Donald Trump's Calendar of Chaos
A monthly cycle of inevitable consequences
It feels like Spring. It also feels like December. The cadence of having Donald Trump as President has always been heart-pounding. Trump 1.0, as experienced from the relative peace of Britain, meant waking up to mad end-of-day Trump posting or New York Times stories, followed a few hours later, around British lunch time, by Americans waking up and also freaking out.
The American comedian John Mulaney had a famous skit in 2019 likening the experience of being governed by Donald Trump to hearing that there was ‘a horse loose in a hospital’. The standard rhythms of hospital life were now disrupted by equine snorting and charging. And as Mulaney noted wisely, the ‘creepiest days are where you don’t hear from the horse at all…’
We have, however, been hearing a lot from the horse recently. Indeed, since the New Year, Trump has been ever louder, more offensive, more erratic, and more active. It is perhaps not a coincidence that 2026 marks the Chinese year of the horse.
Let’s recap January. Three days in, Trump kidnapped the autocratic leader of a nearby country. Let me be clear, Nicolas Maduro deserves everything that’s coming to him. He (and yes, Hugo Chavez) turned Venezuela from an unequal but stable democracy to an unequal but erratic and draconian dictatorship. Still, kidnapping leaders of other sovereign countries is, to say the least, punchy. And it gave Trump a sense of potency and unstoppability that has had some interesting and not entirely positive consequences just weeks later… But we’ll come back to that.
Also in January, the invasion of the great state of Minnesota by ICE, leading to the killings of two protesters: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As an ex-resident of Minneapolis, I wrote an elegy to the city. You can read it here. I opined in that piece that the literal overkill of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis could mark a turning point in the Trump regime’s popularity. I stand by that, given everything we have seen since in terms of Trump’s polling.
But there is another important aspect of Minnesota. It was an example of Trump facing negative consequences from earlier choices. And that, I think is the story we will see play out over 2026. Each month so far, Donald Trump’s presidency has become further weakened and destabilised by decisions made by… Donald Trump a few weeks or months earlier. We will, I anticipate, experience a calendar of chaos. It will also be a calendar of consequences.
Let’s talk about a few more of those consequences that have already played out in the first few months of the year. February saw the Supreme Court finally awaken from its self-induced hibernation to finally cast its verdict on one of Trump’s wilfully lawless policies. And on this occasion it was the big one. Trump’s prime obsession. His white whale. Tariffs. Turned out they were enacted unlawfully. Who could have imagined that a schedule of tariffs clearly created by a stressed out intern on ChatGPT could have turned out poorly?
Trump’s fury was quite something to behold. He castigated multiple judges he himself had selected and remarked on the shame they had brought on their families (I wouldn’t fret too much on this front, Neil and Amy). But Trump’s tariffs had failed because he tried to take short-cuts the previous spring and impose mad tariffs under emergency powers that Congress had not in fact permitted. He had other options, he just chose not to take them. Good news, tariff fans, he has taken those other options now, with a 15% blanket tariff now imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act. Bad news, they expire in July. Consequences and consequences. We’ll return to that.
Oh, something else happened in February. Someone, somewhere around the world finally paid the price for having been associated with the American financier Jeffrey Epstein. It was of course not actually another American. Imagine. But we did get two for the price of one, with the arrests in the UK of (the artist formally known as Prince) Andrew and Labour’s own Professor Snape, Peter Mandelson. These of course, were consequences of Trump refusing to release the Epstein files so vigorously and suspiciously that Congress ended up forcing his hand, thereby creating a series of Chekhov’s miniguns that will fire monthly until the end of time.
And then March entered like a lion (and so far appears not to be leaving like a lamb, or at least a lamb that hasn’t been kebabed). Now I don’t want to ruin the clocklike nature of this rundown but to be fair the first attack on Iran did in fact happen on February the 28th. Fortunately this was not a leap year, so I feel broadly confident in calling the Iran War Special Military Excursion basically a March thing.
Since the United States government has cleverly refused to identify any consistent or coherent set of war goals, it is I suppose challenging to absolutely deny they have achieved any of them. But, you know, it doesn't feel to me like things are really going that well. What with global energy markets on life support and Donald Trump oscillating between furious promises to bomb infrastructure followed by talking about what lovely negotiators the Iranians are. The war has gone so badly that we are far enough through the looking glass that it has actually improved Keir Starmer’s prospects of remaining in power. An age of wonders.
The Iran War was, you guessed it, also an inevitable consequence of earlier Trump decisions. Not least the one to kidnap Nicolas Maduro and then just assume that the same decapitation strategy (albeit with actual explosive decapitation involved) would necessarily work pretty much anywhere else. It was also a consequence of bombing Iranian facilities last summer, which gave the Iranians the view that whatever they did, Israel and America would seek to destroy their (horrible) regime. And of course of selecting Pete Hegseth - an amalgam of every bad guy from 80s teen movies - as Secretary of Defense War.
I am sure the choice to bomb/invade Iran will have further consequences still. How could it not? And we will come to them. But given that so much of what has happened since January 1st of this year followed from earlier choices in Trump 2.0, let’s go out on a limb and think through what chaos might be predictable over the rest of the year.
April: Elections Abroad, Court Cases at Home
In just a few weeks one of MAGA’s most important elections is happening. Albeit not in America. Viktor Orbán is facing potential defeat in the Hungarian parliamentary elections as his party Fidesz lags in the polls. There has been a lot of talk about potential Russian (and maybe other) dirty tricks against his rival Peter Magyar. So perhaps Orbán will ‘prevail’. But if he doesn’t that’s a big hit against MAGA thinkers’ vision of a conservative nationalist anti-immigrant Europe. That idea is usually spelled out as Make Europe Great Again.
And again, they have themselves to blame. Rubio has visited Hungary, Vance is about to. Trump has loudly endorsed Orbán. But it’s not clear that being associated with Donald Trump helps, even in Hungary, which has been substantially more pro-Trump than elsewhere. Twice as many Hungarians believe Trump is hurting global peace as those who believe he is helping. And the latter are almost entirely concentrated among the now-dwindling base of Fidesz voters.
I’m enough of a political scientist to know it is very dangerous to rule out Viktor Orbán. Hungary’s electoral system has been quite literally designed to manufacture majorities from regions and groups loyal to Fidesz. And its media environment is so slanted it makes GBNews look like Reuters. So perhaps the chaos will be contained for MAGA, even if MEGA is looking ropy.
Back home there is also the possibility of consequences coming due - this time in the Supreme Court, with the oral arguments about Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship coming up over the next few weeks. It’s hard to tell on this one. Most legal scholars, most other courts, view birthright citizenship as clearly guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. But this is a highly conservative court and one whose rulings on immigration have heretofore been fairly aligned with Trump.
But there are two likely outcomes. I think still more likely is the court rules against Trump, although it may seek to make conservative precedent as it does so. And in this case we will get the standard attacks on the court we saw in the tariffs incident. Potentially also some ratcheting up of other policy attacks on immigrants or on naturalisation. If the Court rules for Trump it will be a rolling policy disaster as it then becomes unclear which babies born in America after Trump’s executive order (which only applies to births after its date) have American citizenship. I would have to assume the most likely outcome is grandfathering in until the date of the court decision but who knows… Chaos either way, just different types of chaos.
May: Chaos at the Fed
You might be forgiven for thinking that with the announcement of Kevin Warsh as Trump’s pick for the next Chair of the Federal Reserve that potentially market-stirring chaos in monetary policy was over. You would be half right. Warsh is clearly more of a stable, establishment figure than say Kevin Hassett, a man so sycophantic one would expect him to set interest rates algorithmically to the tone of TruthSocial posts.
But nothing is so simple because Trump’s previous attacks on Jerome Powell, current Chair, which included trying to hold legal investigations into the refurbishment of the Fed, have so upset Congress that (retiring) Republican Senator Thom Tillis, chair of the banking committee, is refusing to progress Trump’s pick to take over from Powell come Powell’s term ending this May.
So that means that Jerome Powell may simply continue as Chair of the Federal Reserve, even as Trump is attempting to sue him, and even as his chairmanship has expired. Powell remains a member of the Federal Reserve Board for another couple of years in any case, which means even if not actually Chair he is likely to serve as a shadow Chair with great sway among this colleagues.
In other words, Trump has destabilised the Fed and market expectations about interest rates and inflation without actually achieving his goal. And if Powell stays on as Chair in May we may end up with an exciting Two Popes style situation that will keep market volatility high until it gets resolved (in 2028…).
June: The World Cup
Oh Gianni. How it could it have happened? All that effort to find the person most deserving of a bespoke peace prize and the unthinkable happens. Next time perhaps you will inadvertently grant the World Cup to a petro-dictatorship.
Despite Signore Infantino’s misfortune, the World Cup is still taking place in America, though perhaps the ceremonial re-awarding of the FIFA Peace Prize will no longer take place. You know who else also won’t take place - the Iranian football team, who it seems will no longer be in Group G. I suppose they could be replaced by the United Arab Emirates who came third in their qualifying group but were knocked out by Iraq. That would be, I suppose, quite apt.
Whatever FIFA do to make up the numbers in Iran’s absence there is another problem of absence - that of fans. First, quite a few countries’ fans will have to pay $15,000 bonds to even visit the US - indeed not just the fans but apparently the players and staff too. This includes those from Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cape Verde and Tunisia. And then there’s fans from the rest of the world who might be a wee bit put off travelling to America given the experiences of some many immigrants and even tourists of heavy-handed ICE behaviour. On top of which, Trump is not ruling out having ICE agents patrol the stadia during World Cup games. Football officialdom has often worried about the possibility of fan violence in the grounds. It is less used to having to worry about state violence outside.
Trump has a surprising liking for football and clearly is excited about having the world’s eyes on the World Cup this summer. Perhaps he will want to do a reenactment of the Diana Ross penalty kick that set off World Cup 1994. He may be less excited if his big show descends into chaos. It will be like the Iran War mixed with the failed Kennedy Center season.
July: Tariffs Expire
Memba tariff tantrums, eh? What ever happened to them? Well the tantrum has been delayed for a full month now as the Section 122 tariffs that Trump legally could impose have been enacted. But they will terminate by law on July 24th. Which means the Trump team will either need to come up with a new tariff plan (e.g. industry specific ones), or go back to their time-tested policy of doing something unlawful and waiting for the courts to block it.
Every trade department and foreign ministry around the globe is now waiting for the next turn in the tariff tantrum dial. It’s not clear whether or even why states would negotiate new deals with Trump before July 24th since (a) Trump Often Signs Then Abandons Deals Anyway (TOSTADA), and (b) Trump’s team are rather distracted by ‘other events’. So we are in standard waiting mode - we know what the consequences of Trump’s choice to impose Section 122 tariffs are, we know when it will happen, but we don’t know how much chaos there will be.
August: Vacation Season
Do we at least get a break from all of this? No. August is US vacation time (all two weeks of guaranteed employer vacation - what generosity!). For most Americans that will mean driving somewhere. Perhaps to a national park if there’s not a government shutdown. Maybe we’ll get lucky.
But what we know for sure is that gas prices are going to be high and Americans on long car voyages are going to feel this in the wallet. At this point, with the Strait of Hormuz essentially shut for several weeks, we know international energy prices are going to remain highly elevated into the medium term. Yes, the US has its own supplies but it is not entirely able to buffer against this kind of price shock. Trump has already released hundreds of millions of barrels from the US strategic petroleum reserve but for even the US to keep prices down it would need to ramp up domestic production at rates that are unlikely to kick in this year.
US average gas prices at the pump have already roughly doubled since the start of the year ($1.60 a gallon) to today ($3.20). American commuters and travellers do not have many alternatives to the car, so they won’t be easily able to substitute - this will have a direct effect on pay packets. And if you had planned on flying somewhere in the summer? Also more expensive. And this chaotic consequence for later in the summer was already baked in by Trump policy in early March.
September: Universities Back in Session
As we move further into the future we are necessarily looking at slightly more opaque consequences. But the start of the American school year in September (or sometime late August) will mean the start of a second academic year fully under Trump 2.0.
Trump’s Justice and Education Departments are still engaged in a war of attrition with various high-profile American universities. They have just gone after Harvard for the three thousandth time, again with accusations of anti-semitism (they should try hanging out with the crowd at CPAC), and ones that are so rehashed that Harvard’s lawyers have already asked for the case to be transferred back to the court they won in last year.
But other predictable chaos is likely. Federal agencies have already gone back to Columbia and Cornell who signed deals with the Trump administration, with a series of new requests and potential fines. Nobody who signs a deal with Trump should ever expect him to go away. Once you have expressed weakness he will just be back for more. So as universities and others cotton on to this I expect instead a series of never-ending fights, at least until Congress changes hands (more below). Since the start of the school year is important for universities and students, it feels likely to me that this is when the Trump administration will choose to be maximally disruptive. That’s just how they (t)roll.
October: Surprise?
Now we are well into the fall. As we get closer and closer to the midterms on November 3rd, if polls don’t narrow - and I very much expect that they will not - I would anticipate nervousness in the Trump administration to ramp up.
As we have already seen with the Epstein files, Congress’s investigatory powers remain very strong. Yes, this is much easier if enough Republicans are willing to defy Mike Johnson, but with bad polls and slim margins in the House, there will often be enough already. Poor performances in House and Senate hearings can be deadly for staff in the administration, as Kristi Noem now knows. No one in the Trump administration is going to want to have to face the consequences of their policy agenda (and assorted money-making) under a Democratic House or indeed Senate.
Since the midterms are very early in November, I expect the last couple of weeks of October to be the time when the administration will try a Hail Mary pass to keep MAGA voting and repress turnout elsewhere. We will come to repressing turnout in a second. October would be the moment for some giant victory to crow about.
What might that be? It’s likely to be foreign policy related - since that’s in the administration’s control - and it’s likely to be violent because… Hegseth. So if I were in Havana, Mogadishu, Sanaa, or maybe even Copenhagen, I’d keep my eyes open.
November: Midterms
And now we are back very much in the territory of known knowns. Everything Donald Trump has said about the upcoming midterms suggests he would be quite happy to deliberately suppress voting by Democrats. Whether he can actually make that happen is a much more open question.
I suspect the SAVE act, which massively restricts voting rights and is likely to disenfranchise potentially millions of women whose last names have changed from their birth certificate, is dead on arrival in the Senate. Trump is throwing a series of expected tantrums about this, arguing he will veto any other legislation if the Senate don’t pass the SAVE act. But they won’t. It would never pass the filibuster and I suspect it might even struggle to get the need fifty Republican votes.
So Trump will be forced to rely on powers he does have rather than those he would like. That probably means relying on the entity that he seems to consider his private paramilitary - ICE. Now let’s be clear, ICE cannot effectively stand outside every polling station in America. There are around 100,000 polling stations and about 20,000 ICE agents. Even the entirety of Homeland Security agents is still only around 80,000 and that includes TSA and the Coast Guard. Removing security from airports and ports to stop Democrats from voting? I mean they might try it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Realistically the way this is going to go down is by targeting particular precincts with lots of ethnic minorities in Democratic voting areas. I do expect something like this to happen on a relatively small scale. If Trump can claim violence at the polls or that his agents spotted some kind of vaguely defined malfeasance, then he may claim the elections were illegitimate. Particularly if he loses both House and Senate which IMO is about 50/50 right now.
Lots of people are dooming about this. As with all the consequences in this calendar I think we just need to accept it (a) might happen and (b) that doesn’t mean Trump will get his way. Look at many of the previous consequences - they are either Trump not actually getting what he wants, or him getting what he wants and it falling apart within weeks or days. But no, he is not going to accept defeat calmly. That won’t happen.
December: Trump Take Christmas
Assuming America is still standing after the midterms that doesn’t mean that Trump’s reign of error is over. He remains President until January 2029 (or if he passes away, JD Vance will be President until then). Moreover, the new Congress isn’t even seated until January 2027. It is possible, given what we just saw above, that if Trump loses badly he will try and insist that current Representatives refuse to give up their seats. Again, I agree this could happen, it would be bad, but also remember that Trump doesn’t always just get what he wants. And I am confident, if not certain, that losing reps will stand down and let their replacements take office.
But December, even as the electoral outcome resolves could still be very busy for Trump. If his team suspect that the Democrats are going to make Congressional oversight very painful for them, they might either try and hobble it in advance, or start throwing each other under the bus. We have already seen with the fate of Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski what the latter looks like. Steven Miller and Pete Hegseth might be particularly concerned about becoming sacrificial lambs for others in the administration. Again, this will be a story of inevitable consequences.
And then there’s where the American economy is by the end of the year. I have assumed nothing about whether there is an AI crash this year. There might be, there might not be. We are in the zone of Substack posters having predicted ten out of the last zero AI crashes. But rising energy prices might make data-centre production and scaling strategies untenable.
And in any case, the rise in energy and food prices that Americans - let alone everyone else in the world - will face is going to absolutely deep-six many people’s Christmases. If Donald Trump is then coming off a bruising electoral defeat he will take all of the blame and quite rightly so. He could find himself descending the path that George W Bush took before him - from unstoppable second term victory with a popular vote majority, to figure of fun, hatred, and contempt two years in.
I suppose one could call this chain of events tragic. After all in tragedies, a series of choices made early on in the play build inevitably towards hubris and nemesis. Donald Trump might have a world record amount of hubris to swallow. Perhaps Gianni Infantino could give him a prize for that.
But in tragedies we usually feel sympathy, or at least empathy, for the protagonist. Yes, they are usually undermined by a fatal flaw that they had the agency to avoid but out of pride or anger or jealousy could not. But we can see ourselves in them.
Donald Trump cannot see himself in anyone. He has no obvious empathy, except possibly for winners who he can temporarily align himself with. So there is no tragedy here for his falling prey to a series of inevitable consequences.
The only ones experiencing tragedy are those exposed to the chaos of those consequences - deported immigrants, bombed schoolchildren, bankrupted businesses. So as Trump’s calendar unfolds, let’s give him the same amount of empathy that he would give us.
Very nice piece. Very nice.
I thought Mulaney got that bit from Kool Keith but I don't know where he got it from.