Donald Trump Does Not Have a Plan
He has dictatorial desires. But not everything is a brilliant distraction or part of a cunning masterplan. Let’s not turn incompetent agents of malice into omnipotent supervillains.
This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.
I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.
The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.
Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!
If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.
You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.
To start the week, the President of the United States threatened to erase “a whole civilization.” It doesn’t feel right to simply move on. As Donald Trump’s madness will continue to ramp up and - excuse me for sounding dramatic - threaten humanity, it is urgently important we grapple honestly with what is happening here.
As Trump kept escalating his threats, prominent elected officials and political observers suggested there was some method to what he was doing – that it was either all a cunning distraction from matters Trump wanted to obscure or perhaps all part of a devious long-term scheme that would ultimately lead to a Trump dictatorship.
I strongly disagree.
This regime and its unstable leader are not systematically implementing a masterplan. I don’t say this to downplay the threat. In fact, it is imperative we confront the distinct dangers we face. What we are dealing with is chaotic destruction wrought by an increasingly delusional wannabe-dictator who leads a comically incompetent government and a movement drowning in its own conspiratorial hyperreality. They will continue to escalate because they are ideologically, temperamentally, and psycho-politically incapable of anything else. But there is no strategic genius at work here.
If we suspect coherence and foresight as the main drivers behind what Trump and the extremists around him are doing, we fail to understand the inner thinking of this regime. If we insist there must be strategic deliberation underneath the escalating chaos, we risk sanitizing what this government is doing and what fuels the man who leads it. Although borne out of an understandable impulse to emphasize the authoritarian threat, this nevertheless constitutes a form of sanewashing that does not help us counter the Trumpist threat. The man who is president is acutely dangerous; his dictatorial desires are limitless. But he does not have a plan.
So, let’s first examine why the assumption that everything this regime does is strategic in nature, either deliberately deceptive or part of a devious masterplan, is utterly implausible – and why other frameworks are a lot more helpful in grappling with the escalating chaos. And let us then investigate why so many pundits and commentators are nevertheless clinging to the idea that everything the MAGA regime does is a clever distraction or comes out of a carefully executed “playbook” – and what makes the assumption that there must be a secret scheme behind Trump’s actions so attractive, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.
If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.
But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.
Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.