When Trump won his first term in 2016, I’ll admit it: I found him interesting. After years of watching the same dull, morally bankrupt parade of politicians staggering across the stage—each one as ethically flexible and nauseatingly interchangeable as the last—Trump felt like someone had opened a window in a very stale room. I never really blamed any one political tribe; to me, becoming a politician in the first place already implies a certain level of moral decay and a disturbingly casual willingness to sabotage humanity’s future for pocket change. Trump arrived like a gust of disruptive weather, messy but undeniably refreshing. And in some ways, he truly was.
He didn’t dismantle the financial influence-peddling machine that sits at the core of modern governance. He didn’t topple whatever shadowy bureaucracy people theatrically refer to as the “deep state.” He didn’t slim the grotesque political colossus that sits on everyone’s chest. But he did something else: he cracked the glossy façade. He forced the creature into the light, exposed parts of its anatomy we were never supposed to see, and revealed how much of politics is theater covering rot. That alone was… instructive. But let’s be clear: Trump is not, and never was, a reformer.
Real reform would mean pulverizing the corporate concrete slab suffocating economic life, freeing actual entrepreneurship rather than merely sponsoring a different flavor of cronyism. That was never on the menu. What was always guaranteed, regardless of who sat in the chair, was the same trajectory: more government, more bureaucracy, more lumbering monstrosity devouring everything in reach while pretending it’s “for your own good.” Trump broke some windows, dented some walls, and annoyed the right enemies, but he never intended to rebuild anything better. Real change won’t come from a stage or a golden elevator. It has to claw its way up from below—if people still remember how.
https://www.masterresource.org/maize-kennedy/trump-ai-doe-mission-creep/