Conservative icon Ayn Rand built her vision of an ideal man in a diary entry about William Edward Hickman — a 1920s child murderer who dismembered a 12-year-old girl and mailed her father a ransom note signed “The Fox.” Rand admired his total absence of guilt. She wrote that his contempt for “the mob” (society) was the mark of a superior mind. That admiration became Howard Roark, the architect-hero of The Fountainhead — a man who dynamites a housing project rather than compromise his vision. The book became a bestseller. The bestseller became a governing philosophy. Skip to today: Trump’s Cabinet reads like a fan-fiction competition for Rand’s most grotesque archetypes. A reality-TV plumber runs Homeland Security. A brainworm-addled former addict runs public health. A hedge funder runs Treasury. The world’s richest man gutted the agencies investigating him with the DOGE scam. Government isn’t being administered — it’s being gutted and pillaged, then handed back to voters with a bill for $40 trillion. This isn’t “chaos.” It’s the plan working exactly as designed. Rand’s whole pitch was that if everyone acted with maximum selfishness, society would somehow benefit — a mangled bastardization of Adam Smith dressed up as moral philosophy. Reagan repackaged it as “government is the problem.” Forty-five years later, the middle class is gutted, the parks are for sale, and the guy who called Roark his hero is auctioning off federal agencies to whoever flatters him hardest. Trump told USA Today in 2015 that The Fountainhead was his favorite book, and that he identified with Roark specifically. That’s central to the origin story for how we got here. Trump relates to a character based on a child killer with no conscience.