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It’s not just Donald Trump’s bloated, bruised hand. Just about everything American in the last decade has carried a whiff of decay.

The novelty of Trump’s first presidency has worn off and nothing has come along to replace it. Trump seems content to let Project 2025 ghouls run the show while he arranges deck chairs. Democrats are stuck in a perpetual 2016, permanently bickering over a move away from the identity politics that supposedly characterized Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House. Years after Kamala Harris lost a campaign that sidestepped all questions of race and gender whenever possible, the decrepit consultant class of the Obama era still rises from its graves to suggest abandoning hard fights like the one for trans rights.

Infrastructure Week has come and gone, and much of the U.S. is still crumbling, with no real drive to fix it. WPA plaques marking major construction projects in dying cities feel like they were plopped down from another planet, and seem completely unimaginable at a time when billionaires are called in to hack and slash the state. Compared to the muscular mid-century federal government that built the era of American prosperity, the Trump era is notably lazy and visibly flabby. 

But that laziness can have its upside. 

The lack of any coherent strategy, and the complete absence of any desire for long-term commitments, can work in progressives’ favor when the Republican Party tries to pursue its more  difficult agenda items. We’ve seen it with Trump’s global tariff program, which was slapped down by the Supreme Court earlier this year. It looks like we might see something similar with Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. 

In Supreme Court arguments on Wednesday, the justices seemed skeptical of the administration’s arguments for ending the citizenship protections provided by the 14th Amendment. Trump, who attended the government’s oral arguments, stormed out to post that birthright citizenship was “stupid,” which offers  some indication how the day went for his legal team. While an eventual loss for the Trump admin will likely be cloaked in constitutional justifications, we can’t fully discount the fact that figuring out who counts as a citizen without birthright citizenship would be incredibly messy. 

Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett got right to point, asking how Trump’s administration planned to function in a post-birthright citizenship world.

“How would it work? How would you adjudicate these cases?” Barrett asked.

It’s a complicated question that no doubt applies to millions of Americans. The sheer cluster of it all may just encourage the court to call it off.

What do you think? Will sloppiness or apathy doom Trump’s plans? Sound off in the comments.

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