The War of Donald T. – How a President Dismantles the State and Governs Through Chaos

Washington these days resembles a besieged palace. In the corridors of the White House, where strategies were once forged, now reigns the silence of an administrative corpse. No budget, no trust, no sense of proportion. Only a president who has turned paralysis into the tool of his power. Donald Trump calls it order, others call it destruction - and perhaps both are true. This is no ordinary shutdown. It is a war, fought with memos and dismissal letters, orchestrated by a president who has transformed his budget office into a kind of internal tribunal. The agency that once monitored numbers now decides over people: who gets paid, who loses their job, who belongs to the system and who does not. “The grim reaper,” Trump calls his budget chief Russ Vought - and rarely has a metaphor so precisely captured the nature of a government.

The Office of Management and Budget has been instructed to “batten down the hatches.” In the corridors, a new slogan circulates, officially confirmed via social media post: “Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs, and wait.” Pay the soldiers, pay the police, cut the rest - and wait. It is a sentence that sounds as if it were chiseled in stone, a mantra of a state devouring itself. As the paralysis enters its third week, the lists of those dismissed continue to grow. Scientists, teachers, social workers, administrative lawyers - all whose work does not fit Trump’s worldview. What remains are the army and the deportation agency, guns and border fences. In the ministries, the dismissal letters pile up like dead flies on stacks of files. More than 750,000 federal employees are affected - a mass experiment in administrative demolition.

Trump enjoys the sight. He speaks of cutting “the deep roots of bureaucracy,” and by that he means the remnants of institutional reason. Vought, architect of the ultraconservative “Project 2025,” calls it reform. In truth, it is the systematic disassembly of the state - not through laws but through payrolls. Those who are paid live. Those who are not, disappear. In front of the budget office building, where civil servants and employees have gathered, stands Senator Chris Van Hollen. “Trump and Vought are using this moment to terrorize these people,” he shouts into the crowd. His voice echoes off the glass façade behind which the new power center of America sits - unremarkable but lethally efficient. “It’s a lie,” he says, “a big, fat lie.” But the lie now works faster than the law.

The shutdown, now in its 14th day, is no longer a budget crisis - it is a creed. Trump has turned the state into a reflection of his ideology: militarily strong, socially amputated, legally deaf. He has turned a political instrument into a ritual. The government, once a guarantor of order, has become a stage where arbitrariness wins the applause. Russ Vought, a man with the stoic expression of an accountant and the mission of a zealot, is Trump’s tool and amplifier. In his hands, budget law becomes a weapon. He speaks of “efficiency,” but what he means is erasure. In one draft, it is proposed that laid-off employees shall have no right to back pay after the shutdown ends - a break with decades of precedent, a slap in the face for hundreds of thousands of families.

While the lives of civil servants are on hold, Trump’s parallel state runs at full speed. The military is now receiving its pay on time. Homeland Security remains fully funded. The money for mass deportations continues to flow - drawn from those “available funds” of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a law that sounds like a Trump quote and works exactly like one: loud, imprecise, and dangerous. Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, speaks of “innovative solutions” to pay the Coast Guard. She smiles as if the crisis were a marketing opportunity. “Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill,” she says, “no hero of the Coast Guard will miss a paycheck.” Not a word about nurses, researchers, or parents whose incomes are frozen.

Trump, who never leaves a stage unused, has adorned Vought’s new role with a manufactured hero myth. An AI-generated video shows the budget chief in a black robe, scythe over his shoulder, set to Don’t Fear the Reaper. “Every authoritarian leader has his grim reaper,” says Democrat Steny Hoyer. “Russell Vought is Donald Trump’s.” And while Hoyer speaks, a grotesque parody of democracy plays out in the halls of Congress: Republicans refuse to convene, Democrats fail to reach majorities. House Speaker Mike Johnson simply nods. “They have every right to move the funds around,” he says, as if it were pocket change. If the Democrats want to sue - “bring it.”

It is as if one could watch the spine of a nation breaking in slow motion. Not through violence, but through bureaucracy. Not by revolution, but by spreadsheets. The president has learned that one does not need to overthrow institutions to destroy them - one only needs to transfer them, selectively, like a god with accounting software. The irony is complete: a president who styled himself as a fighter against “the system” has become the architect of its ultimate form - a system without soul, without restraint, without humanity. The war of Donald T. is not a war against opponents. It is a war against the very idea of the democratic state.

And while outside the capital sinks into the silence of the dismissed, the light in the Oval Office stays on. Not because governing continues there - but because Donald Trump loves the darkness in which only he still shines.