Dazed and confused: Does Trump have a plan? Probably not, and for us, that’s a good thing.

I had just lain down for a nap yesterday and closed my eyes and begun to drift off into sleep, when I was seized by the thought that we have no fucking idea what Donald Trump is up to, and it is very probable that neither does he. My eyes opened and I reached into my bedside drawer and pulled out my notebook and wrote down this note: “What is his strategy of pursuing so many insane and seemingly impossible goals that keep getting thwarted one after the other?”

I put the notebook aside and took my nap. When I awoke and read my note, it occurred to me that I had spent the last 100-plus days down in the weeds of Trump’s rampage through federal government departments and programs without standing back and asking that very question: what the fuck is going on? What is his plan? Does he even have a plan? Does the whole thing simply amount to a gigantic, manic tantrum brought on by his having lost the 2020 election, and the conviction of his right-wing base that over the last 50 years, they have effectively speaking been cut out of the life of this nation?

I’m writing this column as an explication of what happened yesterday before my nap because I think a lot of people have had the same questions and are struggling through the same process of having been confused by what has happened over the last hundred days. I am coming to a realization that if Trump’s dream for a second term has been a grand design, then it’s a disaster. If thinking things through isn’t his strong suit, and neither is improvisation, he’s in real trouble, because he’s got nothing left.

The numbers that I reported on Tuesday in Salon from former Common Cause counsel Fred Wertheimer – that there have 222 legal challenges to Trump’s rampage that have resulted in at least 123 rulings by judges that have stymied him with temporary restraining orders and injunctions, a few of which have gone all the way to the Supreme Court – gives you something of an inkling that things have not been going the way that Trump and his people hoped and planned. Maybe they simply hoped and had no plan and thought they could bull their way through.

There was a story today about what happened to Department of Justice lawyers in the courtroom of Judge James Boasberg, who is still trying to get to the bottom of what the Department of Homeland Security did after he ordered them to stop the flights taking alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador several weeks ago. One story said the DOJ lawyer was “rattled” when Boasberg asked him whether his client, Donald Trump, was “telling the truth” about the related case of Abrego Garcia, who was “mistakenly” deported along with the alleged gang members to the supermax prison in El Salvador. It’s never a good sign when you are an attorney representing a defendant in a federal courtroom, and the judge in the case questions the veracity of your client and the entire case you are attempting to make to the judge.

This is just one example of how things have not been going well for Donald Trump. He has been stopped or at least temporarily thwarted in his efforts to fire federal workers and shut down entire departments of the federal government. He has run into unified resistance from universities he has been trying to push around by threatening to cancel their federal funding. In the case of Trump’s bullying major law firms, after a few initial successes to get them to agree to do pro bono work for his administration, other law firms are standing firm against his threats and he is losing in a court case filed by one firm that is challenging his threats as unconstitutionally imposing on their rights to free trade and freedom of speech. Now that some law firms are starting to stand up to him, the original firms that agreed to provide millions of dollars worth of free work are explaining how hollow the agreements really are – they aren’t even written down in contract form, and in nearly all cases, the firms themselves get to decide what pro bono work they do and have the right to refuse work they don’t agree with.

Josh Marshall, the excellent editor of Talking Points Memo, wrote a column on April 29 with the title, “Trump’s already lost.” He explains that his assessment of Trump’s first hundred days is “more a personal interpretation, my perception of events,” and holds that things for Trump are not going to get better, and are likely to “get worse, and on some fronts they’ll get much worse.” He goes on to describe the haphazard way Elon Musk and his DOGE cowboys haven’t accomplished even a fraction of what they said they would, and then he points out how Trump’s tariff program is failing, how he’s had to scale back tariffs imposed earlier, and the spectacularly disastrous effect the tariffs are beginning to have not just on our economy, but the world’s.

This week, Marshall has begun to take a hard look at the campaign Trump launched against this country’s long history as the world’s leader in medical research. “Why does the Trump administration have it in for biomedical/ disease research?” he quite plainly asks. He concludes that it has a lot to do with Trump having a desire to “dominate and control the universities and eliminate them as what people in his world see as a seedbed for liberal ideologies.” Because so much of the federal money that goes to universities has to do with research on disease and its cures, that’s where the damage ends up being done.

But take a moment to stand back and look at that. Other than the apparent obsession to hit “the libs” where they are most vulnerable and from which they are most unable to fight back – their research laboratories and the pointy-headed nerds who occupy them – what sense does Trump’s assault on medical research and disease cures make?

Absolutely none.

The same could be said for the cuts to federal departments and programs that will end up causing the closure of dozens if not hundreds of rural hospitals and thus damage the health care of Trump’s base voters primarily in the South and in the Heartland. Why would he do that?

Well, there is the obvious answer that he doesn’t give a shit about his base and never has. But it’s not just his MAGA base that will be hurt if the cuts to medical research end up going through. There are doubtlessly Republican members of Congress and Republican appointees to jobs in the Trump administration, not to mention all the Republican office holders in states around the country, who have members of their immediate and extended families suffering from the kinds of diseases that are being studied at universities: diabetes, cancer, heart disease, even lesser chronic diseases like skin conditions and persistent bronchitis and infectious scourges such as sepsis and various auto-immune diseases such as Lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. What is going to happen when some of those Republican family members are no longer enrolled in special studies of experimental drugs and treatments associated with medical research?

Do you see how little thought has gone into so much of what Trump is attempting to do with his 143 executive orders and his appointments of obvious incompetents and loons like RFK Jr. to run departments like Health and Human Services? Washington Post columnist Dana Millbank wrote a column centered on the disastrous testimony of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins before a Senate committee on Tuesday during which he could not answer question after question put to him by senators from both parties. “Could incompetence save the Republic” Millbank’s column’s title asked.

The answer increasingly appears to be “yes.” One video clip that made the rounds this week was of Trump’s jack-of-all-trades-major-dumbo Stephen Miller addressing reporters in the White House press room. He sounded like a babbling fool, and not just in a typical Trump appointee fashion. He was worse, way worse, and everything he said reflected the fact that so little thought was given by Miller and those like him before they started doing stuff that has inevitably come back to bite them in the ass in courtrooms, like the deportations to the torture prison in El Salvador. They haven’t been forced to reverse themselves yet, but it’s coming. Their plan to use Guantanamo to hold deportees was a complete failure. NBC News reported yesterday that “A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order preventing migrants from being sent to Libya or any other third country after immigration attorneys filed an emergency motion Wednesday.” The fingerprints of Stephen Miller, drooling Eichmann of the Trump administration, are all over that one.

I can’t say that I have completely answered my own pre-nap question about why Trump is doing so much out-of-control shit in such an incredibly haphazard way. I’m beginning to think that we got fooled by the whole Project 2025 thing into thinking something like, oh-oh, this time they really have a plan. Well, to the extent that they did, their plan was half-assed, and their attempt to riff their way through court appearances and explanations – see also: bumbling VA Secretary with no clue what he’s doing or why – are backfiring spectacularly.

This is not to say that it’s time to drop our guard or sit back and relax and just watch them fuck up by the numbers. No, they need to be opposed at every turn, in the streets, on the op ed pages, in the courts, and to the extent Democrats can, as they did with the alleged VA Secretary on Tuesday, in the Congress.

But I’m beginning to agree with Josh Marshall: the fog of war is lifting, and Trump doesn’t have many victories to show on the battlefield of his first hundred days. He is announcing a tariff “deal” with Great Britain that isn’t a deal at all. He’s got one of his lackies in Switzerland readying the inevitable collapse of his tariffs on China that he will lamely try to spin as a “victory” because China “treated us very unfairly” and now they don’t. Or some horseshit to that effect. He’s not getting the Ukraine “deal” from Putin he thought he would. And a recession is tiptoeing its way on little cat feet that anyone who walks into a Walmart will be able to experience for themselves by the fall.

There is at least a chance that this will not turn out to be the summer of our discontent, but Trump’s.