After six weeks, is Trump 47 going well? It is and it isn’t. Frankly, I give it a C-. While still far below its potential, it at least has not failed. Which is frankly amazing.

What is frustrating about this administration is that it has the opportunity to win and the strength to win, but neither (it seems) the will or the understanding to win. So, it’s going to lose. But it is not yet fated to lose.

Here are some things the new Trump administration doesn’t seem to understand, some things it does seem to understand, and some more things it doesn’t. After the paywall, I’ll give a policy example of what could be done in a world with more clue.

Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power—which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.

No one has an appetite for destroying and/or replacing the old administrative state. Everyone wants to make it efficient and effective. Particularly enlightened actors, Barbarian or Mandarin (more the latter, of course) also want to reward their friends and even their supporters—where permitted, of course, by law. This is wise. The end. There is no Trump revolution. Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Sorry guys.

The likely result of this confused attack is that the system sustains minor damage till it learns to resist the new insult. This was the result of McCarthyism, for instance. The effect is like giving an inadequate dose of an antibiotic or chemotherapy. By insulting the organism, we are only strengthening its will to resist—and destroying the window for this treatment, which will never again work—not even a little bit.

McCarthy killed anticommunism. He did not kill communism—he only finished off centralized Old Left communism. But he killed McCarthyism. Which is why America is a communist country (decentralized New Left) to this day. (What did you think “progressive” meant? Look at the history of this word across the 20th century. As Earl Browder said: “communism is as American as apple pie.”) Trump is on the way to killing Trumpism, in the same way.

As we saw in the case of USAID, the alliance of Barbarians and Mandarins is strong enough to literally destroy entire agencies, signage and all. But in order to retain this strength, it will have to keep acting this strongly and more. Power at this level has to go forward or it goes back. It certainly cannot do its enemies any favors, and win.

Big-brained people think that “personnel is policy,” but I and other galaxybrains know it’s much worse than that. Structure is policy. You cannot fix the wrong structure by putting the right people in charge of it. The structure of the US foreign policy apparatus inevitably dictates US foreign policy. 1945, that magic year, will never die. Put the right people into the wrong structure, and they will develop wrong opinions.

To capture an elite, you have to demolish its institutions, filter its personnel (for both loyalty and talent), and rehouse them in new and better institutions. Once these new institutions are firmly established and clearly superior, the regime change is complete. It’s an understatement to say that the administration is far away from any such dream.

SOME YEARS AGO, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority.

Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men