676. Has America Lost the Plot?

Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host and foreign policy scholar, made a prediction on Freakonomics Radio just after Donald Trump’s re-election. He said the second Trump administration would not be as bad as people feared, because the country had checks and balances, institutions, bureaucracies, laws, and rules that could not be dispensed with. A few months later, he was asked about that prediction. His answer: "Yeah, it was basically wrong."

The difference between Trump’s first and second terms, Zakaria argues, is not just a matter of degree. In the first term, Trump did not expect to win, was nervous about governing, and delegated authority to people like Gary Cohn and Jim Mattis, who acted as constraints. Cohn twice persuaded Trump not to impose the kind of tariffs he later enacted; Mattis talked him out of attacking Iran. But those people later distanced themselves from Trump after January 6, and Trump came to see them as disloyal. In the second term, he surrounded himself with slavishly loyalists who do not push back. The result is a presidency that Zakaria describes as "regime change by jazz improvisation" — impulsive, amateurish, and ideologically erratic. Trump, he says, likes to "wing it," and the second term has been far more unpredictable than the first.

The Iran War as a Case Study in Miscalculation