One forgets that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, “DOGE,” once had a co-chair. Vivek Ramaswamy, the bombastic Harvard-educated entrepreneur, was poised to begin his tenure alongside Musk as a crusader against big government fraud and corruption. That was until he posted on X (formerly Twitter) to defend H-1B visas for skilled immigrant labor.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” he said. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

His statement piqued the ire of MAGA thoroughbreds Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer. They decried an emergent “big tech oligarchy,” not because they felt compelled to defend Americans from Ramaswamy’s half-hearted generalization, but because for a brief moment, it revealed the spirit that defines their movement and the circumstances we have condemned ourselves to today.

In his first campaign to seize control of our politics, Trump told supporters that none of their hardships were the fault of their own. He told them they couldn’t find jobs because illegal immigrants were taking them. That it felt like the true American culture was being lost because, in fact, Democrats were diluting it to prioritize the interests of immigrants, members of the LGBTQ+ community and those who had the audacity to kneel before the American flag.

He told us that the hard work of chasing the American dream was over. You no longer had to pull yourself up by your bootstraps because being born in America was enough. Together, we are going to “Make America Great Again,” he said. And what’s so tremendous is that we’ll do it without doing anything at all.

It was a campaign against personal responsibility. And it’s one that could only be led by the man who, with a “small loan of a million dollars,” became unequivocally self-made.

On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order to end “discriminatory” diversity, equity and inclusion programs. He sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take back the Panama Canal.

Among others, he signed an executive order to turn on the water in Los Angeles County. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” and Denali “Mount McKinley.” He said that our country needed to purchase Greenland from Denmark for the sake of our national security and that the people of Canada looked favorably upon becoming the 51st state.

He attempted tariffs on the exports of our country’s greatest allies only to be so embarrassingly rebuked when these nations threatened to raise our prices. With the stroke of a pen, he banned less than a dozen transgender athletes from college sports. And as such, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth finally addressed the root of our military’s problems: DEI initiatives and, of course, transgender soldiers.

There is a certain level of meaningless political theater we have become accustomed to in the Trump years. But as demonstrated by the sheer emptiness of the accomplishments I listed and you ignored, he’s not even pretending to care about the work of making America great again anymore.

He circumvents small majorities in Congress to sign dubious, yet inconsequential, executive orders he does not author, attends Super Bowls and Daytona 500s for the affirmation he craves and allows the toddler son of the wealthiest man in the world to outshine him in an Oval Office press conference.

So when a passenger plane collided with a Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River, the buck didn’t stop with Trump. He couldn’t have been responsible for consoling us. He’s hardly responsible for being our president.

The reason the presidency of the United States is so prestigious is because, to use journalist John Dickerson’s phrase, it is “the hardest job in the world.” Thus, it is the highest merit. The president is the country’s chief negotiator — with Congress, our allies and adversaries around the world.

He is there when the country needs consolation in the face of tragedy, and he is there to spend long nights doing the work necessary to push our country forward, even and especially if he will never receive the requisite credit for it.

We have allowed Trump to make the presidency shallow. Dwindled to a couple of appearances at major sporting events and impromptu pressers in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One. All of the pageantry of the office without the necessary merit of its occupant. He has made the president a caricature, not a stalwart, of the nation he serves.

Somehow, he has made the most exceptional office in the world wholly mediocre.

Arguments that there are those in our government who are undeserving of their titles because of DEI, that there is some deep level of fraud and corruption at agencies that feed children in crisis — these are insecure projections of the fact that at the top of the pyramid lies a mediocrity that’s unbecoming of the offices it occupies and the nation they represent.

It is hard to do the work of governing. That’s why they dismantle the good-willed agencies of the American government — it’s much easier than maintaining them. That’s why Trump’s electoral mandate in Congress is hardly fruitful. The Republican majority in the House is the smallest since the Great Depression. That’s not easy, not even for The Donald.

It’s why they call FBI agents who investigated the president for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021 “corrupt.” Why they threaten to dismantle the Department of Education and why they replace offices at the Defense Department for the New York Times, NPR, NBC News and Politico with the New York Post, Breitbart, the Huffington Post and One America News.

Anything that makes the president look smaller or his time harder, these things are endangered in the second Trump term. If not for ideology’s sake, then for the love of mediocrity.

There is a reason our attention is consumed by “what victory feels like,” as Musk put it on Inauguration Day. Because if you’re busy thinking about what victory feels like, the substance of victory doesn’t matter at all. And, as it stands right now, there doesn’t appear to be any real opposition to Trump II.

“This can be our Sputnik moment,” Ramaswamy says. “Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.”

Bannon and I agree — Ramaswamy was wrong about the American culture of mediocrity. But his outcry wasn’t for hard workers like you and me. It was for the apparent mediocrity that is America’s “new golden era” in its first 30 days. And ultimately, it’s for this acceptance of mediocrity that is fomenting an autocracy.

Aidan Klineman is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.