POWER WITH PURPOSE
Theodore Roosevelt’s Lost Leadership Style vs. The Three Trumps (2017–2026)
Prologue *This Post · Pt 1 (Live Mar 24) · Pt 2 (Live Mar 25)· Pt 3 (Live Mar 26)
The Revenge Tour
He came back with a blueprint. The guardrails that bent during the first term were removed before the second term started. The prosecutions that failed to finish were dismissed before the inauguration. The Court that blocked him in 2020 had been rebuilt during the years in between. What followed wasn’t governance in the traditional sense. It was application — a demonstration of what the system now enables when institutional restraint has been sufficiently reduced and the accountability timeline has been sufficiently exhausted.
By Rxan Smith · March 2026 · Uncomfortable
“If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”
— Donald Trump, Truth Social, August 2023
In This Piece
Day One: The Blueprint Gets Executed
DOGE: What Efficiency Looks Like When Nobody’s Checking
The DOJ: Constraint-Building vs. Constraint-Repurposing
The Family Business: The Oval Office as Revenue Stream
Foreign Policy Without a Doctrine
AI Deregulation: Removing the Guardrails on the Next Monopoly
The Tariffs: A Tax You’re Not Supposed to Call a Tax
The Convergence
And Finally…
Day One: The Blueprint Gets Executed
January 20, 2025. Trump signed 26 executive orders on his first day — a record for a single day in office. The volume was not random. It was the signature of an administration that had spent the prior two years planning the sequence, and the prior four years learning which levers existed.
Executive Order 14147, “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” directed the attorney general to investigate federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies under the Biden administration, with particular attention to cases where their actions appeared directed against political opponents. On the same day, Trump pardoned nearly all convicted January 6 rioters.
The sequencing tells you something about the operating theory. The order accusing the previous administration of using law enforcement as a political weapon was signed on the same day the man who incited the Capitol attack gave clemency to those convicted for their roles in it. Whether or not you accept the framing of that order, the practical effect was immediate: the accountability machinery was reoriented, the personnel who operated it previously became subjects of review, and the signal sent to every career official watching was legible.
The first term stress-tested the guardrails. The second term arrived knowing which ones had failed and which ones could be removed.
DOGE: What Efficiency Looks Like When Nobody’s Checking
The pitch was familiar: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, would lead a government efficiency initiative cutting $2 trillion in federal waste and returning the savings to the American taxpayer.
That $2 trillion promise became $1 trillion, then $150 billion. Here is what the data shows.
A Politico investigation found that of the $145 billion DOGE claimed to have saved via canceled contracts through the end of June 2025, roughly $1.4 billion — under 1% — were verifiable cash savings. The top 13 claimed contracts were found to contain significant errors. The top two were Defense Department contracts listed as terminated, saving $7.9 billion. Both contracts were still active.
The workforce reduction was real. A disproportionate share of those who departed had 20 or more years of service — the Partnership for Public Service estimated roughly 4 million cumulative years of institutional knowledge left federal agencies during this period. Federal spending in FY 2025 rose from $7.135 trillion to approximately $7.558 trillion. The Cato Institute found no noticeable effect on spending trajectory attributable to DOGE. The disruption costs of firing, rehiring, and administering paid leave ran an estimated $135 billion according to the Partnership for Public Service. The Yale Budget Lab projected the IRS would lose $8.5 billion in revenue collection capacity in 2026 alone from reduced audit staffing.
The structural note worth adding: Musk entered the government’s payment systems, personnel databases, and agency data networks in an advisory capacity that, at the time, carried no formal conflict-of-interest review, no divestment requirement, and no blind trust requirement for his private holdings. His companies — SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, X — each faced federal regulatory review or held federal contracts touching the agencies he was accessing. Whether that proximity produced improper influence is a legal and evidentiary question beyond the scope of this piece. That the structural conditions for such influence existed without a formal review process is a factual one.
Musk departed in May 2025, saying DOGE had been “only a little bit successful” and that he would not repeat the experience. The federal workforce is smaller. The deficit is larger. The institutional knowledge is gone. The spending continues.
UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH DOGE promised $2 trillion in savings. Verifiable savings came in under 1% of that figure while federal spending rose and disruption costs ran into the hundreds of billions. The largest outcome was a workforce reduction concentrated in long-tenured, experienced personnel — the portion of any organization most expensive to replace and most difficult to reconstruct. Whether that was the goal or the result, it’s what happened.
The DOJ: Constraint-Building vs. Constraint-Repurposing
Roosevelt’s theory of the state included a specific proposition: you need referees. Independent institutions capable of constraining both public and private power without fear of retaliation from either. After Watergate, the Justice Department’s operational independence from direct White House direction became one of the foundational norms of American governance — not a law, but a practice upheld across administrations of both parties for fifty years.
The second term ended that practice in several key respects.
The DOJ established a “Weaponization Working Group” to review law enforcement officials who had previously investigated Trump. The appointed lead, Ed Martin, had promoted the claim that the 2020 election was stolen and publicly committed to naming and shaming officials who couldn’t be charged. Federal prosecutors in New York dropped corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams in a sequence that a federal judge described as suggesting a bargain — the same week the administration was negotiating with Adams over immigration enforcement cooperation. Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted in September 2025. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton faced charges related to classified information handling. A sitting senator was informed she was under investigation following participation in a video reminding military personnel of their obligation to refuse illegal orders.
In November 2025, Trump publicly called for the executions of prominent Democrats. In February 2026, the Washington U.S. attorney’s office sought to indict six members of Congress who had appeared in that video. The grand jury declined to bring charges.
The honest framing here requires a distinction: not every case brought under the second term is meritless on its face, and asserting that would be precisely the kind of overclaim this series is trying to avoid. The pattern that matters is not whether any individual prosecution is justified. It’s whether the selection of targets, the timing of charges, the dropping of cases in exchange for political cooperation, and the explicit public commentary from a president directing the attorney general toward named individuals are behaviors consistent with an independent law enforcement system — or behaviors that, in key cases, functionally repurpose enforcement as an extension of political priority-setting.
The Weaponization review also covered the SEC and FTC — agencies with no obvious connection to Trump’s personal legal grievances. The corporate entities subject to those reviews included Amazon, Google, Meta, and companies associated with Musk. At least 26 companies on the corporate enforcement review list donated to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Roosevelt built referees. In several key domains, the second term has repurposed them.
The Family Business: The Oval Office as Revenue Stream
This section requires arithmetic more than argument.
The Trump Organization earned $802 million from crypto ventures in the first half of 2025 alone — a 17-fold increase from the same period in 2024, exceeding all traditional business income from real estate and licensing combined, according to Reuters reporting on public disclosures.
The vehicles: World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform co-founded by Trump and his sons. The $TRUMP memecoin, launched the weekend of the inauguration. The Melania memecoin. A stablecoin called USD1. A publicly traded entity with value tied to WLFI token holdings. A Bitcoin mining venture. The Trump family has cashed out at least $1.2 billion from World Liberty Financial over a 16-month period, according to Wall Street Journal analysis.
Days before the inauguration, an Abu Dhabi investment vehicle backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the UAE’s national security advisor — purchased 49% of World Liberty Financial for $500 million. The Trump family entities claim entitlement to 75% of World Liberty Financial’s revenues. Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had been the subject of SEC enforcement action for securities fraud, is among the largest WLFI holders and an advisor to the project. The SEC dropped its case against him after Trump took office.
The administration has halted or terminated federal enforcement actions involving multiple cryptocurrency firms that invested in or donated to the president’s ventures, including Coinbase, Gemini, Robinhood, Ripple, Crypto.com, Uniswap, and Kraken. The president simultaneously sets national cryptocurrency policy while his family generates hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency revenue.
None of this is illegal on its face. The president is exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest laws that apply to other federal officials — a structural feature of the office that every prior president chose not to exploit at this scale. That exemption existed before this administration. The scale at which it’s currently being used is new.
The Brennan Center has noted that the scale of financial benefit flowing to a sitting president through policy-adjacent ventures has no clear modern precedent in American political history.
PRO-TIP The conflict-of-interest exemption for the president isn’t a loophole the second term discovered. It’s a structural feature every prior administration chose, as a matter of norm rather than law, not to exploit at scale. The norm is now gone. What replaces it — in this administration and every future one — is whatever the occupant of the office decides to do with the same exemptions. That’s the durable consequence, regardless of what you think of the current occupant.
Foreign Policy Without a Doctrine
In 2025 and early 2026, the administration threatened to acquire Greenland, discussed retaking the Panama Canal, launched military strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen, and engaged militarily with Iran — in each case without a publicly disclosed strategic framework, formal congressional notification, or stated theory of the national interest being served.
The Signal chat incident made the operating style visible. Senior officials used an encrypted messaging app to discuss active military strike plans against Houthi targets in Yemen — and the National Security Advisor accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to the group. The editor read real-time operational planning for an ongoing military action. The administration’s initial response was to question the account’s accuracy.
Three specific data points anchor this section beyond the interpretive:
The Houthi strikes continued for months without congressional authorization and without a stated exit condition or objective metric. The administration opened — then paused — then reopened — tariff pressure on Canada and Mexico while simultaneously pursuing separate trade negotiations, producing a negotiating posture that trading partners described as inconsistent. The administration conducted preliminary negotiations with Iran over nuclear constraints while simultaneously conducting military strikes against Iranian proxies — two postures that are not inherently incompatible, but that were never explained to the public as a unified approach.
The issue is not the use of force per se. It’s the absence of a publicly articulable theory of what the force is achieving and under what conditions it would stop. Doctrinal ambiguity can be a tactical choice. At scale and across multiple theaters, it also makes accountability — congressional, public, or allied — structurally difficult to apply.
AI Deregulation: Removing the Guardrails on the Next Monopoly
The AI executive orders generated the least coverage of any major second-term action. They may produce the most durable consequences.
The Biden administration had developed early AI oversight frameworks: federal agencies required to assess AI safety risks in high-stakes applications, disclosure requirements for consequential AI deployment, regulatory agency authority preserved to oversee AI in their respective domains. The second term revoked the foundational Biden AI order and replaced it with a framework directing agencies to eliminate regulatory barriers to AI development and deployment.
The practical shift: companies developing the most consequential AI systems — systems already shaping hiring, lending, medical diagnosis, insurance underwriting, and military targeting — now operate in a federal regulatory environment where the primary constraint is voluntary self-governance and market pressure, rather than agency oversight with enforcement authority.
The beneficiaries of this framework are identifiable. They include companies with direct financial or personal ties to figures inside the administration. Several founders and executives moved between private AI ventures and government advisory roles during this period without formal conflict-of-interest review.
Roosevelt spent a decade building antitrust infrastructure because he watched a single private entity — Standard Oil — become powerful enough to set prices, control distribution, discipline opponents, and operate effectively above public accountability. He understood that the problem wasn’t the technology or the industry. It was the absence of referees before the concentration became irreversible.
The AI deregulation of the second term removes referee infrastructure before the next generation of concentration has finished forming. Whether the outcome resembles Standard Oil, or something without a prior historical analogue, is an open question. The removal of the oversight capacity to answer that question in real time is not.
The Tariffs: A Tax You’re Not Supposed to Call a Tax
The second-term tariff regime — broad levies on Canada, Mexico, China, and eventually most major trading partners — was framed as the culmination of a decades-long argument about American manufacturing, trade deficits, and economic sovereignty.
That argument contains real substance. Decades of trade liberalization did hollow out specific manufacturing sectors and the communities built around them. The grievance is legitimate. The question — as with every policy in this series — is not whether the grievance is real. It’s who pays for the remedy.
Tariffs are taxes collected at the border by U.S. importers and passed through to retail prices. Economic analyses of the second-term tariff structure estimated household cost increases ranging from several hundred to over a thousand dollars annually, concentrated on goods categories where lower-income households spend a higher share of income. The tariffs function as a regressive consumption tax — the economic incidence falls disproportionately on the households least able to absorb it.
The carve-out and exemption structure tells the adjacent story. Industries with effective lobbying operations received modifications. Countries with negotiating leverage received pauses. The tariff schedule that emerged is less a uniform policy applied on principle than a negotiating instrument with selective enforcement — which means its outcomes in practice reflect political and commercial power asymmetries as much as economic logic.
The workers who needed manufacturing jobs got the announcement. The lobbying operations got the exemptions. The consumers got the price increases. The pattern from the first term’s tax bill — constituent-facing rhetoric, donor-class outcomes — repeated itself in a different policy domain and a different direction.
UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH The administration that ran on lowering costs for working Americans implemented the largest tariff regime in modern American history. Economic analyses across the political spectrum estimated net household cost increases measured in hundreds of dollars annually, concentrated on goods lower-income households purchase most. The people who most needed relief from cost-of-living pressure absorbed the most tariff exposure. That’s not an interpretation. It’s where the incidence landed.
The Convergence
Strip the individual sections down and a single structural observation runs through all of them:
The second term is the operational phase of a system in which weakened institutional restraint, exhausted accountability timelines, privatized governance channels, and narrative dominance have converged — producing a presidency that, in several key domains, converts state power into aligned political and financial ecosystems with reduced friction from traditional checks.
That’s the description. The important clarification: this is not a claim that every outcome was pre-engineered or that the system operates as a unified conspiracy. Institutional decay rarely works that way. What it produces instead is an environment where the incentive structure now enables certain behaviors — financial, political, legal — that prior constraint systems made costly or impossible. The behaviors follow the incentives. The incentives follow the structure. The structure was changed, incrementally and sometimes by accident, across three chapters of this series.
The first term tested which constraints held. The second term operates inside the knowledge of which ones didn’t.
Roosevelt’s specific contribution to American governance was the construction of constraint infrastructure — the regulatory bodies, antitrust mechanisms, and executive accountability norms that made the state capable of limiting private power before that power became unaccountable. His insight was not ideological. It was mechanical: markets without referees don’t stay markets. States without referees don’t stay states. You build the referees before you need them, because by the time you need them it’s already too late to build them at the necessary speed.
The second term is not a refutation of that insight. It’s a demonstration of what happens when the referees have been, in several key areas, replaced, redirected, or removed.
And Finally…
So Pick One
Across four chapters — Roosevelt, the Audition, the Waiting Years, the Revenge Tour — one structural argument has been assembling itself beneath the political noise:
Modern executive power is no longer primarily constrained by law or elections in the way the post-WWII democratic framework assumed. It is increasingly shaped by the interaction between narrative velocity, institutional latency, and the gap between what the rules formally prohibit and what a sufficiently resourced and motivated actor can functionally do within them.
Roosevelt closed that gap preemptively. He built the referees before the game required them. What the three Trumps represent — as a sequence, not as isolated events — is a systematic discovery of where those referees had been weakened, removed, or never built in the first place.
The second term is what you get when the discovery phase is complete.
The question the series has been building toward is not whether any individual is uniquely dangerous. It’s whether a system that produces these conditions once, without the internal mechanisms to correct them, will learn anything that changes the output the next time a sufficiently motivated actor arrives with sufficient resources and sufficient patience to use the available space.
History does not suggest that systems self-correct automatically. It suggests they correct when enough people with enough institutional standing decide the cost of not correcting exceeds the cost of correcting. That calculation has not yet been made in a durable, structural way.
A system where power is allowed to have purpose eventually produces leaders who use it that way.
A system where power is allowed to have momentum, and the incentives reward momentum over purpose, produces this — and will produce variations of it until someone changes the incentive structure instead of just the leader.
The difference between those two systems is not a president.
It’s a country that decides which one it wants — and then builds the referees to enforce the decision before it needs them.
We haven’t fully decided yet.
The series ends here. The question doesn’t.
Roosevelt used force to solve problems. The revenge tour uses force to define enemies. That is the entire difference. That is also the entire series.
THE THREE TRUMPS · Full Series
Prologue — Power With Purpose · Theodore Roosevelt & the Standard We No Longer Meet
Part One — The Audition · Trump Term One (2017–2021)
Part Two — The Waiting Years · Biden, the Martyr Factory & the System That Blinked (2021–2024) Meet
Part Three — The Revenge Tour · Power Without Restraint (2025–Present) (Live M
Uncomfortable runs on spite, caffeine, and whatever cash you feel like throwing at it. No sponsors. No corporate sugar daddies. No algorithm to lick. If this piece made your blood boil or your brain spark — good. That’s the point.
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