This photo caught Trump off guard — and should scare the hell out of America

I keep thinking about that haunting photograph of Donald Trump, framed in the window of his gilded new Air Force One, looking at poster boards prepared for him by the foolhardy lackey Bill Pulte and apparently unaware that he could be seen.

It's an unforgettable image because it captured something I can't stop noticing: every day now feels like looking through that window and watching something get demolished. Trump has unleashed total destruction on this country, and it's gotten to a point where it's too much to comprehend.

Americans have been spoiled, myself included. For decades, we have assumed certain things would just be there.

We would have a growing economy, and if it faltered, the government would give it a lift.

We would have the world's most capable military, a respected and venerable diplomatic corps that could smartly negotiate peace. We would have cheap gas, medical schools turning out the best doctors and psychiatrists year after year. We would have civil rights protections, a functioning justice system, and a president who might not be perfect, but had America's best interests at heart.

There were always hiccups because any government is an evolving work in progress. There have been countless times when our frustration bubbled up and we protested, spoke out, and switched things up at election time.

The point is that we didn't have to think about any of it. That was the luxury of living inside institutions built by people who came before us, always improving or adapting. Failing, yes, at times, but always seemingly bouncing back.

I think Americans still generally believe that despite all of the intense turmoil over the last year and 10 months, American institutions will just go back to normal once the demolishing storm that is Trump passes. But what took decades to stand up, and less than two years to demolish, will take decades again to return to those simple expectations.

The Environmental Protection Agency is being hollowed out just as climate consequences accelerate. Health and Human Services is being run in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. telling an anti-vaccine crowd “they have a friend” in the White House, while funding and guidance for the next pandemic quietly disappear.

And the Justice Department? The proverbial wrecking ball has already crashed that from all sides of the building.

Throughout our government, career civil servants, the unglamorous people who actually keep agencies running across administrations, are being pushed out. What happened to transgender intelligence expert Julia Curlee is emblematic of other highly skilled professionals being kicked to the curb for reasons that have nothing to do with their job performance.

Even in corporate America, there's demolition occurring. Take CBS News, once a genuine standard-bearer for American broadcast journalism for generations, which has had its integrity demolished by the heavy hand of Trump.

Trade relationships with Canada and Mexico that took generations to build are being demolished. And now there's that foam board of the demolition of the Kennedy Center, the demolition of the White House's East Wing to make room for a ballroom, an act that runs against everything the building has stood for in its plain, deliberate simplicity.

This week, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who runs a psychiatric training program at Columbia University. The government support it has relied on for years is gone. The program has been cancelled.

He reminded me that what happened to his program is a microcosm. Multiply that by every medical and doctoral training program across the country that depended on the same kind of funding, and that pipeline providing future doctors and psychiatrists stops.

Any interruption in that process will take years to rectify. Doctors aren't trained overnight.

Here's what worries me most: We all go blithely along, with none of this demolition yet apparent. Gas is still relatively cheap. The stock market hasn't collapsed. Most people go about their lives without feeling the absence of cancelled medical training grants, a gutted pandemic preparedness office, or not seeing ICE agents roam their streets. There are so many other things waiting in the wings that could disappear.

But all of these institutions and actions don't fall over the way buildings collapse. It takes time to dismantle their effectiveness. They are eroding before our eyes, and the moment we need them, we will discover they're not there.

You don't build a great medical education system, a functioning diplomatic corps, or a competent public health apparatus overnight. It takes decades. And when you tear it down, rebuilding takes decades too.

Ask yourself this: If you are a public servant who was cut by Elon Musk's indiscriminate DOGE, will you be available to come back in 2029 after a Democratic administration takes office? Most likely not, because the infrastructure you helped build is gone, you've taken another job, and you're not going to go back to a disaster area with the thought that in four years you could be fired again.

That's the part I don't think many Americans get. Even in the more immediate, best-case scenario, if Democrats retake the House and Senate, some competent people are reinstalled and funding is restored, you cannot simply flip a switch and have back what was lost.

The talent that left won't all come back. The programs that closed won't reopen on the old timeline. The relationships with allies that frayed will need to be painstakingly rebuilt, if they can be at all.

And we're doing all of this at the exact moment artificial intelligence is reshaping the world faster than any technology in memory. It's a moment that is screaming for more institutional competence and foresight, not less.

Layer that on top of everything else in the throes of being dismantled, and the country is heading into genuinely uncertain territory with a weaker infrastructure than it's had in generations, or maybe in the short lifespan of a 250-year-old democracy.

I don't say any of this to scare the bejesus out of anyone. I say it because I think most Americans wake up with blue skies in their eyes, not realizing that somewhere behind them, a wrecking ball is swinging closer and closer to causing irrevocable damage. Eventually, all of what Trump's doing will come home to roost.

And when it does, the picture of a poster board of the Kennedy Center being demolished will have been an ugly harbinger.