I would very much like to agree: I am often angry about politics in the US and think the governments here are basically "three war crimes and a real estate scam

I would very much like to agree: I am often angry about politics in the US and think the governments here are basically "three war crimes and a real estate scam in a trench coat". You might consider why almost everyone, including those of us on the far left who despise these institutions, are worried. Unfortunately the folks running the show have been so uniformly nasty to me, people I care about, and the world in general that it's super hard to trust them. I and a lot of queer folks feel directly attacked by this admin, and I've seen a whole lot of folks happily embrace positions that I find actively racist and revanchist. If we compare the rhetoric of, say, FDR to the current admin there is now a complete absence of "we are in this trying time together". Instead it feels very much like folks are thinking "the storm has come" and all their political grievances towards anyone to the left of Reagan will finally come to fruition, and all us blue haired xis and xirs will probably get sent to a black site. And if the bad guys really were going to get their comeuppance, then maybe the nasty cultural connotations involved could be overlooked (they can't be, but let's pretend). Because at the same time, the folks who are making these changes seem incredibly incompetent. It very much looks like they are mashing buttons without any understanding of what they do. I have learned how to operate enough complex tools to know what it looks like when someone with no understanding is just pushing buttons and seeing what happens. That's fine when it's some nerd like me plugging stuff into a modular synth... it seems incredibly worrisome when it's the levers on how much my food will cost or how long I will have to wait until I retire. You can tell me that I'm ignorant and can't see what's going on (that's not a new thought even to myself), but I feel the same way about watching these folks "Hello World" their way through a rewrite of the US Gov as I feel about watching Musk "Sieg Heil": when you make me choose between you and my lying eyes, I am gonna have to go with my eye balls. I'd be stoked to see the whole CIA disbanded. I have no confidence that the folks in power now have either the skills to make that happen, and worry that if they do they will replace it with something even more criminal and vicious. The Storm isn't coming (to be clear, I think that idea is a naval-gazing fantasy). They are just putting their own swamp and whatever they might replace the current systems with is probably just going to screw us all harder. And even if they weren't actively hostile to folks who don't already make mid-6-figures, they likely don't have the chops to implement workable, long-standing institutions.