President Donald Trump’s behavior is getting stranger by the day, following an all too predictable fascist arc. He appears entirely convinced that his power has no limits, while surrounding himself with people who have no interest in challenging that belief.

On Wednesday, that weirdness took the form of an executive order targeting ticks and mosquitoes in Washington, D.C. Trump effectively declared war on the pests through a presidential proclamation, as though signing his name were the missing ingredient in insect control.

The order directs the Interior Department, Agriculture Department, Environmental Protections Agency, and Health and Human Services to act. It calls on them to “reduce invasive mosquito populations by 90% and the tick population by 50% by 2028 using safe and effective, non-chemical, and innovative technology-enabled methods.”

There is something undeniably hilarious about Trump appearing to believe that a stroke of his Sharpie can produce an effective and comprehensive pest eradication program across the district. Compared with many of his other executive orders, this particular proclamation is also far less dangerous.

But an order can be silly and comparatively small while still representing terrible governance. This is what governing by haphazard executive order looks like after guardrails and government capacity have been stripped away, leaving a personalist regime organized around one man’s endless grievances.

Trump’s preferred version of governing consists of issuing little proclamations while ignoring the federal programs needed to carry them out. His administration has already gutted actual funding for efforts such as pest eradication, leaving thin presidential orders to masquerade as serious government policy.

Presidents are not supposed to spontaneously decide how the country should confront invasive, disease carrying insects. Public health and environmental agencies exist to study those problems, develop informed responses, and carry out programs grounded in expertise rather than presidential whim.

The contradiction is especially glaring because the executive order claims to target diseases spread by ticks and mosquitoes. At the same time, the administration has critically jeopardized funding for Lyme disease research, undercutting work directly connected to one of the pests Trump now wants dramatically reduced.

That funding was choked off, and research was left to languish for months. The Trump team later boasted about tackling Lyme disease anyway, only now with substantially less money available for the research required to address it.

Trump’s 2026 budget proposal also slashed most public health funding to the bone. Yet the administration’s latest performance suggests that money, research, and sustained government programs can somehow be replaced by Trump’s scrawled signature on another official document.

The administration also eliminated all climate health funding, leading to a spike in dengue fever, a disease carried by mosquitoes. Florida is already experiencing a dengue fever outbreak, while public health experts worry that the number of cases is being underreported.

Someone has already died amid that outbreak, but Florida has not provided details about the death. That grim reality sits awkwardly beside the spectacle of Trump ordering agencies to make mosquito populations plunge through little more than presidential command.

Screwworms have also returned, while the administration is not funding malaria prevention abroad. The article warns that the consequences of abandoning that prevention will eventually come home, likely soon, and no stack of executive orders can substitute for the discarded work.

Trump’s order leans heavily on hopeful language about sterile insect techniques and control tools created with safe and effective biotechnologies. It treats those tools as if they can simply be summoned into existence, ready to solve the problem without the funding and research his administration has undermined.

The whole production has the flavor of waiting for Palantir or SpaceX to pitch an artificial intelligence driven mosquito net. Under the vocabulary demanded by another Trump executive order, perhaps that should be a “super intelligence-driven mosquito net.”

For now, the country is left waiting to see whether this latest order produces anything meaningful. If it does nothing, Trump may find someone else to blame, perhaps former President Joe Biden for failing to build an AI powered bug zapper resembling a Golden Dome for ticks and mosquitoes.