Trump's spaghetti-test presidency
Throwing stuff at the wall turns into a recipe for chaos
Food historian Luca Cesari wrote in 2017 that Italians living abroad are almost invariably asked about testing the doneness of pasta by throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks.
No serious chef would ever use that test. The idea is bogus, but as Cesari noted in an Italian-language post (thanks Google Translate!), “like all urban legends, this one must also contain a grain of truth, otherwise it would be inexplicable why this picturesque story continues to be repeated outside the peninsula” of Italy.
While chefs today almost always prefer pasta that still has a bit of bite to it (“al dente”), that was not always the case. Sticky, doughy pasta was once the norm. Cesari cited 19th century cookbooks that prescribed cooking pasta for 30 minutes, 45 minutes and in one case, even an hour.
Recipes aside, the spaghetti test has migrated from a folk tale to a marketing strategy. Throwing many things at the wall to see what sticks can be viewed as a fruitful research technique, even though some management experts say it’s no way to run a business.
Yet the first 44 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency can fairly be described as employing a “throw it against the wall” ethos. It characterized his business career — from Trump Steaks to Trump University, from bibles to watches to crypto — but has obvious drawbacks for running a country of 340 million people.
Trump has boasted about the effectiveness of his improvisational rally speeches: he calls his approach “the weave.” In his second term, he’s adopted a similarly freewheeling style in making policy — putting something out there on social media, often with no apparent prompting, and seeing how the world reacts.
There seems to be no one in the White House with the standing to check his impulses and few Republicans outside the building who dare to challenge him. Judges are scrambling to keep up with the pace of Trump’s decisions and blocking some of the new president’s moves.
Trump is largely free to hurl things at the wall and see if they stick — perhaps with the only real curbs being how the polls and the markets respond.
Ready, fire, aim
So far, some big changes are sticking, including the gutting of the foreign assistance agency USAID. But policy shifts have led to a remarkable number of misfires and chaotic last-minute swerves:
Trump threatened to impose 25% tariffs against Mexico and Canada at the beginning of February, then put the tariffs on pause for 30 days, only to institute them at the beginning of March. On Wednesday, he promised auto companies a one-month reprieve from the Mexico and Canada tariffs.
In a bid to project toughness, Trump’s team started using military aircraft to deport immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally, but the administration paused the practice after it “proved expensive and inefficient,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Some flights carried a dozen people to Guantanamo at a cost of at least $20,000 for a migrant, the Journal’s analysis showed.”
The General Services Administration slammed the brakes on a plan to sell “440 federal buildings representing nearly 80 million square feet of space that only hours earlier it had listed for sale,” the Journal reported. “That followed stinging criticism from workers in the buildings, elected officials and others opposed to the mass property sale that led the GSA to pause.”
The courts paused Trump administration plans to cut off $2 billion in foreign aid and to unilaterally slash the amount the government pays universities and other research institutions for some costs related to scientific research work.
Trump unveiled a plan to evict Palestinians from Gaza and turn it into a massive resort area, but backed off after it became clear Arab nations wouldn’t accept millions of displaced Gazans.
The administration moved to suspend arms shipments and to pause intelligence sharing with Ukraine, as Trump expressed more support for the invader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, than he has for Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Still, the road to a peace agreement sought by Trump appears long and complicated, and it’s not at all clear how the U.S. can safely steer to the end of it.
Still to come, according to news reports, are massive cuts to the staffs of such agencies as the Internal Revenue Service and the Veterans Affairs Department, as Elon Musk continues to swing his DOGE axe.
Left out of the process is the Congress of the United States, theoretically an equal branch of government which passed the laws that funded and established federal agencies and empowered the executive branch to set regulations. Republicans who control both houses are treading carefully lest they incur the ire of the MAGA base by publicly objecting to Trumpian policies.
Why it doesn’t work
Many of the consequences of Trump’s actions could have been foreseen by experts who have questioned the use of the spaghetti test in the private sector. As Howard Kullman wrote for Inc. magazine in 2019, “throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks doesn’t actually work for spaghetti or for startups.” Kullman added:
the idea seems to be that sheer volume and variety — tossing dozens of different products into the market as rapidly as possible — is deemed the key to successful innovation rather than adopting a more targeted and limited approach based on consumer research and testing, followed by launching a few strong contenders and then constantly iterating from there. There’s a lot less frenzy and maybe even a little less fun, but it’s much more likely to lead to near-perfect pasta. More isn’t necessarily better — only better is better — and less is often more.
A measured approach to transforming an organization as complex as the federal government would be to conduct a thorough study of its operations, craft a plan identifying what should change and what shouldn’t and draft a step-by-step transition process.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for some of what the Trump administration is doing, pooled the thoughts of a group of conservatives who were extremely frustrated at their lack of success in shrinking the size of government through the Bush and Trump administrations. They also wanted to vastly expand the powers of the executive branch, overshadowing Congress and the judiciary.
Finally, there was a heavy cultural component to the project. Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts wrote in an opening essay, “Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left — at home and abroad.”
Thus Project 2025 did not even pretend to be a non-ideological study of the government’s strengths and weaknesses.
Business jitters
America’s business community is largely bewildered by the rush of change in Washington. Trump’s actions have created huge uncertainty about tariffs and trade, government spending and other policies.
“The United States economy is starting to show signs of strain as President Trump’s abrupt moves to shrink federal spending, lay off government workers and impose tariffs on America’s largest trading partners rattle businesses and reverberate across states and cities,” the New York Times reported.
Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday did score points with his base. But it got us no closer to a true understanding of the logic of throwing so much spaghetti at the wall.
Spaghetti? This guy's hurling eggplant parm. Government by splatter. It will take years to clean up the mess.
The biggest pile of pasta that Trump is hurling at the wall is the number of dead people allegedly receiving Social Security. His endless recitation of Musky-smelling numbers was totally false, of course. But it's just one aspect of the drive to privatize Social Security. An even bigger pile of pasta is the plan to fire many thousands of Social Security workers. The idea is to make the public—including those who are receiving Social Security payments—believe that the government-run system isn't working, and it's time to privatize Social Security. Let's all hope that these piles of pasta slide down ineffectually down the wall, like the actual catsup that the Felon-in-Chief has been known to throw at an actual wall.