Every day that I wake up in the United States I give thanks for the stupidity of Donald Trump and his administration. Because that’s what’s going to save the country.

The most alarming thing about the American craziness that began in January 2025 has not been President Trump’s spiteful, unhinged, wrecking-ball behaviour. It’s been the utter failure of the institutions that were supposed to stop it. Americans used to talk a great game about their system of checks and balances, the way the system would distribute power and not concentrate it. Turns out that checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers: in the UK and South Korea, they removed the crazy people and the would-be tyrants just as they’re supposed to, and democracy continues to flourish – the way it did in the US in 1974, when President Nixon committed a clear abuse of power and there was widespread bipartisan agreement to stop it. Whereas in the second Trump term, after multiple abuses on a scale with Watergate, the politicians who can impeach a tyrant and (to a significant extent) the Supreme Court that can rein in his power meet most of it with a collective ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Even the non-government institutions of civil society that had proclaimed their resistance to the much tamer first administration – corporations, universities, law firms – often showed a terrifying willingness to kowtow.

With the pathetic weakness of the vaunted American institutions thus exposed, it would have been child’s play for a would-be dictator to end American democracy, become a monarch for life, and make opposition illegal. If Trump were even half as smart as Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan or Xi Jinping, it would all be over. All the relevant institutions would have bowed to him, opposition would be suppressed, the Democratic Party would be made effectively illegal, we socialists and legal immigrants and gender non-conformers would be in jail. In that situation, staying in the US to support my friends would feel less compelling – I couldn’t support them from jail, or dead. American democracy would have had a good run of 250 years, and that would be it.

Mercifully for Americans, it so happens that Trump is a complete idiot. And so are the people trying to prop him up.

Among the more alarming of the administration’s many fascistic behaviours is its attempt to prosecute opposition leaders – yet nearly all of these have failed. While the abuses of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are chilling, they are not succeeding at their goals: as of this May, Trump had lost nearly 10 000 ICE-related court cases and won just over 1000. An administration on its way to a successful fascist takeover would not accidentally leak war plans to a journalist.

The most recent entry in the long list of “actions that would be terrifying if they were actually competent” was the attempt to punish former special counsel Jack Smith for having investigated the administration, where a Republican senator claimed to have found a smoking gun convicting Smith of perjury… but a followup question humiliated the senator, showing the whole accusation depended on his confusing the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes. Political scientist Daniel W. Drezner put it best: “What is therefore worth stressing is the myriad ways in which the Trump administration has been unable to autocrat its way out of a paper bag.”

And that’s not even to mention the Trump administration’s biggest mistake (a tremendously high bar, for an administration that Drezner rightly called a clown car.) I’m speaking, of course, of the war in Iran. It was never even clear what this invasion was supposed to accomplish. (Régime change? Weapons of mass destruction? Cheap oil?) But its execution was not merely a loss; it has made the Vietnam War look like a success by comparison. The war has left Iran’s anti-American theocratic régime more powerful than before, with the US now in a much weaker geopolitical position than it was at the start, losing control of the Strait of Hormuz so central to world oil shipping. And of course, this has all caused prices to rise dramatically, under an American régime that was elected promising above all to lower them – and to not get embroiled in foreign wars the way previous Republican régimes did. So the intellectuals once most supportive of Trump (Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene) have left him, and even his base doesn’t have the enthusiasm it once did.

None of that is good for the people of Iran, of course. Nor is it good for the long-run economic or geopolitical situation of the United States. But it does at least bode well for the US’s internal politics. A year ago, most of us educated Americans were understandably living in fear of the horrors this government was out to inflict. But while the damage being caused is still very real, the government still looks a lot less terrifying – because owing to its own comedy of errors, its power is very much contracting rather than expanding.

This administration has made me think a lot of Disney’s 1943 anti-Nazi propaganda cartoon, Der Fuehrer’s Face, well worth watching nearly a century later. This short is striking to watch today in a variety of ways – not least for the startling depiction of Donald Duck making a Nazi salute. But what strikes me even more in “Der Fuehrer’s Face” is the depiction of the Nazis themselves.

Knowing as we do today about the massive horors inflicted by the Nazis in the 1940s, we are used to thinking of them as a menacing, Lovecraftian sort of evil, which makes them terrifying, a source of genuine fear. So it’s startling to see this short film depict Nazis as, well, goofy: a comical oompah tuba march that would be at home in Dr. Seuss.

I think many would view this depiction of goofy Nazis as problematic: disrespectful, perhaps, to those who perished to their horrors. Looking back on the millions murdered, there are understandable reasons to insist that the Nazis’ evil is no laughing matter.

And yet.

The people who watched “Der Fuehrer’s Face” in the 1940s, the ones who laughed hard at goofy Nazi idiots – those were the people who defeated the Nazis. The American soldiers and workers who united in common cause for the successful effort that was World War II: they weren’t looking at their murderous opponents as implacable cosmic horrors. They were looking at them as goofy clowns. And that’s really important – because goofy clowns are a lot easier to beat.

In 2025 as Trump was gutting scientific agencies and introducing a secret police force that would imprisoning people for free speech, while those who could stand in their way fell over in shameful cowardice, it was all too easy to view him as a brutally efficient evil, on the way to creating a thousand-year Reich. But this was all to give him far too much credit. Not unlike the way that the Social Justice movement endlessly flatters white people in a non-moral sense by treating them as the only agents of history, our fear and despair gave Trump a credit that he did not deserve.

Few of us alive today had any experience with actual Nazis before the Trump era. In our early lives, the accepted way to treat Nazis was with a grave moral seriousness responding to their genuine evil; for many decades, this seemed to work as a way of recognizing that Nazis were beyond the pale, unacceptable in every sense. That’s not working anymore, now that Nazis are tragically widespread, a live option, whether we like it or not.

And in that era, I think we have a lot to learn from “Der Fuehrer’s Face”. What we need to do now is beat the Nazis and related forms of right-wing authoritarianism. And in doing that, surely our best teachers are the grandparents and great-grandparents – usually no longer with us – who actually did beat the Nazis once before. They didn’t tremble before the relentless onslaught of an inexorable evil. They laughed at the comical foolishness of their grotesque foes. And they got the job done. The audience of “Der Fuehrer’s Face” did the thing we need to do now: hand the authoritarians a defeat so decisive that they are powerless for generations.

The Trump administration’s idiocy is no comfort, of course, for those unfortunate enough to be in its direct path: the innocents accidentally arrested by untrained ICE officers, the people of Iran, and others far too numerous to count. I don’t mean to minimize their suffering. But I do think that for the majority of us who are not affected by it in so dire a way, it is a relief to know that this has an end. The wheels are coming off the clown car. A lot more damage will be done in the next two years. But the damage is being done by clowns. And we should be grateful for that, for clowns are a lot easier to defeat than titans.