How is Donald Trump allowed to get away with increasingly irrational, arbitrary and dangerous behaviour?
It appears that presidential limits no longer hold. I once believed in formal and informal constitutional checks and balances, but no longer. The system is not restraining but accommodating him. The Emperor’s clothes are invisible. We see it, but courtiers pretend otherwise, praising recklessness as inspiration and dissent as heresy.
Why? It is time to explain the pernicious yet poorly defined political and economic ideal of the past five decades that created this situation: enlightened self-interest.
The governing creed of Margaret Thatcher reinforced by her companion, Tina, "There Is No Alternative", presented it as fact. Supporters invoked Adam Smith to portray this world view as settled orthodoxy.
The real damage lay not in privatisation or deregulation, but in the claim that society does not exist and individuals are solely responsible for their own fate. An idea that has quietly shaped a generation has come home to roost.
Only a minority around Donald Trump and in Congress enthusiastically enable him. Others use passive acceptance, or silence, which allows the damage to continue.
They do not believe a word he says. This is not about belief but self-interest and a lack of self-respect; individuals advancing themselves who not are capable of understanding the consequences once the party ends.
We have been here before, where indifference fuels authority without limit. In this, the work of Gustav Gilbert, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno explain why we watch incredulously as Trump delivers bizarre and authoritarian pronouncements on live television.
In the US Congress, politics is a methodical dance across tiles that are at once firm, slippery, and collapsing, depending on circumstance. Principles shape party allegiance.
Elections determine where one may win the votes. Survival is the constant.
Only a few Republicans openly champion Donald Trump. Others dance based on presidential whims and calculation. They are not believers, but owe enough of their electoral success to Maga voters to remain silent.
Those who speak out face immediate primary challenges rapidly financed by Trump supporters. These individuals should embody the constitutional checks designed to protect the American republic. They possess the power to act, yet with narrow self-interest choose not to with consequences far beyond their own careers.
Enlightened self-interest? It is nothing of the sort.
What of those who surround the president as in government? In 2016, Donald Trump appointed established, experienced Republican figures with institutional knowledge and a sense of duty to senior roles.
As detailed vividly in Fear, by Bob Woodward, governing became damage control.
Senior officials spent the president’s waking hours preventing impulsive ideas becoming policy.
In one stark example, the chief of staff and White House counsel routinely removed draft executive orders placed on the president’s desk, proposing, for example withdrawal from trade agreements, exiting international institutions or sanctions driven by fixation.
If Trump noticed a document, aides would propose “legal clarification” and quietly remove it. Out of sight meant out of mind.
Hours later, even when asked, the president had often forgotten the idea entirely and was habitually watching TV.
Now, Trump is surrounded with an odd mix of Fox News presenters, right-wing bloggers and former contestants from The Apprentice. There is no-one to say, “Mr President, we have treaties, obligations and lawful options", because there is no-one competent to do so.
Online crusades drive policy. Fronted by camera-hungry martinets in key departments, the federal government is stretched, distorted and damaged by actions untethered from evidence or necessity.
Flunkies feed the president’s narrative and enact his wishes without reflection.
They are not acting for the United States, but for themselves: advancement, status, enrichment. From junior aides too grateful to dissent, to media figures writing policy, to cabinet secretaries fixated on single crusades while ignoring their wider remit, the country is not governed in the public interest but the self-interest of those competing to hold the president’s attention.
In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagined a business as usual reboot after the failure of a fictional authoritarian government under Charles Lindbergh.
I, too, once believed that the US could endure Trump through strong institutions transcending politics. Even in November 2024, I was convinced that America would survive another Trump presidency.
One year in, I am beyond incredulous. I am genuinely unsure whether a Republic of the People, by the People, can survive intact. The federal government has been weakened and immobilised.
My concern is not only the next three years but what follows: will Trump leave quietly, or violently unsettle what remains?
Recovery will require something absent for decades — an America focused on what it does well: enlightened collective interest capable of rebuilding after national tragedy.
I hope and pray that is still possible.
• Duncan Connors is a former University of Otago academic.
