From Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: Colonel Kurtz: “Are my methods unsound?” Captain Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

I was listing for my neighbor Swamp Rabbit some of the steps Donald Trump took to undermine the law in the first weeks of his second term — illegal arrest and deportation of foreign-born residents, a crackdown on media outlets that question his judgment and motives, ongoing defiance of the courts system, an all-out attack on environmental protection laws …

“Trump wants to fix it so there ain’t nothin’ to stop him from being a dictator,” Swamp Rabbit said. “There’s a method to his madness, I guess.”

But my neighbor was giving our first criminal president too much credit. As the New Republic‘s Ross Rosenfeld recently suggested, there’s no method — there’s only madness, and a desire to wreck anything that promotes the common good. Trump and his minions, led by Elon Musk, have already dismissed thousands of federal workers, shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, raided the Treasury Department, made enemies of countries that were our allies, explored new ways to eliminate Social Security, and much more.

“I don’t care about that stuff,” Swamp Rabbit joked. “How about the price of eggs?”

Eggs are the least of our problems, I told him. Trump’s goal is to grab all the loot in the country for himself and his billionaire cronies, and smash everything else in order to do so. Chaos is his ally. His minions lay off nuclear weapons workers. They impose tariffs that could blow up the economy. They cut health services as measles is spreading.

I played for my neighbor the Laurie Anderson recording about a lunatic airline pilot instructing his passengers to prepare for a crash landing: Put your head on your knees… Put your head in your hands… Put your hands on your hips… Ha-ha… We are going down… We are all going down together.

Footnote: Robert Reich is growing impatient regarding people who are in a position to fight Trump. A recent post of his was headlined: “Where the HELL are the Democrats?” He should follow it with “Where the HELL are the media?”