The Center Cannot Hold

 We are in Yeats' poem more than ever.

Things fall apart
The center cannot hold

As Paul Krugman points out, business leaders and markets are skittish because Trump is talking crazed nonsense, and he might actually mean it. A scary sample passage:

Most alarming of all, if it’s real: People within the administration appear to be floating the idea of restructuring U.S. debt via a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” that would force investors holding Treasury bills — short-term debt — to exchange them for 100-year bonds. This would effectively be a default on U.S. debt. Since the whole world financial system rests on the perceived safety of U.S. Treasuries, which are universally accepted as collateral for many transactions, such a move would threaten global economic chaos. But is the administration serious about this idea? Nobody knows.

How can a country careen from insane idea to insane idea and not fracture? How can bad idea pile upon bad idea and not crumble? 

At the root of populism and its fatal flaw is the antagonism towards expertise and  education. The problem is, we have created a world that relies on expertise and education and the batshit insanity that seems to buffet the government daily (thousands of staffer cut from Social Security!) means that there will come a moment when things really break open. We already have a dead child from measles. If Social Security checks don't come out, because Musk broke the whole thing in the name of efficiency, then shit will get very real and very painful very quickly.

The thing that gives me pause - because I've always been OK with the "find out" portion of FAFO - is how we will be able to put stuff back together with that bloated orange gasbag infesting the White House for four more years.