"Everything Seemingly is Spinning Out of Control"

It's been a year now of constant daily tectonic shifts - can we handle this pace? Oh hell, yeah!

Note to readers: in our household, the Christmas season isn’t over until the carols are out of my head and all the decorations are down. Our sole remaining tree is a “Winter Tree” to provide lingering light throughout the month of January. And I refuse to take down outside garland and lights until the end of January. It’s not a hard task - I just need the light a little longer. That said, while I may feel like I’m still in the holiday mood, it’s 2026 nonetheless and things are happening. And just as the new administration started off with a bang last year (and never let up) the new year is off to a raging start. Let’s do this!

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James Taranto once joked that the press corps had the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel. Today, the squirrel needs a Red Bull subscription from Amazon. For those who don’t know James, “Everything seemingly is spinning out of control” was a regular trope from his WSJ column Best of the Web Today. He employed it ironically - sarcastically - as I am here today.

For most of my life, “news” was something you tuned into throughout the day to see if there’s anything new. Hence, news. Most of the time, what the media curate for us isn’t really news, it’s what “someone said” about the news. That’s how they fill these huge voids between events. The media gets the time to go deep and expand the coverage - turn over rocks, compare stories with other writers - and fashion a narrative among like-minded souls.

Lately - since January 20th last year, say - the news stopped feeling like a sequence of events and started feeling like an Iranian centrifuge hit by a Massive Ordnance Penetrator. In response to my wife’s morning query “So, what’s in the news?” I respond, “Everything honey. Everything”.

Eleven days into the new year we’d already burned through three full‑blown media fixations, each one treated as if it were the hinge of history, and then each one left suspended the moment a fresher outrage or novelty arrived. As if narratus interruptus has become the new journalistic gestalt.

And no, I won’t elide whether the current administration is intentionally orchestrating this tempo — flooding the zone, forcing pivots, keeping the media off balance — and what that means for Democrat cognition (an oxymoron). So you’re not being conspiratorial if you suspect Trump feeds the press three major eruptions per week when they can only metabolize one narrative bolus at a time. It’s what I’d do with an oppositional defiant press. But not all these events erupt because Trump wields a magic media wand (which he does).

Trump doesn’t control the weather, for instance. Nor does he dictate what the Ayatollah and ruling mullahs in Iran will do. And while Trump can certainly trigger the western European leaders to say or do about anything, Putin and Xi are a good deal more circumspect. The Venezuela guy had a choice and decided to do it the hard way. The point being, Trump doesn’t control most of the rest of the world - but he does control here. So here is where the pot gets stirred.

Before going further, it’s worth stating plainly: I voted for this. At the time, “hopefully”. And now - you betcha: “enthusiastically”. After a four-year insult to everything America is, ever was and ever could be - we weren’t drifting toward decline; we were accelerating toward it, metaphorically strapped into a high‑speed crazy train.

Everything was broken. Not in the melodramatic, campaign‑ad sense, but in the enervating, grinding, bureaucratic sense that rots a nation from the inside out. We had no policies capable of fixing anything, and the policies we did have only deepened the dysfunction. At some point, the responsible choice stops being “steady as she goes” or “proceed with caution” - it becomes “hire the guy that’ll break everything all at once.”

Trump and his apologists often say he inherited “a mess”. That’s categorically untrue. Everything was broken and getting more broken. That’s “a mess” like a Cat 5 hurricane is a gentle spring shower. So everything had to be dealt with and all at once. There wouldn’t be the luxury of handling crises piecemeal - not when everything is in crisis. You only get four years - probably only two. And don’t forget: the enemy gets a vote. And yeah, I’m calling them “the enemy” because that’s how they’ve behaved.

Remember back to the Obama days when the administration was serially beset by one crisis after another - hitting like waves on a beach? And some genius therein declared “we can walk and chew gum!” Remember the word “pivot” - as in, they’d pivot from health care to deal with ISIS? I remember that - and I remember asking why a six trillion dollar a year government can’t anticipate a crisis once in a while. That was the word of the day: pivot. They were all the time pivoting from one crisis (of their own making - or neglect) to the next.

Trump hasn’t had that luxury - his crises arrive by the Costco wholesale bundle. And have you noticed that no matter the “crisis”, Trump’s cabinet already has a plan and are dealing with it? Or that we only find out there’s a situation when his team has Delta Force enroute to deliver the solution?

I certainly wouldn’t have admitted this before the election, but the Swamp and the Dems (but I repeat myself) were damn right that Trump was bringing chaos. One that was long overdue, and I’m glad he is. Because if we don’t break Washington (and all the moribund Blue states) it’s going to break us.

So everything had to go and it had to go all at once. The entire Project 2025. Some pieces, like the lawfare, had to unfold on its own schedule, but most everything else had to be kicked off on day one. And that’s the part the pundit class keeps missing. They treat the pace of events as a communications strategy, when in reality it’s a triage strategy. When everything is broken, you don’t get to sequence repairs. You don’t get to “pivot.” You don’t get to walk and chew gum — you have to sprint and rebuild the treadmill while you’re on it. The velocity isn’t a choice; it’s the bill coming due after decades of deferred maintenance and neglect - or intentional abuse.

Which brings us back to the headline: “everything is spinning out of control.” The received wisdom being that the nation and its government can’t take fixing everything at once. No administration can do that! The job’s too big for one man! What a quaint notion. We used to assume the federal government couldn’t handle more than one crisis at a time — that multitasking was a myth, that Washington could barely tie its shoes without convening a task force. And yet here we are, discovering that when the moment demands it, everything can be done at the same time. Not elegantly, not with West Wing walk‑and‑talks, but he’s getting it done. Hey, those Delta guys that just busted Maduro? Send ‘em to the North Atlantic - I got a ghost Russian oil tanker to impound.

And we’re not collapsing.

The economy is strong. The dollar is stronger. Interest rates are falling while unemployment drops and growth is surging. We are moving massive numbers off the dole (and that’s going to accelerate). Gas is cheap and getting cheaper (unless you live in California of course). We’ve witnessed the largest one year decline in our trade deficit’s history. The stock market’s at an all time high. Rents are falling. The border is, for the first time in recent memory, closed and sealed - and we’re now experiencing negative net migration. Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been shattered and the regime is buckling. Hamas is defeated. Venezuela’s narcotics pipeline has been severed. Europe and NATO are problem areas, but everyone, including Russia, is deferential to this president. For good reason.

And have you noticed how cohesive this cabinet is? The absence of leaks? The all-of-government coordinated approach to everything they do? And how they’ve won damn near every court case and key vote in Congress. Does that look like an outfit spinning out of control?

Did you notice we didn’t even have a hurricane this year?

If this is “spinning out of control,” then I’d like to place my order for more. Please.