Why Politics Is So Insanely Complicated in 2025

Ed Kilgore: “Every major news story in the past week had one thing in common: none of it was remotely simple or easy to explain. The basic facts surrounding the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities were obscured by walls of secrecy and spin. The New York mayoral primary was hard to predict thanks to the city’s complex ranked choice voting system and the byzantine alliances and rivalries it spawned. And above all, the domestic governance of the country continued to be snarled in arcane judicial, congressional, and executive branch procedures.”

“Systemic chaos and confusion have been the reigning leifmotif of the second Trump presidency. If your grasp of the way government is supposed to work is based on Schoolhouse Rock or social studies lessons on ‘how a bill becomes law,’ the last five months or so must have been baffling to you. It’s not an accident, either: Donald Trump’s ways of doing business make the normal business practices of the public sector all but impossible.”