Leadership incompetency and it's residual effects.

I'm not generally inclined towards seeing the silver lining in the Trump presidency. He's still doing real harm in a lot of ways. But there is perhaps something to theory that he's unintentionally demonstrating an important lesson for Americans. That the President of the United States, the "most powerful man in the world," can be insanely incompetent, borderline-illiterate, outrageously corrupt, and leading an administration in total chaos... and yet life more or less goes on as normal. Even the machinery of the federal government continues mostly-unaffected. And with a few (still very important!) exceptions, most people's lives have been mostly-unaffected beyond watching the side-show spectacle of it all.

Bill Clinton once tried to spin his tawdry scandals with the hope that maybe he'd helped "demystify" the Presidency. No kidding. We've now somehow reached the point where the President can have a babbling word-salad meltdown for half an hour on live TV, with a trio of his most loyal cheerleaders visibly cringing their way through it... and it wasn't even the biggest news story of the day.

Deflating America's messianic god-emperor centre-of-the-universe expectations for the Oval Office is exactly the opposite of what he wanted, but if Trump does end up having that effect... I'll take it.