Trump’s Congress chaos is a reminder we should brace for ‘unknown unknowns’

Editorial: After US lawmakers struggled to prevent a government shutdown – prompted by the president-elect’s budget intervention that even divided his own party – the pandemonium has been a salient reminder about what is surely in store for his second term

With a month to go before he officially becomes the 47th president of the United States, Donald J Trump is already causing mayhem. His rejection of a bipartisan budget deal in Congress has threatened a federal shutdown and triggered huge anxiety for employees and those dependent on public services just before Christmas.

It’s not the first such game of fiscal “chicken” indulged in by America’s politicians – but it serves as a pointed reminder, were it needed, of what may be expected in the coming four years or so.

To borrow that famous saying by one of America’s more philosophical defence secretaries, the late Donald Rumsfeld, there are “known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Mr Rumsfeld was then talking about the course of the war in Iraq. It holds equally as an analytical framework for contemplating the second coming of President Trump.

The Trump “known knowns” derive from his behaviour in his first term, including his attempts to subvert the 2020 election result, and his activities since. So we know that he is irrational, erratic, overly sensitive to criticism, vengeful, prone to boasting and fantasising, and prefers “alternative facts” to ones that fail to confirm his prejudices. He won’t surprise anyone, in that respect, though his talent to shock remains undimmed as he approaches his ninth decade on earth. His attitudes and general outlook are also unchanged and unchanging.

Unfortunately, there are two other known knowns that are new, and which will serve to exacerbate the more dangerous aspects of the idiosyncratic Trump way of doing things.

The first is the virtual blanket of immunity from prosecution that the Supreme Court conferred on him last July. He will thus be less inhibited about breaking the law; and, as was observed in his first term, a hyper-partisan Congress will fail to censure him through the alternative constitutional mechanism of impeachment. Sad to say, Trump 47 will be just as contemptuous of the law of the land as Trump 45, but will now have more scope to get away with it. To put things politely, it widens the scope for potential corruption, and further erodes pluralistic safeguards.

The other change derives from Mr Trump’s experiences in his first term, which may now be seen as a kind of rehearsal for the real thing.

After his inauguration in 2017, Mr Trump tended to appoint competent, experienced “Establishment” figures he did not know well; and he had little in the way of a detailed programme for government to hand to them. The result was a chaotic administration.

This time it’s different. His appointees are very often people he has spotted on TV, are usually relative novices, but fanatically loyal to the Maga movement and Mr Trump personally. The Project 2025 agenda, which Mr Trump affects to know nothing about, also provides them with a framework for the administration.

Extreme as they are, policies such as using the US army to deport millions of settled migrants, or imposing punitive trade tariffs on allies, have at least a certain amount of preparation behind them – and they will be implemented by Trumpian true believers who won’t be sacked for insubordination. There will, in that sense, be more administrative stability, though the policies themselves will be deeply damaging to the welfare of the United States.

A central “known unknown” is how bringing the richest person on the planet into the administration will pan out.

We know for sure that Elon Musk is already exerting influence, and making public utterances, far behind his already very broad remit as putative joint chief of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. We know that how the Musk-Trump relationship evolves will be central to the success of the administration. We know that it’s not in the vested interests of either man to fall out with the other.

What we cannot know is whether that coincidence of interest will be sufficient either for Doge and Musk’s other interventions to be a success – and whether those two planet-sized egos can co-exist in harmony. It is as if an irascible grandfather reaching his dotage let his brilliant but excitable 13-year-old grandson run the family store. It might work… but it might not.

The unknown unknowns also abound. Mr Trump was fond of claiming in the campaign that neither the invasion of Ukraine nor the 7 October attacks and subsequent wars would have happened if he was president. That is obviously debatable, but the real question is how this reincarnated President Trump will deal with the kind of foreign and domestic crises that crash out of a clear blue sky – the “black swan” events that even the most rational and well-prepared of administrations get caught out by.

We cannot know how Mr Trump will cope with them, though his response to the Covid crisis gives little cause for optimism. As Mr Rumsfeld remarked of his unknown unknowns, “if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones”. Of that, the world may be sure – and of that, the world should be worried.