Washington power players are engaged in a relatively new high-risk sport: the game of breaking things.
Silicon Valley paved the way, embodying Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra: “move fast and break things.” In a relatively short time, the act of breaking has gone from a mixed or destructive impulse to being presented as a sign of great entrepreneurial agility and dynamic energy, a modern idol. And the first capital of breaking on the West Coast has found a new home in the White House.
If the Trump administration is about anything, it’s about using its power to break things.
So breaking the National Park System, a jewel of the nation and a draw for visitors from around the globe, displays their power. As does breaking the local control that citizens and their local elected officials have over their cities and counties, breaking the Federal Reserve and the banking system it regulates, breaking the way the nation collects labor and economic statistics, and breaking the emergence of renewable energy sources.
The breaking continues and accelerates, one act crashing into the next. Today, health care. Tomorrow, the U.S. Postal Service. The day after that, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other federal agencies — as well as any institutions that have the capacity to exert accountability. In the near future, Social Security. If breaking national entities isn’t enough, there are international treaties, strategic alliances, and key global relationships of all kinds to be broken.
This appetite for breaking feeds on itself. Because every act of breaking ends with nothing built, nothing advanced, nothing improved, there’s a need to keep moving faster and breaking more. Breaking the next thing distracts attention from the damage done by the last destructive act.
I first saw the elite using their power to break things back when I went to Yale on a scholarship in the late 1960s. I had a bursary job clearing tables in the freshman dining hall.
One night, just for fun, a group of guys stacked their trays, filled with dirty plates and glasses, one on top of each other, higher and higher. So high that the bursary boy trying to clean up their mess would find it impossible to dismantle easily and clear. Their teetering tower would inevitably crash to the floor. Then the entire dining hall would echo with howls and laughter from those who set the trap.
That, of course, was the whole point. Those guys felt entitled to break things — plates and glasses then, bigger things later. They knew that someone else would clean up — some scholarship kid, some Puerto Rican or Black cafeteria worker. If they got into trouble, they knew someone would bail them out — mommy or daddy then, a lawyer or PR consultant later.
But these new breakers have taken this to a new level: They have elevated breaking as their core and sole mission. They have one big problem though: They don’t know what they are for.
It’s only a matter of time before increasing numbers of Americans — the many and increasing millions struggling to survive in a service economy, or losing jobs to the latest tech triumph or brutal federal cut, or with few or no benefits, or with incomes that can’t possibly support a starter home — begin to weary of this program of breaking all things.
People, if organized, still have the power to put the brakes on these breakers — and put the country back on a track that meets the unmet needs of the vast and complex American center — what I call its “mixed middle.” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson laid this out in her recent New York Times opinion piece:
“For politicians, the center has atrophied. … But among voters … the center may be alive and well. … Voters are complicated. People in the American center are likely to be heterodox in their viewpoints. Our country is so often described as polarized and hopelessly divided, but the reality is that there is a great deal more ideological complexity in the American electorate than we might think.”
You don’t have to be a top-flight pollster to find that complex middle and hear the range of views the people there share. You just need to go out and listen to them.
The communities and candidates that do that in 2026 could halt and reverse this mindless binge of breaking — and steer the nation back to a period of recovery, where people again take pride in building, in making.
Gecan, is a senior advisor at Metro Industrial Areas Foundation and the author of “Going Public” and first wrote about his Yale experience in the Village Voice (“Tribes of Yale,” Aug. 19, 2003).
