The State Has Many Ways to Lose Control

The Trump project, in its domestic and foreign-policy forms, has a recurring administrative fantasy: decisive action can settle an argument before the argument has time to organize. Remove a government, centralize a database, dominate the news cycle, and surely the facts will eventually take the hint.

The available political indicators suggest the electorate may be filing a contrary brief. In a New Republic podcast transcript, Greg Sargent and Michael Cohen point to Democratic special-election overperformance, generic-ballot leads cited from Fifty Plus One and YouGov, weak Trump approval figures attributed to Reuters and the New York Times polling average, and an uncalled Butler County, Pennsylvania, legislative race where Democrat Brandon Dukes was slightly ahead. The district had reportedly backed Trump by 18 points in 2024. But the AP had not called it: as Sargent put it, “the AP has not yet called the race”.

That qualification is not decorative; it is the entire constitutional mood. The transcript is analysis, not a results desk, and its polling evidence comes with absent methodology and a candid warning from Cohen: “it’s hard with polling these days, because you have a lot of lousy polling out there.” Still, the pattern it describes is politically intelligible. An administration can make every contest a referendum on presidential force of personality. It cannot ensure that force is on the ballot in a midterm.

Nor should Democrats mistake a possible rebuke for a conversion. Cohen’s formulation deserves to be printed above every consultant’s expense account: “This is an anti-incumbent wave, OK? It’s not a pro-Democratic wave.” Voters may be withdrawing a license without having selected a contractor. That distinction is where governing begins, and where most victory-night speeches abruptly lose interest.

The same preference for the clean, climactic act appears in the administration’s Iran policy. According to an Al Jazeera survey of seven decades of US intervention, the US and Israel attacked Iran beginning February 28, with Washington claiming Tehran was close to acquiring nuclear weapons. The article says Trump initially named regime change as a central war aim, then later disavowed that objective; it also reports that Iran’s government endured despite the killing of Ali Khamenei and other senior figures, with replacements installed including Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader.

The record assembled in that article is less a history of American omnipotence than a catalog of the bill arriving after the ribbon-cutting. The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh restored the shah and secured a quarter-century of close US-Iranian ties, before the 1979 revolution. Iraq removed Saddam Hussein but, the article notes, did not uncover the alleged weapons stockpiles used to justify invasion. Afghanistan saw the Taliban’s first government toppled, two decades of US support for a civilian government, and the Taliban’s return after the 2021 withdrawal. Libya lost Muammar Gaddafi and retained political fragmentation. This is not a pattern that needs a focus group.

As King’s College London’s Andreas Krieg summarizes the 1953 coup: “In that sense, 1953 succeeded operationally and failed historically.” That is a useful distinction because operational success is unusually photogenic. It has maps, footage, officials at podiums, maybe a font designed to look decisive. Historical success requires a legitimate political order that can survive the people who installed it, which is why it appears less often in campaign messaging.

The human and fiscal costs in the article’s account are grave: it cites Brown University estimates spanning hundreds of thousands of direct deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan-related conflict, and millions of deaths across post-2001 US-led wars when indirect deaths are included. Those are estimates with different scopes, not interchangeable tally marks. But they underline the same policy lesson: the absence of a ruler is not the presence of a settlement. Foreign policy is not improved by treating the sequel as somebody else’s genre.

At home, the machinery is smaller but the governing instinct is familiar: acquire a better instrument, promise guardrails later, and regard skepticism as a minor software defect. A report on the dismissal of a vandalism charge in Ohio describes how a Clermont County grand jury declined to indict Cody Morelock over allegations that he dismantled a Flock license-plate-reader camera, pole and solar panel in Union Township. The charge was dismissed; the article does not explain the grand jury’s reasoning.

The irony is almost too efficient. Police reportedly identified Morelock through footage from other nearby cameras, along with information associated with a credit card and customer rewards account. Flock systems collect plate numbers and vehicle characteristics in a central database available to local police and, often, agencies beyond the locality. One person was accused of attacking a node in a network and encountered the network as the answer. Bentham would have called it elegant; most citizens might prefer a term less appreciative of the architecture.

There is a real policy dispute here, not merely a culture-war skirmish involving ladders and municipal hardware. The article says the Institute for Justice had logged more than 100 cases of law-enforcement abuse of license-plate-reader data as of August 12. Flock has announced safeguards intended to limit misuse, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls those reforms “cosmetic” and argues that searches should require warrants. The reported vandalism incidents nationwide are not a substitute for law or democratic process. They are, however, evidence that consent cannot be assumed merely because the camera came with a solar panel.

This is the domestic version of the larger problem. Systems built for frictionless control tend to treat legitimacy as an implementation detail. Elections answer back in aggregate; grand juries and courts answer back case by case; public resistance answers back in ways neither elegant nor always lawful. A state that confuses capacity with authority eventually discovers that feedback, too, is a network.