I ultimately think it's a mistake to attribute too much intentionality to decisions with this many moving parts. A lot of compromises are made and backroom deals are struck, and we'll never know the full details of them all. Regardless, I don't think we're looking at conspiracies so much as at the interaction of faceless systems which have run for decades on interchangeable functionaries, functionaries distinguished by party affiliations which mean increasingly less. The chaos we're seeing right now isn't, I don't think, a deliberate effort at subverting the system as much as a collision between the system and an 'outsider' who is less unwilling than unable to play the game.
Imagine you're at a wedding reception and it's still kinda fun, cringey white-people dancing but no angry drunks so it's at least entertaining to watch. A whole bunch of people decide to bust out line-dance standards and a relatively coordinated Electric Slide breaks out. But there's this dude who's been there the whole time, family member on the groom's side, maybe. Well-dressed, looks like he's got decent money, but visibly uncomfortable whenever he's not the center of attention. Everyone's watching and laughing and having a good time and he's out there on the periphery of it all, increasingly discontent with being left out. Eventually he charges in, hellbent on having every last fragment of your attention, and plants himself dead center in the middle of the group. Looking on from the edge of the dance floor, you almost immediately realize "Holy shit, this guy doesn't know the steps at all!" But he's gonna dance, dammit, whether he matches the others or not. Only problem is, everyone else has done these same steps at, like, dozens of weddings and parties, and they know exactly where they've stepped next every time before. However, our would-be protagonist is doing his own thing in the middle, and there's no such thing to him as negative attention. The dancers can't avoid tripping over the guy and keep in step with the person on either side and know what the guy two people away is gonna do, and the result is a hilarious human pileup that renders it utterly impossible for anyone to dance.
Now, I'm more or less indifferent to the Electric Slide. Maybe the rich guy's possibly inebriated, unarguably uncoordinated dancing would be a hell of a lot more entertaining to watch, if he were out there by himself. But everyone else on that floor, bride's side or groom's side, knew the steps - even if they weren't the best steps - and they would've been able to keep their dance up for a while had they not been interrupted. And it ultimately doesn't matter whether the rich white guy's dance was better than the Electric Slide everyone else has been doing since forever, because when the pileup happens and everyone flops to the dance floor, nobody is dancing anymore.
Now imagine, if you will, that the guy who pushed his way to the middle of the floor is just the loudest and most visible of a number of somewhat drunk dudes who would rather do their own thing than follow the steps, and there are smaller pileups going on at least once or twice a song because these guys feel the need to express their dissatisfaction with the established dance moves from the middle of the floor. Nothing's gonna get done. And those guys have their own agendas - they didn't come with the rich guy in the middle - and they've got their own alternate alternate dance moves. That, to me, is what's going on in Washington right now.
At the risk of misjudging the man's character (though I at least won't insistently refer to him as a 'piece of shit' as others are wont to do), I feel it's relatively safe to say that the central figure of Donald J. Trump's ideology, his political philosophy, and his ontological construction of existence is none other than Donald J. Trump. I think many wealthy individuals, most sufficiently famous people, and damn near all politicians have at least a touch of clinical narcissism, but DJT the man seems to have been entirely subsumed by The Donald and the Trump brand. I think whatever he does at this point is aimed at the advancement of his image, or more accurately the advancement of the persona he's constructed through which to interact with the world. I'm not sure there's any real intent to create or destroy anything, just a compulsion to be the smartest guy who made the most final decisions about the most important issues. I'm sure, Wondy, that DJT would dearly love to be known as the guy who 'saved America' even if he's not really sure how to go about that. But at the moment he's a guy in the middle of the dance floor doing his own thing.
The problem is made far worse when you look around and see the other guys on the dance floor out to do their own thing, who've actually been dancing to the same steps as everyone else for years and years but suddenly see a chance to also be smart guys making final decisions about important things. At this point, in the GOP it looks like a split between the old money who care far less about actual Republican principle than just preserving the comfortable slice of the economic pie they've been carving out for themselves, and then the Freedom Caucus and Tea Party holdovers who are blindly but relentlessly driven by their own poorly-translated approximation of "real conservatism" and "traditional values", and would be perfectly content to trip up every single person on this proverbial dance floor just so long as they can stop that damn Electric Slide. Neither of those factions seems to have a coherent plan for how to actually create something new once they've finished pulling down all the shit they don't like, but I don't think even the few who are aware of that are particularly bothered by it. There are a handful who honestly just want to be done with the pointless cross-aisle bickering and are willing to compromise in pursuit of actually accomplishing something on behalf of their constituents, but they're very definitely lost in the shuffle.
So to recap, you've got the DNC and some of the GOP's old guard all over the floor, pissed off that they can't keep doing the dance they've been doing for years. You've got a few moderates trying to help people up and at least get them out of the pile to figure out what to do next. You've got a whole bunch of half-assed paleocon True Believers busting a clumsy yet tasteful and family-friendly move in the path of anyone who's still even attempting to do the previous dance, and then shouting angrily at those they knock over for having the temerity to disrespect their shitty-dancing "heritage". And finally you've got our hero dead-center in the middle of the dance floor, gyrating frantically and flailing his arms to something totally different from every other damn person out there, screaming for you to notice what a magnificent dancer he is and how important he looks with his big hands and totally natural hair.
