Well, it’s pretty clear by now that Trump not only wants to run the United States like a business, but in particular, he wants to run it like one of his businesses. Like the ones that have had to file for bankruptcy six times.

Good luck, America.

Trump is, of course, trying to clear away anybody who might provide some constraints on his actions. There are essentially no constraints on his action as the head of the various Trump organizations, and he wants it the same way with respect to the federal government. So he has cleared out 23 Inspectors General, and anybody from the Justice Department or the FBI who had a hand in the investigations of him — even though they were just doing the jobs they had been assigned to — anybody who might not cooperate with Trump’s whims.

Then, more recently, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management announced that all mosts of the federal workforce (not including the military) could choose to resign if they did so by February 6th, in which case they could retain their pay and benefits through September 30. On the surface, maybe that didn’t sound like such a bad deal. This idea had Elon Musk’s signature all over it, as Musk made exactly that kind of an offer to the employees of Twitter when he first took over. And quite a few of Twitter’s employees took him up on it at the time. Those who don’t quit voluntarily, according to Trump, are potentially subject to being fired.

The problem, of course, is that the federal government does not operate at all like a relatively small company like Twitter. At the time Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, the company had approximately 7,500 employees. All of them were basically “at will.” The federal government has approximately 2.1 million employees, and almost none of them are “at will.” But beyond that, there are many structural problems:

• About 90% of the federal workforce is either (1) unionized or (2) covered by various aspects of the civil service system, and consequently (Project 2025 notwithstanding) can only be fired “for cause.”
• The executive branch has no ability to pay “severance” for employees who resign unless Congress appropriates funds for them to do so.
• The suggestion that those who resign could take a second, non-government job during the deferred resignation period, doing so is likely to violate ethics rules that prohibit such behavior (if they could even find jobs).

In other words, the threat of being fired is largely a toothless tiger. Yes, in some cases agencies could be reorganized in such a way that some positions could simply be eliminated, but that would not be a large segment of the federal workforce.

All of this points to the ways in which the Trump administration is likely to be a kakistocracy, albeit one that could do plenty of damage. 

I have been arguing for a while that the opposition to Trump should take a page out of Trump’s own playbook and tie everything up in court. I’m talking about the ACLU, other legal advocacy groups, and the Attorney Generals of the blue states. They can do it.

The Trump administration may eventually win some of these cases, but it might take two years or more for them to do so. By that time we should be in 2026, with a likely Democratic House and Democratic Senate. After a while Trump will become so much of a lame duck and such a drag on his party that even his fellow Republicans will start ignoring him. In the meantime, everything has to be disputed, everything has to be challenged, everything has to be tied up in court.