Break Now, Fix Later

What a ballroom can tell us about the future

I’m off this week, but the enterprise rolls on. This post originally ran in Ed Elson’s newsletter, Simply Put. Subscribe here.

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Here’s a question for you: What was last week’s most important headline? Was it Trump’s address to the nation (where he told us nothing)? Was it the jobs report (which will likely be revised down)? Was it the firing of Pam Bondi (who’ll likely be replaced by someone worse)? No. Last week’s most important headline was something else. Per The Wall Street Journal: JUDGE HALTS CONSTRUCTION OF TRUMP’S WHITE HOUSE BALLROOM.

We’ll get to why this matters in a moment. But first, a quick refresher on this ballroom. Last summer, President Trump announced plans to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom for a proposed budget of $200 million. (That budget has since doubled.) In order to do this he needed to demolish the East Wing, a historic portion of the White House complex that was built more than a hundred years ago. This was a controversial decision that required permission from Congress, however Trump didn’t seek any permissions and tore down the East Wing anyway, giving rise to one of the most iconic and disturbing images in recent memory.

That was the East Wing seven months ago. Fast-forward to today: The structure remains obliterated, a giant crater in the middle of one of our nation’s most historic sites. It’s an unpleasant sight, but one we assumed was temporary … until last week. A federal judge ruled the ballroom project unconstitutional, which means the ballroom may never get built — but, more importantly, the East Wing will remain in ruins for the foreseeable future.

This obviously matters for historic, ceremonial, and architectural reasons, but also for another reason more profound. The ballroom has become a metaphor for the president’s entire approach to policymaking. It is the mirror image of every major executive decision that has reverberated across economies, markets, and borders. It’s U.S. policy, if U.S. policy were a building.

I have a name for this strategy. I call it BNFL: “Break Now, Fix Later.” It describes the President’s tendency to break things (often old and historic) and promise to build something “bigger” and “better” in their place, until he realizes he doesn’t actually have the wherewithal (or the constitutional authority) to get it done — at which point he becomes bored and moves on to the next shiny object. The end result is that “the builder” never actually builds anything, but mostly just destroys things. Break Now, Fix Later.

As we shall see, BNFL describes almost every important decision the president has ever made — and it may help us predict those he’ll make in the future as well.

Iran

Let’s start with the crisis du jour: Iran. It’s still not entirely clear why we attacked the country. Supposedly, it’s because Iran’s nuclear capabilities had grown significantly, even though the president literally told us last summer that they were obliterated. Either way, the general idea was that Iran posed an “imminent threat” due to its belligerent regime, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The solution, then, was obvious: Install a new regime. Indeed, Trump said regime change would be the “best thing that could happen.”

As with the ballroom, the regime change operation kicked off by tearing things down. The U.S. launched more than 12,000 airstrikes on Iran, hitting 11,000 targets and more than 150 vessels. It also (according to preliminary investigations) destroyed a girls’ elementary school, killing over a hundred children in the process. Trump quickly swept those details aside and hailed the successful assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, which brought the murderous dictator’s regime to an end.

A few days later, we learned who’d be running the new regime: the dictator’s son. Yes, the Iranian succession plan went exactly according to script — only instead of the 86-year-old Ayatollah dying of natural causes (which was already imminent), he was assassinated by the nation’s sworn enemy. So not only did we not install a more friendly regime, we made the existing regime even angrier and more radical.

Soon after Khamenei Jr. was installed into power, Trump arrived at the “fix later” part of the operation. The “goal has been attained” he said. “We’ll be leaving very soon … within two weeks.” Few believed his new timeline after he blew the first one. But what’s more important is the sentiment: The operation was more tiring and complex than he bargained for — he’s over the whole Iran thing.

A trail of destruction is left in his wake. Not just in terms of lives (nearly 4,000 and counting) but the economy, too. U.S. gas prices have risen more than 30%. In Europe, they’re up more than 50%. Fertilizer prices, an essential input cost for food, have risen nearly 50%. Construction material prices are ballooning, which will lead to even higher housing costs. Investors went from expecting multiple rate cuts this year to expecting a rate hike, and recession odds have risen almost 10%. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, this war is making all of us poorer. In sum: Lots got broken and nothing got fixed.

Tariffs

The same pattern played out last year, in what has become Trump’s most defining policy: tariffs. On “Liberation Day,” Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to authorize the largest tariff hike on foreign imports in nearly a century in an attempt to reign in the trade deficit. Many of our closest allies were blindsided with rates as high as 50%. He even tariffed the Heard and McDonald Islands, a territory inhabited by only seals and penguins.

Chaos immediately ensued. The S&P 500 sold off nearly 10% — its largest weekly drop since the pandemic, erasing $5 trillion in market value. As Trump started to ease and pause tariffs, markets recovered — but supply chains didn’t. Nearly a third of all sea shipments were canceled immediately. As import costs rose, companies began to pass on those costs to their customers. Within a few months inflation was ripping upward again, as nearly 80% of the tariff burden was funneling down to the consumer. The average American was facing an estimated $2,000 annual financial loss, according to The Yale Budget Lab.

Things got even stupider when the Supreme Court determined in February that the tariffs were illegal. This wasn’t a difficult decision: Trump had falsely claimed emergency powers and levied a tax on Americans without congressional approval. As Founding Father James Madison put it, “Congress alone has access to the pockets of the people.” The U.S. government must now return the $160 billion it had collected over the course of the tariff saga. (In other words, this was all for nothing.) Ironically, despite bearing the majority of the costs, consumers won’t see a penny, as they did not directly pay the tariffs themselves. So not only did we not get anything done, we also set back American households even further. #BNFL.

DOGE

A major component of the Trump 2.0 agenda was to reduce wasteful government spending. The goal was, in Trump’s words, “to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the budget.” So he created the “Department of Government Efficiency” and employed Elon Musk to get it done.

Within days it was clear that Elon and Trump had a shared passion for blowing things up. They immediately ripped up thousands of contracts, fired more than 200,000 government workers, and fed an entire agency known as USAID “into the wood chipper.” It’s estimated the elimination of USAID (which specialized in foreign assistance) will lead to nearly 10 million preventable deaths over the next four years. A high price, but a price they were willing to pay.

That was until DOGE got shut down. After a highly predictable falling-out between the president and Mr. Musk, the agency was quietly dissolved and its employees let go. The department said it saved $215 billion. Independent analyses have concluded the real number was a fraction of that, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll go with it. On Elon’s own terms, those results were underwhelming: His original projection was $2 trillion.

It wouldn’t be a true BNFL, however, if Trump didn’t actively make matters worse — and in the case of government efficiency, that’s exactly what he did. Right as Elon was canceling spending plans, Trump was building a new one: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would prove to be one of the largest government expenditures in American history. The bill both reduced revenue and increased spending, loading up our government with an additional $850 billion in expected interest payments and adding an estimated $4.2 trillion to our national debt over the next decade. There is no bill less efficient than this, which begs the obvious question: What was DOGE even for?

Take Your Pick

So far we’ve reviewed three major policy decisions, each of which were quintessentially BNFL, but let’s be clear, there have been plenty more. For example:

• Promising (threatening) to “take” Greenland, thus ruining our relationships with NATO allies, only to get distracted and ultimately reverse the decision on the global stage.

• Pressuring the Fed chair to cut rates (and threatening to fire him), which eventually raised yields as investors priced in the danger of an un-independent Federal Reserve, only to walk back his comments and let Powell play out the rest of his term.

• Pursuing greater energy independence with “drill, baby, drill” policies, which actually just meant gutting clean-energy programs. This backfired when we spiked oil prices with yet another war in the Middle East, making us even more in need of renewable energy than we already were.

Like the ballroom, each policy starts with a grand vision that could feasibly be framed as a net positive for society but is soon followed by a cynical fit of destruction. Then, once it’s time to actually build the thing, the circumstances suddenly change and it’s no longer possible. The strategy amounts to annihilation. It’s “move fast and break things,” minus the innovation.

Two Interpretations

There are two ways to interpret the BNFL strategy. One reading is that Trump is simply in over his head. After all, it’s easier to break things than to make things. To build anything worthwhile, you have to invest time and effort, you have to achieve a consensus, you have to pay attention to detail — and the president has no interest in any of these things.

There’s also a darker interpretation, however, and although I don’t necessarily believe it, I think it would be unwise to rule it out. That reading is the following: Maybe he genuinely only wants to destroy things. Maybe this systematic pattern of destruction is by design, and his promises to build things anew are in fact lies meant to conceal his thirst for destruction. That would make him a psychopath, sure, and psychopaths are rare. At the same time, though, the probability that a series of policies would all lead to the same destructive end by accident is … equally rare. Again, I’m not saying I believe this interpretation. I’m just saying it’s possible.

Artemis

I’ve struggled to write this, as every time I try to type my mind returns to Artemis II. More specifically, it returns to the mission’s recent photograph of Earth, which will go down as one of the most iconic images ever.

The image is a reminder that to build anything worthwhile takes time. It took nearly a decade of planning to send these astronauts into space. The astronauts themselves prepared for this specific mission for more than three years. The operation didn’t just involve them, but the coordinated efforts of tens of thousands of people. Nothing this hard could ever get done without collaboration and planning.

In a way, it’s the opposite of BNFL. Build now, fix … forever. A stark contrast to the image with which this post began.

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P.S.

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