with federal troops. And he has relentlessly attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programs everywhere, from the military, to universities, to corporations, forcing many of them to eliminate their programs.
Democrats’ sweeping victories in states’ elections this month signal that Trump may have finally overstepped his support in the country. His favorability ratings in the polls, never strong, have been falling since the beginning of his second term. In October an NBC News poll found a new low in his popularity: 48 percent of respondents, representing virtually half of the population, said they strongly disapprove of his presidency, while 30 percent said they still strongly approve of it. The latter number represents his reliable, hard-core base of followers. But even many of them are already feeling the effects of Trump’s trashing.
CODA
Eugene O’Neill’s classic play, The Iceman Cometh, describes the lives of a group of alcoholics who live in a flop house above a saloon in New York City in the early years of the 20th century. As they drink away their failures and faults in the bar below, they maintain hold on dreams of future successes. A charismatic travelling salesman comes by the saloon and lifts everyone’s spirits. But on his next visit he is a changed man, and he tells the alcoholics that their dreams are frivolous because they are drinking their lives away. If they stop drinking, their hopes for success can be realized.
Many of the men take heed, cease drinking and go out into the world, aiming at successful jobs and careers. It doesn’t work out for any of them. They return to the flophouse and bar and resume their drinking lives. There they learn from the travelling salesman that he has been lying about everything. That rather than his wife having been murdered, that he had murdered her himself. That he himself was a philanderer and a drunk. That in fact he believes that men’s dreams are nothing but delusions required to make life possible. The men were relieved to conclude that his earlier message of taking responsibility for their own successes were the ramblings of a lunatic. They could simply now return to their old “pipe dreams” and excuses about why they had not succeeded in life and live out their delusions in the bar.
This dark tale has echoes in Trump’s behavior. In his conning his political base to believe that he has the solution for bringing them better days ahead, that only he “can fix it.” That only he can save the American Dream for them. In his pretense at being a man of faith and virtue3 when in fact he is a world class narcissist who brings pain and even death to others. In his blaming his followers’ stress and anxieties on the wrong parties (immigrants and people of color), rather than on the real systemic sources of their troubles.
But the Iceman and the Trashman are also different. The Iceman finally succumbs to his conscience. He even calls the police on himself for his wife’s murder. Enough said.
I hope that Trump’s outrageous behavior in 2025 will bring his followers to their senses, finally. Looks like it may happen soon……what do you predict?