A driving motivation is malice

The nasty guy was inaugurated a year ago tomorrow. That has prompted Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to express her thoughts of the first 365 days of the nasty guy’s reign. She begins by saying:

One of the driving motivations of Trump's presidency has been breaking the federal government.

Breaking it by choosing to lead federal departments people who don't believe in the objectives of those departments, like Betsy DeVos. Breaking it by choosing to lead federal departments people who have no qualifications to lead those departments, like Rick Perry. Breaking it by ensuring no career bureaucrats with experience and decency would want to work for it anymore. Breaking it by creating warfare with intelligence agencies. Breaking it by wanton deregulation. Breaking it with ineptitude and malignity and laziness and corruption. Breaking it by starving it of resources. Breaking it intentionally.

Another driving motivation is malice. He is breaking the government so that it can’t serve the people, only him.

But perhaps a silver lining? Nope. Lots of people are crediting the nasty guy with the huge number of women running for office, for people waking up to politics, or the resistance. McEwan answers:

I believe the nation's first female president would have inspired more women to run for office, too, without the debasement of women as a cost of that increased engagement. I have no gratitude to people only waking up to politics now, when the republic is dangling on the edge of a f***ing cliff. And everything good about the resistance existed long before Donald Trump.
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I refuse to breathe life into any narrative that credits Trump for anything of value that existed long before his presidency or would have happened, anyway, with far less collateral damage.

As for his accomplices in Congress – written on the day that something better happen or the government will be shut down – McEwan answers a question posed by, and quotes from, Damian Paletta and Erica Werner of the Washington Post: Can the GOP govern?

No. That has been apparent for a very long time.

And of course a big part of the reason they can't govern is because they don't want to govern. Governance is fundamentally at odds with destruction, and the Republican Party has become very explicitly a party committed to destroying the government.
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Congressional Republicans spent most of 2017 trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and passing their disgusting tax bill, "spending little time focused on how to pay the government's bills this year." Senate Republicans aren't even "expected to vote on a budget resolution at all this year, a move that would have been unthinkable in recent years, as they said it was a cornerstone of good governing."