The chaos Trump creates doesn’t just distract — it makes America less safe

After 100 days in office, Donald Trump 2.0 is hemorrhaging support. In a recent New York Times/Sienna poll, a majority of people surveyed use words like “scary” and “chaotic” to describe his presidency.

The one attribute that has always served President Trump’s ambitions is his instinct for generating publicity. And now Trump’s ability to manufacture conflict about culture war issues is in overdrive. He’s appointed TV pundits and conspiracy theorists to lead our country’s largest federal agencies. He deports legal immigrants. He defies court orders. He goes after universities. These fights — which offend both the conscience and common sense — dominate news coverage.

But the more the media covers wrongful detention and deportation, the less they're covering how Trump's tariffs are tanking the economy. The more the media covers his attacks on Harvard, the less they cover his plan to eliminate Head Start.

But there's a deeper harm to all this chaos — and it’s mostly invisible. Trump’s relentless, disruptive activity creates a vacuum: in leadership, competence and ultimately, national security.

Timothy Snyder, the Yale political scientist and author of “On Tyranny,” put it this way:

The Musk-Trump people run national security, intelligence, and law enforcement like a television show. The entire operation of forcible rendition of migrants to a Salvadoran concentration camp was based upon lies…[and] made for television. Its point was the creation of the fascist videos. But this is a media strategy, meant to frighten Americans. And a media strategy does not stop actual terrorists. It summons them. Security agencies that have been trained to follow political instructions about imaginary threats do not investigate actual threats.

Most Americans aren’t paying much attention to the ways in which our national security apparatus has been gutted. We are too distracted by everything else — plummeting retirement accounts take precedence over the alphabet soup of our national security agencies: CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS.

But the U.S. State Department just eliminated the office that monitors foreign disinformation. FBI Director Kash Patel has overseen a purge of the FBI’s most experienced officials. The Department of Homeland Security, under Kristi Noem, seems more focused on staging photo ops of deported immigrants than rooting out terrorists.

In a matter of months, Trump has fired an array of the military’s most experienced leaders. A month ago, he dumped half a dozen top officials at the NSA, perhaps on the advice of a far-right conspiracy theorist who has suggested that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job.”

Trump’s explanation for purging these veteran officers and intelligence officials was chilling. “We’re always going to let go of people — people we don’t like or people that take advantage of, or people” he explained, “that may have loyalties to someone else.” Protecting the homeland from foreign and domestic enemies doesn’t appear to enter into the matter.

Trump’s relentless, disruptive activity creates a vacuum: in leadership, competence and ultimately, national security.

Terrorism, as Synder notes, “is a real risk in the real world.” We can’t be the only two people thinking that America has let its guard down. What are the Osama Bin Ladens and Timothy McVeighs of the world thinking?

The media needs to make this clear. We should be seeing stories on the front pages of the major newspapers, and on primetime news broadcasts, that not only expose how our national security apparatus has been degraded, but how that makes us vulnerable to attack. Americans need to understand how Trump’s actions put them at risk.

Otherwise, Trump will do what we’ve seen him do before in times of crisis: shift blame, fearmonger and indulge his autocratic impulses. What history remembers about the Reichstag Fire isn’t how many were injured, but the fact that Hitler and the Nazi party used that event to declare a state of emergency.

We have already seen the lethal result when our reality TV president encounters reality. The COVID-19 crisis gave us a preview. When that pandemic began, Trump undercut health care experts, sowed division, and promoted quack cures. He helped fund Operation Warp Speed — which led to the creation of a vaccine — which he then undermined. As a result, the U.S. had a higher rate of death and illness than any other industrialized nation.

It can feel, at times, impossible to look beyond the daily chaos Trump generates. But if our Fourth Estate doesn’t document the ways in which our national security has been compromised, we will not only be vulnerable to a terrorist attack, but to Trump’s exploitation of that attack.

Follow Cog on Facebook and Instagram. And sign up for our newsletter, sent on Sundays. We share stories that remind you we're all part of something bigger.