Analysis of Trump's Impact on US Governance (Part 2)

A popular backlash that was too big, too big to rig the institutional damage. In a way you can subsume all of that under credibility. Can you rebuild normal relations with other countries when everybody knows that America is a country that elected Donald Trump twice and that Trump completely ripped up all of our international agreements? Everyone will always know that any agreement with the United States is a suggestion that for all you know, the next Trump like figure can come along and simply ignore. And the same thing is true for so government agencies. Presumably you can have, hopefully if there's a Democratic president after the 2028 election, at a Democratic Congress, you can have a house cleaning. But are really good people going to go into government institutions now? Very good question. We used to have civil servants who were much, much better than in a way we deserved. Because in something like Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve, which is partially insulated but has not been fully insulated, you typically had people who could be earning two or three times as much on Wall street as they were in government. But they served in these government jobs because they felt that they had meaning. I know people like that. So do I. And those people are all leaving or have left and will they come back because your job might have meaning, but only for four years. There have been some surveys that say that a majority of officers in the military either have left or are strongly considering leaving because they feel themselves to have a mission. They talk a lot about honor, which is a word that the rest of us don't use. And it's a great thing. But after two years, and of hegseth, after two years in which competent officers were fired because they weren't political loyalists and incompetents were brought in, are you ever going to be able to reconstitute the American military as it was? So we've suffered enormous damage. I would add the lawyers at the Department of Justice, which is really important. The Foreign Service people I know a lot of them, a lot of them were really devoted intelligence officers. The Internal Revenue Service. It's a long term reconstruction that is going to be required and that's not going to happen quickly and not at all if people think this could be repeated.