Pulling the Thread

I keep coming back to this image from my childhood: a shirt or sweater where one little piece of stitching starts to loosen. You notice that tiny thread sticking out, and you tell yourself you’ll deal with it later. But then, out of habit or frustration or curiosity, you tug on it — and suddenly the whole thing starts to come apart in your hands.That’s what the last few months have felt like to me.A loose thread.A fabric that’s beginning to give way.And the question I keep wrestling with — the one I can’t shake — is this:What exactly is unraveling here?Is society unraveling under the weight of all this chaos?Or is Trump’s world beginning to unravel because human beings, collectively, eventually reach exhaustion?Because something is giving way. You can feel it.I’m not shy about my views — I have never thought Donald Trump represented the kind of leadership that motivates human beings to do their best work. Nothing about him aligns with the values I spent 30 years trying to build and protect inside my own company: dignity, loyalty, steadiness, fairness, and treating people like human beings instead of props in a never-ending performance.But lately, I’ve been watching something different.Not just bad leadership or bad decisions — God knows we’ve had plenty of that.What I’m seeing now feels like pressure on the fabric of the country itself.When we fire missiles at people in the water — people whose boat we already blew up — and brush it off with a slogan… something is wrong. That’s the kind of moral line a healthy society hesitates to cross. Yet here we are, crossing it casually.So again, the thread.You tug on cruelty.You tug on chaos.You tug on fear.And eventually the stitching starts to fail.But here’s the part that fascinates me — and worries me.There are two unravelings happening at the same time, and it’s not clear which one will give out first.1. One thread is our society — strained to the point of fatigue.People are worn down. Prices, health insurance, political conflict, stress, anger — it’s a constant drip. Even the strongest fabric weakens if you hold it under tension long enough.And chaos — daily, relentless chaos — is its own kind of acid.It dissolves public patience.It erodes trust.It makes reasonable people throw up their hands and say, “I can’t live like this anymore.”If enough people hit that point at the same time, that’s one kind of unraveling.2. But the other thread is Trump himself — and his whole political brand.His movement depends on constant escalation.It has to be noisy, shocking, angry, frantic.That was thrilling for some people at first — a jolt of adrenaline.But no human community can sustain that pace forever.People get tired.People get numb.People want their lives back — some quiet, some dignity, something to trust.And when exhaustion sets in, chaos collapses under its own weight.That’s the second unraveling.So here’s the question that sits right on the edge of all this:Which gives way first?Do we lose the fabric of our society before we lose this man and the culture of chaos around him?Or does his unraveling happen fast enough that we can stitch ourselves back together?That’s what keeps running through my mind — not out of fear, but out of realism. I’ve seen organizations fray from the inside, and I’ve seen them recover when the source of the chaos finally burned itself out.I’m hoping for the latter.I’m hoping the unraveling we’re seeing is coming from his side — not ours.Because I’ll tell you what I believe deep down:Human beings only tolerate instability for so long.Eventually, fatigue becomes clarity.And clarity can be a powerful thing.