“Some choose to find comfort in the belief that [the Trump administration's] incompetence will undermine [its] anti-Americanism. Don't bet on it. Autocratic regimes with a demagogic bent are nearly always inefficient, because they cannot create and extend the network of delegated trust that is essential to making any organization work smoothly. The chaos is characteristic. Whether by instinct or by intention, it benefits the regime, whose goal is to create an overwhelming feeling of shared helplessness in the population at large: we will detain you and take away your green card—or, no, now we won't take away your green card, but we will hold you here, and we may let you go, or we may not.”

-- Adam Gopnik, “Trump's Radical Anti-Americanism: As the President rejects our foundational principles, all we can turn to is our instinct for shared defiance,” in The New Yorker