Opinion | The Budget Fight and Trumps Nihilistic Style

In about a month, the inauguration will complete a loop: Donald Trump will become president again, eight years after the initial event.The Trump era of American life will last about 12 years, including the Biden interregnum, stretching from the summer of 2015 into the winter of 2029.The country has, to understate it, already wildly changed.None of us are the same people we were eight years ago.

Politics definitely isn’t the same as it was — even people’s reactions to Mr.Trump winning the presidency again are different.

This time it has played out more like a mix of resignation, alienation and openness than the shock and refusal of late 2016.“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Mr.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday morning.He is like a magnet who pulls, repels and reshapes what surrounds him.There is the constant pull between the idea that what’s happening in the news must have a point and the occasional and disorienting sense of pointlessness, such as the fight over the government funding process over the last few days, only for the proposed end results to not look so different from before in a big picture sense.That sequence involved three parts that drew on existing political dynamics but were surprising to experience altogether this week: Elon Musk attacked the bill that would have funded the government through mid-March for having too much superfluous spending, Mr.

Trump concurrently asked that the debt limit be abolished and a sizable group of House Republicans voted no on Thursday to a deal that Mr.Trump supported.

(A new bill passed the House on Friday night with both Republican and Democratic votes.)A major part of the past two years has been Mr.Trump’s promise that radical, dramatic change is coming, undergirded by the broader movement of national conservatives and the more hard-core MAGA universe, from mass deportations to a rethinking of American power abroad.

We’re already in an era of deep change, which happens in big and sm...