Alan Zendell, April 22, 2025

Throughout Donald Trump’s business and political careers, his hallmark style has been  to create chaos and confusion. One thing Trump is masterful at is manipulating our legal system, and the most effective way to do that is to assure that reasonable doubt always exists. He learned this from his lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, and his association with organized crime figures who had been evading the law for decades.

Trump has always treated laws and regulations as mere inconveniences. He understands that even when he lies or defrauds or defames someone his liability is limited because lawsuits are expensive. He has always spent millions on lawyers, knowing that a formidable team of highly-paid litigators will intimidate most opponents. When that doesn’t happen, and cases go to trial, he often loses, because a fair-minded jurist won’t allow laws to be flouted.

The key phrase, above, is “fair-minded.” That’s what our founders intended when they created three co-equal branches of government. But human nature being what it is, and power and wealth being as seductive as they are, when powerful people lose in court, they do what any ruthless sociopath would do: rig the courts with extremist judges with a wink toward future rewards based on loyalty, and for those judges who retain their integrity, threats, harassment, and calls for their impeachment become the rule.

But there’s a more sinister side to the chaos and confusion: lack of transparency. Given how much it cost for hundreds of MAGA people to create Project 2025, and Trump’s attempt to disavow any knowledge of it, we should have known his campaign promises were more than bluffs. Actually, most of us did, and many of those in the middle, who have no ideological axe to grind, are beginning to see it, too.

It works like this: at one level, Trump and his supporters are completely open about what they intend. Could they have used any blunter image than a madly grinning Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw? Unless you’re cutting firewood, chainsaws are about mayhem and destruction. But the image was also comical, and so inappropriate, it was easy to take it as a joke. That’s a very sophisticated way to replace transparency with opacity.

Start with the obvious fact that the federal government, like all huge bureaucracies, is fat and inefficient. Then use that as an excuse to decimate programs you don’t like while somehow failing to notice the waste everywhere else. And if you look closely, you’ll see a pattern. The programs being cut tend to serve the poor and working class among us and are considered a nuisance by business leaders and extremists. They also transfer wealth from billionaires to the rest of us which is their death knell. On one hand Trump communicates an extremely transparent intent to change America into a fascist MAGA nation, which is too outlandish for most people to take seriously, while at the detail level, very dangerous things are occurring out of our sight.

Musk seems to be mining data from every federal agency and feeding it  into a massive AI-activated database, and for the average person, there’s a good deal of appeal to that idea. We see it in crime and spy dramas, as computer experts and hackers manipulate data to solve crimes and avert international crises. But always lurking in the background is the question – what if they knew everything about all of us? In the hands of a power-mad, unscrupulous leader, that same capability would ensure the end of our personal liberties. We’ve tested our balance on slippery slopes before and so far avoided catastrophes. But will we this time? Have we ever faced a fifth-column effort within our own ranks that is as rabid and well-funded as MAGA?

At a deeper level, Trump has surrounded himself with committed loyalists. Indications are that an essential element of their loyalty to Trump is adopting his cavalier approach to rules, laws, and standards of behavior. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seems to treat our national security laws the same way Trump does. By discussing imminent plans to attack terrorists in Yemen on unsecured lines, he and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz showed such complete contempt for national security and the lives of our military personnel as to make Colin Powell and Hilary Clinton’s inadvertent mishandling of emails trivial by comparison.

Everything we’ve seen in three months smacks of a rogue administration bent on power and control, with no cohesive plan for our economy, our relationships with our allies, or how to end two wars that could escalate into nuclear conflicts at any time. When it comes to the true beliefs and intentions, assuming any but personal greed exist, of the people in the Trump administration, opacity is the rule.