They Can't Even Make the Trains Run On Time

The worst of both worlds: malignant authoritarianism paired with utter incompetence.

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Benito Mussolini did not in fact make the trains run on time; the idea that he did was a bit of mythmaking from the very early days of his fascist regime. It’s a powerful notion, so much so that it persists to this day in the two opposite ways that saying is repeated. When someone says “Mussolini made the trains run on time,” sometimes it’s meant sarcastically, as in “Don’t excuse a regime’s malevolence by citing its competence.” If they say it seriously, it means “You gotta hand it to them…” Both rely on the same foundation: If a government can deliver things people need — critical services, some measure of prosperity — they’ll tolerate all manner of repression.

That may be more or less true in different places at different times. But as Donald Trump hurtles the American economy toward recession and Elon Musk rips apart every piece of the federal government he can get his clammy little hands on, we are now experiencing the worst of both worlds: an administration of both limitless malevolence and stunning incompetence.

A different Trump administration could exist

Strange as it is to remember now, the economy during the first three years of Trump’s first term wasn’t the greatest in world history as he often says (or even the greatest in American history), but on the whole it was pretty good. Inflation and unemployment were low, income growth was steady if unspectacular, and though Trump did nothing to address the deeply rooted problems that he exploited to win office — inequality, deindustrialization, the precarity of a system where workers have almost no power — he didn’t do too much to screw up what was working, either. At the time this appeared politically shrewd, that unlike some of the ideologues in his party, Trump understood what was too dangerous to mess with (e.g. Social Security and Medicare) and steered clear, much to the disappointment of people like Paul Ryan who were hoping to crush the welfare state.

That isn’t to say many bad things didn’t happen, but it’s a reminder that a different kind of Trump administration from what we’re seeing today would have been possible. But it now appears that everything that didn’t go wrong in Trump I was the result not of intentional and savvy neglect, but of a president and an administration that had not fully self-actualized.

There have been incompetent presidents before, but I’m not sure we’ve ever seen this degree of shambolic chaos, a combination of 1) the dumbest, least qualified people, with 2) the worst objectives, and 3) the most sweeping ambition.

Yet every day they tell us they are engaged in a glorious project of “reform” to at last make the federal government “efficient.” So ask yourself this: What part of the government is working better now than it was three months ago?

As far as I can tell, there is not a single aspect of the federal government that is operating more efficiently in this administration. Conservatives are happy that the government is simply no longer doing certain things — providing foreign aid, protecting consumers, conducting medical research — but are there any areas where those conservatives want the government to perform a particular function and could argue that function is being performed with greater effectiveness than it was?

Apart from deterring immigration — a complicated outcome produced by a great many factors — I can’t think of any. Everywhere you look, on the other hand, there are stories of agencies in chaos, services degraded, and systems that may have been too slow before now not operating at all. The trains are most definitely not running on time.

It will be worse for everyone

It’s almost enough to make you pine for the days of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who may have been evil, but at least they knew how to keep the government running. As for Trump himself, he seems to have gotten high on his own economic supply, convinced that each day’s stock market drop or plunge in consumer confidence are only the birth pangs of the magnificent America to come, one that he will be duly rewarded for creating.

But as he prepares the latest tariff announcement after a series of stops and starts, his own economic advisers seem to have no idea what the policy will actually entail. “I can't give you any forward-looking guidance on what's going to happen this week,” said National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, whom you’d think would know. “The President has got a lot of analysis before him, and he's going to make the right choice.” Peter Navarro (whom Trump hired in 2016 because he was pretty much the only trained economist in America who shared Trump’s belief in the magical powers of tariffs) said the new tariffs could be bring in as much as $600 billion per year, which as the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein pointed out “would almost certainly represent the largest peacetime tax hike in modern U.S. history.”

That number is an absurd exaggeration, but others in the administration are bracing the public for a hike in prices. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” says Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Which is true enough; people might tolerate higher prices if they also came with broader improvements in their lives, like secure health coverage and high-wage jobs. But what if what we get along with the higher prices is a recession, more unemployment, less secure health care, and a government that has rendered itself incapable of solving problems for anyone but those who are willing to open up their wallets for Trump?

Because that’s exactly what we’re heading for. Along with the general decline in services, the administration is already looking to make American life crappier in a hundred ways, from crushing collective bargaining to letting banks charge you more for overdrafts to making your air and water dirtier to leaving you to fend for yourself in a disaster to letting financial scammers know they can do as they please.

I could go on, of course; the list of harms is long and growing by the day. But here’s the thing: Even if you are either broadly supportive of GOP policy goals or just indifferent to them, you're still going to wind up with a government that doesn't work as well and a country where things are just worse. And while it’s not crazy to argue that in certain circumstances dictatorship can be efficient — just look at how quickly China builds train lines and power plants when it wants to — the people who put Trump in office won’t get anything like that, even if they’re pleased to see him hurting people they hate.

The political silver lining is that the now-likely economic downturn and the more slow-moving degradation of so many aspects of ordinary life will produce the same disgruntlement that led to Trump being elected in 2016, then led to him being kicked out in 2020, then led him back to office in 2024. Unhappy voters turned to Trump, and unhappy voters will turn away from him again. If only they could learn the lesson.