Adam Serwer famously said that with Trumpism, "The cruelty is the point." That leads us to sometimes see all the actions as motivated by cruelty - the Stephen Miller Effect.
We now have a story of the State Department refusing visas to a Little League team. Longman suggests that this is done at Marco Rubio's request, but that feels like a rhetorical gambit. Scott Lemieux suggests this, too, as being designed as chaotic and cruel to dissuade anyone from trying to enter the country - legally or illegally.
I think we have to consider the fact that America is a modern bureaucratic state that remains based on the rule of law, although that is getting more tenuous by the day. Still, if you are working within the Federal bureaucracy, you are getting a message about immigration that is loud but not entirely clear. You are getting orders that don't seem rational or feasible, so you struggle to implement them. Maybe some of it is malicious compliance, too, designed to highlight how ridiculous these edicts are.
Authoritarianism is by definition stupider than democracy, because democracy admits of error and corrects for cause. In authoritarianism, the leaders can never be wrong, so they cannot course correct. We see some of that with the Epstein stuff, in that Trump can't retreat because he can't be "wrong" and can't go forward because there's incriminating stuff in there. So, we all look at him and wonder what the hell he's doing? Well, he's trapped in the "logic" of authoritarian rule, in the same way Putin is trapped in Ukraine.
All of this is, of course, bad. The fact that we have a stupid person, surrounded by stupid people, doing stupid things means that we will have more bad outcomes than good one. And if the stupid people get control of things like the Federal Reserve...
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