White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Fun Is Running Out for Trump’s Presidency

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There is a powerful force that affects politics as much as it affects individual lives. It is fatigue.

We just get darn tired of something, be it a job, a relationship, a hobby or a routine. We have been devoted to it for years, and suddenly we want out; we want to do something else. What we loved doing has become boring and tedious. More work than fun.

A kind of national fatigue played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union: People were tired of the system and its oppressiveness. Likewise, South Africa.

I was in and out of that country just before apartheid came to its timely death. Ordinary White people, including Afrikaners, said they had had enough; they were tired of the whole complex, cruel structure.

It is my contention that President Trump wants out — that for him, the fun is over. The old stimuli — his daily television domination, the adulation, the global recognition — once so important to him, are ebbing.

Michael Wolff, Trump’s biographer, and James Carville, the picaresque Democratic activist, have both speculated, along with several commentators, that Trump may not finish out his term. They imply that some external force, like illness, will cause him to leave office.

But I think he would like to do it by choice because he isn’t enjoying it anymore. The music has stopped.

Trump said during his first term that he had left a good life — by implication, a better life — before he became president. The first year of his second term was more to his liking than his whole first term. He roared back into office in 2025 with advantages he didn’t have in 2017.

Now he was the man, admired by some, feared by many. His whims or idiosyncrasies became policy. He took over America as though he had bought an apartment building and was knocking down walls and digging a swimming pool.

Trump had a palpable majority, and his base, which had developed a kind of religious commitment behind the slogan “Make America Great Again,” was solid.

In Congress, he had a majority, thin but blindly loyal.

The transformation was complete. The Republican Party had morphed into the Trump Party, faithful and unquestioning. He was careful to staff this second administration with men and women who accepted his liege. Additionally, he came in with a kind of manifesto in the form of the sweeping Project 2025, crafted by the sycophantic Heritage Foundation.

Trump bulldozed his way through his first 100 days, signing nearly 40 executive orders on his first day back in the White House. He made Elon Musk the foreman of an unconstitutional entity: the Department of Government Efficiency. It battered the bureaucracy but also established, from the start, Trump’s unbridled power.

“You’re fired!” moved from the fateful catchphrase on the TV series “The Apprentice,” which had made Trump a national celebrity, to a tool of government and a way of cowering the workforce.

In Congress, the withdrawal of Trump’s favor was feared as a career death sentence. Privately, Republican eyes rolled, but publicly, it was Trump all the way.

This year, the edifice of certainty is beginning to wobble.

Being president isn’t all plaudits, and some Trump voters are looking away, worried about the ravages of his private army in the form of ICE and the loss of America’s global stature. They are also concerned that the rich aren’t just getting richer; they are now an aristocracy, rich beyond measure, akin to the feudal lords.

Then came the Iran war, where miscalculation, aided by hubris and ignorance, has led to the real possibility that we will settle for less than we had before the first U.S. shot was fired.

In short, Trump took up arms against a sea of troubles and made them worse. Governing has proved to be more complicated than he dreamed.

It has long been a tenet of the right wing that there are simple solutions for complex problems. It is also the Trump creed.

I would wager the main thing keeping Trump from declaring victory and adjourning to a life of golf and self-congratulation would be that he desperately wants to finish his two acts of self-adulatory construction: the White House ballroom and the triumphal arch.

Trump has shown every indication that he sees his legacy not in Middle East peace or global security, but in the currency that made him: concrete and rebar.

Trump shows many signs of fatigue, of being tired of the job and its endless crises. Polls suggest many people are fatigued with him, too.

Watch Out When the Political Class Forgets Cause and Effect

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Anyone who has spent time in criminal court knows this: One of the characteristics of lawbreakers is a poorly developed sense of cause and effect.

At the low end, the folly of the defendants is always on display. The young man who takes a gun with him on a night of drinking. He has increased his chances that he might use it and spend the rest of the useful years of his life in prison.

The shoplifter who keeps at it despite past convictions faces undetermined years behind bars. The burglar who robs a house and, while there, calls home on a cell phone, which will ping off the nearest cell tower, negating any alibi. The murderer who posts on social media.

This poorly developed sense of cause and effect isn’t confined to the lawless. It is rife in the political class, in both cohorts, but primarily these days in the ruling Republican cohort.

We, as a nation, appear to have forgotten that actions have consequences. Those consequences ricochet down through the decades, even the centuries.

Bomb people, and you will get a massive refugee problem.

Deny medical funding, and you will get overburdened emergency rooms.

Underfund science, and the talent will pop up somewhere else, like the universities of Europe and Asia.

Cut off immigration, and you will have deflation from population decline.

Create stateless people — they are still people, still there — and they will become a burden.

Don’t raise taxes to cover the $39 trillion national debt, and the interest payments on the debt will be so enormous that there will be little left for the business of governance.

Action has consequences, just as inaction has consequences. Winston Churchill said: “A decision not taken is nonetheless a decision.”

Here are just some areas where the effect may linger long after the cause has lost its currency — long after the action, which seemed to be “a good idea” at the time, was taken:

Cause: Traduced allies, vitiated treaties and long-term friends abandoned with abusive disdain while rewarding the deplorable with praise, recognition and encouragement.

Effect: The slights and the negations won’t be forgotten, but the reason for them will have faded with the perpetrators. America diminished as a global power, taking a seat beside Brazil or Argentina, damned by a history of causing damaging effects for passing motives.

Cause: Profligate use of the presidential pardon.

Effect: A further temptation to abuse power and advance corrupt patronage. Friends go free.

Cause: The abandonment of the sacred right to see a judge, to identify the accuser, to be tried by a jury of your peers.

Effect: A lawless state of injustice and cruelty, the state out of control, thugs loosed on the people.

Cause: Undermine the elections by falsely claiming that they were rigged.

Effect: A fundamental weakening of democracy and the supremacy of the ballot. All elections are doubted and more easily overturned. The system is undermined.

Cause: Sustaining a lie in the belief that if you claim it long enough, it will sow doubt.

Effect: Truth becomes what those who have power say it is, whether it is about an election, immigrants, the cost of wind turbines or climate change. Truth becomes a commodity in short supply in the political marketplace.

All governments make mistakes, and most go too far in the service of political ideas, which have legitimacy for a time and then fade. This time it is different. The list of political actions that will have detrimental effects in the future and substantially threaten our world leadership is long.

Since the end of World War II, we have led the world in everything from creativity to moral example, from generosity in foreign aid to genius in medical science, from legal thought to environmental protection.

Now, political exigency is undermining that. Petty, small triumphs in what are often just the culture wars have effects that diminish us worldwide, and harbinger a more troubled future for us and the world.

Any day, in the heat of a political moment, another cause may leave an effect that will damage the decision-making mechanisms of the Senate. If the filibuster goes, both parties would rue the effects, long and often.

If it goes, the cause will be forgotten, but the effect will endure.

America, for So Long a State of Mind, Is Losing Its Sense of Mission

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America isn’t just a piece of remarkably fertile real estate between two great oceans. It is also a state of mind.

Even when America has done wrong things (think racism) or stupid things (think Prohibition), it has still shone brightly to the world as the citadel of free expression, abundant opportunity, and a place where laws are obeyed.

When I was a teen in a British colony in Africa, long before I imagined I would spend most of my life in America, I met a man who had seen the promised land. He wasn’t a native-born American or even a citizen, but he had lived in “the States.”

I badgered this man with questions about everything, but mostly things derived from books and movies: Could ordinary people really drive Cadillacs?  As a British writer later said, were taxis in New York “great yellow projectiles”? Did they really have universities where you could study anything, like ice cream manufacturing? Did American policemen actually carry guns?

Our adulation of America was fed by its products. They were everywhere the best. American pickup trucks were the gold standard of light trucks, and American cars — so big — fascinated, although they weren’t ubiquitous like the trucks. Brands such as Frigidaire and General Electric meant reliability, quality and evidence that Americans did things better.

No one thought the streets in the United States were paved with gold, but they did believe they were paved with possibility.

There was criticism, like that of the alleged American hold on the price of gold or the fear of nuclear war. The “shining city upon a hill” idea was paramount long before President Ronald Reagan said it.

And it has been so for the world since the end of World War II. For 80 years, the United States has led the world; even when it spread its mistakes, like the Vietnam War, it led.

America was the bulwark of the liberal democracies — a grouping of European nations, Canada, Australia and much of Asia — that shared many values and outlooks. Call it what it is, or was, Western Civilization, based on decency, informed by Christianity, and shaped by tradition and common expectation.

Central to this was America; central with ideas, with wealth, with technological leadership and, above all, with decency. Now, all of this may be in the past.

This structure has been shaken in less than three months of President Trump’s second administration. It is near breaking point.

This may be the end of days for the Western Alliance, led by America in the ways of democracy and free trade.

Writing in the British monthly magazine Prospect, Andrew Adonis, a peer who sits in the House of Lords as Baron Adonis, states: “Trump doesn’t believe in democracy, just in winning at all costs. He doesn’t believe in an international order based on respect for human rights. He is an authoritarian, lawless plutocrat who admires similar characters at home and abroad.”

Additionally, Adonis says in his article that, unlike the first Trump term, the checks and balances have weakened: “The Republican Party has become a cipher. The Democrats are shell-shocked and demoralized. The courts, the military and Congress are browbeaten, packed with Trump supporters or otherwise compliant.”

I find it hard to argue with this assessment. Why would Trump persist with a tariff regime that was proven not to work with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which triggered the Great Depression? Why would he rile up Canada by threatening its independence? Why would he reopen, without a good reason, the issue of the control of the Panama Canal?

Why is he destroying the civil service in thought-free ways? Why is he going after the constitutional freedom of the press and the rights enshrined over millennia for lawyers to represent those who need them regardless of politics? Why is he leading us into a recession: the Trump Slump?

Either the president has no coherent plans, or those plans are devious and not to be shared with the people.

I believe that he enjoys power and testing its limits, that he has no knowledge base and so relies on hearsay to formulate policy. In the end, he may be listed along with Roman emperors who ran amok like Nero and Caligula.

The Western Alliance is at stake, and America is giving away its global leadership. When trust is lost, it is gone forever.

Reporter Scores First Cat Interview Since JD Vance’s Comments

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After Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance denigrated women who keep cats and don’t have children, whom he characterized as sad “cat ladies,” the media erupted. None of my colleagues, to my knowledge, bothered with the No. 1 obligation of their trade: Get the other side of the story.

So, I thought it was my duty to go forth and interview at least one cat.

I can tell you dogs are easy to interview. They will tell you anything you want to hear and are prepared to perform for the camera. Horses are a journalistic dream: They love to be on camera, especially live television, and will tell you the most extraordinary things. The rule is: If it comes from a horse’s mouth, verify.

But cats are a different story. They go for still photographs, preferably on social media. Facebook is a veritable showcase of posing felines.

But moving pictures? Not as much. Actually, interviewing cats and taking candid pictures takes fortitude. It isn’t easy to get a cat that will open up.

After several disdainful rejections (cats really know how to disdain) a Tuxedo house cat of the male persuasion, whose owner is a childless, middle-age lady, agreed to be interviewed if I met certain conditions:

—No moving pictures, just stills suitable for social media.

—No petting or touching of any kind, unless initiated by the subject.

—No attempts to bribe with food or “blandishments.”

The interview took place in a comfortable, suburban home with a cat named “Simba,” but he refused to answer to that name. He seemed to be a cat, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, who walked by himself.

The homeowner gave me permission to interview her cat in his environment: a sofa draped with a plush, anti-scratch slipcover.

ME to CAT: You don’t like the name Simba?

CAT: It is a family name, but only applies to lions in Africa. We are close but we don’t socialize, except on the internet. If you go to Africa, I could arrange for you to be eaten. (A small, red tongue circled the rim of his mouth.)

ME: So you use the internet?

CAT: Of course. Nearly all domestic cats have computer skills and can crack passwords.

ME: What is the deal with childless women?

CAT: We love them because children interrupt our lives at every level, from sleeping to surfing the net. Also, ladies are malleable.  Children manhandle you and have been known to throw cats out of windows, so they can find out how many lives we have.

ME: You are a house cat. How do you feel about that?

CAT: It is a lifestyle choice. I chose comfort over adventure. Would you turn the air-conditioning up two degrees? Do you know we were worshipped in ancient Egypt and, indeed, we are divine. Silly to try to define how many lives we have: We are eternal.

ME: What do you think of people?

CAT: They have their uses, particularly if they leave their computers on, spend oodles of money on you at PetSmart, and provide companionship on demand. Our call, not theirs.

ME: What sites do you visit on the net when you are surfing?

CAT: “Hot Cats” is my favorite, very risqué.

ME: What do you think about JD Vance?

CAT: You are so slow. Why did it take you so long to ask the only question you want answered?

ME: I was seeking context.

CAT: I could scratch you. Would that be context enough?

ME: Well, what about the Republican vice-presidential pick?

CAT: If he sets foot in Africa, I will have one of my lion cousins, Simba or Leo, drive him up a tree and reason with him. He has caused me personal grief.

ME: How come?

CAT: My companion-lady — cats don’t allow people to own them, you know — was a loyal Republican and that was fine. Cats are more conservative. Dogs, I believe, are all Democrats.

She has become a Democrat and is thinking of adopting a child. If that happens, I shall have to consider new living arrangements.

Now, change my litter, take a picture of me sitting on the piano and post it to Facebook. I haven’t been on social media since the unpleasantness with JD Vance. Such a weird man. I may have to rig a voting machine or two.

ME: Can I ask ….

CAT: We are finished. Don’t forget to take the soiled litter on the way out.