Madness everywhere. Just glance at the headlines leading The New York Times this morning:

A Disregard for Rules Trickles Down From Trump to His Aides

Trump Takes Government Secrecy Seriously. But Only When it Suits Him.

10,000 Federal Health Workers to Be Laid Off

President Trump Moves to Punish the Law Firm Where Robert Mueller Worked

There’s more, but you get the picture. The Washington Post adds a hot scoop: Internal White House document shows agencies preparing to cut between 8% and 50% of staff.

That’s a lot of mayhem, and it barely scratches the surface. The Social Security Administration is being destroyed. ICE is throwing people out of the country for what look to be obviously political reasons, notably a scientist at Harvard Medical School who was detained in Boston and told she’s being sent back to her native Russia. She protested Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion and called for his impeachment. Wonder what’s in store for her.

Across human history, fascism has been imposed upon democracy mostly in one of two ways. First, by brute force—a military coup, that sort of thing. Second, a bit more stealthily, and legally—through legislation, executive decrees, and court decisions that hand more power to the leader.

Donald Trump is inventing a new way. Call it chaos fascism. Destroy the institutions of democracy until they’re so disfigured or dysfunctional that a majority no longer cares about them.

That’s exactly what’s happening with Social Security. The Washington Post reported this week that the SSA is breaking down: Its website "crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts." A Wall Street multimillionaire who probably doesn’t need his Social Security check and who has pledged that he will "100 percent work with DOGE" has already cut around 12 percent of the staff and doesn’t look like he’s stopping there.

In other words: Start by lying about the agency, with absurd and false claims about 140-year-olds cashing checks. Then wreck the agency so that its service becomes crap. Let public anger at it build. And in time, they can just dismantle it and privatize the greatest social insurance system ever devised by this government and put people’s financial fate in the hands of rich cronies. If that’s not chaos fascism, I don’t know what is.

Trump probably doesn’t have some secret plan. As we know, he doesn’t think far enough ahead. Elon Musk, however, probably does. It’s no accident he called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme." That statement either (1) reflected his ignorance of how both Social Security and Ponzi schemes work or (2) was made in full knowledge of how both work—that is, he knew it was nonsense, but he said it anyway because his goal is to destroy Social Security.

This applies to just about everything Trump and Musk are doing.

It applies even to Signalgate. Trump has contempt for rules and procedures, and so he appoints unqualified stooges like Pete Hegseth to run the world’s largest military, who share that contempt—who think being tough means showing the world that they can do anything they want with no consequences. Again—ignore the law, trash the rules, establish that procedure is whatever you say it is. Chaos fascism.

And it will almost certainly go unpunished. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday that the Justice Department wasn’t the least bit interested in looking into it. Some GOP lawmakers are making noises about the need for an investigation of some kind. But really—are the GOP’s leaders in Congress, Senator John Thune and Representative Mike Johnson, really likely to green-light an investigation? Seems pretty unlikely to me, unless it’s done with the secret, express goal of exonerating all involved.

Some senators say the Pentagon inspector general should conduct a probe. OK, we might get that. But remember that Trump has already fired 17 inspectors general, so who’d really care if he fired one more? Break the rules, and then ensure that there’s no accountability. Chaos fascism.

And if you want an image, just one image, that absolutely screams chaos fascism? Feast your eyes upon this photo of Department of Homeland Security Secretary and noted dog killer Kristi Noem at that notorious El Salvador prison this week, the prison where the Trump administration sent a couple hundred alleged Venezuelan gang members. They positioned her in front of prisoners behind bars, most of them bald and tattooed as if extras in a dystopian sci-fi movie, warning others that what happened to those Venezuelan men could happen to you. It’s a chilling photograph—to think that this is now the kind of image the United States wishes to project to the world.

And remember—those men are being held in that notorious prison in defiance of a federal court order. Wreck the rules. Chaos fascism.

Where in the world will we be six months or a year from now? What shape will Social Security be in? Veterans Affairs? What will be the impact of all these tariffs? Trump thinks he’ll force American companies to build factories here, and no doubt a few will, enough that Pravda (Fox News) can promote them as "proof" that the tariffs were a miracle. But most economists predict—well, chaos.

Trump will orchestrate no military coup. The Republican Congress will probably pass no laws that make Trump president for life. That would be too obvious. What they’ll do is make stealthier moves across the board that discredit and destroy our democratic institutions until he and his billionaire friends can strip them for parts. Chaos fascism is here to stay.

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Last week’s quiz: "Extree extree!" A quiz on the history of U.S. newspapers.

1. The first attempt at a colonial newspaper in the United States, Boston’s Publick Occurrences both Forreign and Domestick, was met with what ill fate?

A. The publisher ran out of money after a week.

B. The editor was caught having an affair with the publisher’s daughter.

C. It was suppressed after the very first edition.

D. Its printing press was destroyed in a suspicious fire.

Answer: C, It was suppressed. The first issue published an account of cruel treatment of French prisoners of war, which got the colonial government pretty cheesed off. Fake news, they may have called it. 

2. What was the first daily newspaper in the United States?

A. New York World

B. The Pennsylvania Evening Post

C. The Daily Athenaeum (of Boston)

D. The Providence Gazette

Answer: B, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, which opened for business in January 1775. It was the first paper to publish the Declaration of Independence.

3. The "man with the muckrake" was a character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; what U.S. president lifted the phrase and coined the term "muckrakers" to apply to a new breed of hard-charging, establishment-challenging reporters?

A. Theodore Roosevelt

B. William Howard Taft

C. William McKinley

D. Benjamin Harrison

Answer: A, Roosevelt. In a speech he gave in 1906.

4. Match the owner to the newspaper:

Answer: Bingham = Louisville, McCormick = Chicago, Hearst = San Francisco, Meyer = Washington. Members of the liberal Bingham family are still kicking around doing interesting and impressive things.

5. Match the famous columnist to the newspaper with which he or she is most closely associated:

Answer: Breslin = Daily News, McGrory = Washington Post, Reston = New York Times, Kempton = New York Post. Back when it was liberal (until 1976).

6. Over the past 20 years, newspapers have lost what percent of their jobs? It’s the single steepest dive among 532 job categories tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A. 29 percent

B. 44 percent

C. 61 percent

D. 77 percent

Answer: Yup, D—77 percent. Pretty darn grim.

This week’s quiz: The last golden age. Continuing with the printed word, and in light of the new memoir by Graydon Carter, let’s give some thought to the (now over) golden age of the American magazine.

1. Who was the first editor of The New Yorker?

A. Robert Gottlieb

B. Joseph Mitchell

C. S.J. Perelman

D. Harold Ross

2. This magazine’s notable early contributors included Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and W.E.B. DuBois.

A. Time

B. Life

C. The New Republic

D. Harper’s

3. The first issue of which magazine included the bylines of W.H. Auden, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, and Norman Mailer, among others?

A. The New York Review of Books

B. The New York Times Book Review

C. Dissent

D. Commentary

4. Magazine editors were famous in the golden age, but not just magazine editors. Some art directors were famous too. Probably the most famous one designed many striking covers for Esquire in the 1960s and ’70s, including the memorable one of Muhammad Ali pierced by arrows, à la a painting of Christian martyr St. Sebastian. Who was Esquire’s art director?

A. Milton Glaser

B. George Lois

C. David Levine

D. Barbara Epstein

5. What was Time magazine’s circulation at its peak, starting in the late 1970s?

A. 2.4 million

B. 3 million

C. 3.6 million

D. 4 million

6. Under Graydon Carter, Bryan Burrough was under contract for a number of years to produce three pieces a year of 10,000 words. What was his peak salary for those 30,000 words?

A. $170,000

B. $239,000

C. $308,000

D. $498,000

Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com. 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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