No, He Is Still Not an Evil Genius

The US's slide into post-constitutional chaos continues.  In the midst of it all, it is especially frustrating to find that people who are not at all fans of Donald Trump habitually insist on attributing various kinds of superpowers to him.  None of those fantasies has ever been true, unless one counts "being as bigoted as a controlling minority of the American population" as a superpower.  Even so, purportedly responsible journalists and commentators continue to act as if there is something other than unbridled and unreflective malevolence at work.

To some degree, this is merely more sanewashing, which I defined in a column last Fall as "an attempt to create something coherent out of utter incoherence."  There, I referenced a column by Margaret Sullivan, one of the few truly excellent journalistic critics out there, who noted "a Politico news alert that summarizes a recent Trump speech: 'Trump laid out a sweeping vision of lower taxes, higher tariffs and light-touch regulation in a speech to top Wall Streets execs today.'"

Here is a small part of what Trump in fact had said in laying out his "sweeping vision": "But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’ve talking about because the childcare is childcare, couldn’t, you know, there’s something you have to have it, in this country you have to have it."  Sullivan then quoted this quip from a social media post: "I hope the press is this nice to me if I ever do a speech where no one can tell if I just had a stroke or not."

All of which continues to this day, although some of it is less sanewashing than simply memory-holing all of the evidence of Trump's perilous mental state.  For example, it was not even a month ago that Trump said this: "You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500 percent. I don’t mean 50 percent, I mean 14, 1500 percent. ... So we’ll be dropping drug prices.  It’ll start over the next two to three months. By 1200, 1300, and even 1400 percent. And 500 percent."  Again, it does not appear that anyone tried to sanewash that insanity.  It was widely ridiculed, and although Trump never admits error, the only way out was to count on everyone simply forgetting it when they become entranced by other shiny objects (military takeovers of American cities, anyone?).

None of that, however, gets at the more fundamental problem of treating everything favorable that happens for Trump as the product of some kind of brilliant strategy.  The "n-dimensional chess" trope is a subset of this, but even favorable outcomes that are not deemed to be the product of hidden multi-step genius plans are still somehow said to be Trump's doing because they favor Trump.  One recent example was in an interview on Paul Krugman's substack (which is turning out to be even more of a must-read than his NYT columns used to be, the quote below notwithstanding).  This past Sunday, a military historian named Philips O'Brien saw fit to offer this assessment:

I think people always underestimate Trump. Actually I think Trump is far cagier in getting what he wants than people think. So people are saying about Anchorage, “Oh, he didn't get a deal, it ended early, he was sort of humiliated.” Well, actually, no, it turns out he and Putin have sort of reached an understanding of how the war might end, at least temporarily, but if he can get the Ukrainians to turn over the Donbas, that might have some kind of temporary ceasefire. So, there's an attempt to say, “Oh, he's a buffoon,” and not actually pay him the credit he sometimes deserves.

The Europeans are the worst for this. So they come over and they've obviously got their briefing papers that say, “Suck up to Trump and we'll get what we want.["] And they go and they tell him how wonderful it is. And he throws out very vague things about security guarantees. And they go home and pat themselves on the back. Well, guess what's happened? What has changed in the last week since these summits? Sanctions on Russia are off the table. This was a thing two weeks ago. Sanctions on Russia were gonna be the big thing now. Europeans said, “We must have sanctions. We want to hit Russia.” Now that's gone. Trump has won that fight. He's gotten sanctions gone, which he's always wanted to do. He's never wanted to sanction Putin.

How Does O'Brien know any of this?  How does he know, for example that Trump "never wanted to sanction Putin"?  Why say that Trump is "far cagier ... than people think"?  I am not saying that that is categorically impossible, but we would need a lot more evidence to believe that he is a cagey operator.  Saying that "[Trump] and Putin have sort of reached an understanding" is simply ex post blather.  All of the evidence suggests that Trump wanted a deal.  He did not get a deal.  But O'Brien says that sanctions seemed to be on the table before and seem not to be on the table now, so anyone who looks at Trump's performance and says that he is a buffoon is "not actually pay[ing] him the credit he sometimes deserves."  Right.

The fact is that Trump often (usually?) has no clear idea of what he wants, and he says multiple things that are mutually inconsistent, which allows anyone who is inclined to defend him to pick out the things that he said that comport with subsequent reality and say: "Look, he got what he wanted!"  No, things happened, and people's unquenchable thirst for order in a chaotic universe leads them to insist that Trump meant to do it all along.

As it happens, I wrote about this more than five years ago in a July 2020 Dorf on Law column: "Trump's Not-So-Proto Fascism is Still Not Proof of Political Genius (Evil or Otherwise)."  In turn, that column included this reference to an even earlier column:

[I]n 2017, I published "Trump Is No More a Political Genius Than Lottery Winners Are Financial Wizards," here on Dorf on Law.  Back then, people were hailing him as an evil genius who masterfully manipulated his followers and beat the media through shrewdly crafted messaging.  All of which was (and is) false.

As I described it back then, this is essentially a variation on the question of whether special men make history or history makes some men seem special.  In Trump's case, he is the beneficiary of a political and media culture in which his particular pathologies and excesses ended up fitting perfectly into the moment (with big assists from Vladimir Putin and James Comey).
 ...

Trump simply did the non-genius things that he does, and he happened to fit into the opening that Republicans had created for a reality-denying bigot like him.  He remains the rancid version of the sweet character Chauncy Gardener from the brilliant 1979 political satire "Being There," in which an innocent dolt said things that "worked" not because he knew what he was saying but because the empty things that he said happened to land in ways that people misunderstood and took seriously. 

Why does this matter?  It is worrisome when people give Trump credit for "promises kept," which portrays him as a master politician who deserves the respect even of people who disagree with what he is doing.  For example, Ezra Klein's NYT op-ed from earlier this week included this:

I can see the picture of a president doing what he was elected to do. Donald Trump ran unquestionably on mass deportations. He ran on reversing a historic surge of migration into this country. He won on that platform. He’s just doing what he promised. He’s tripling ICE’s budget. He’s funneling tens of billions of dollars to build detention centers. In L.A., protesters tried to obstruct him, so Trump called up the National Guard. And after years of railing about crime levels in our major cities, Trump is using the power he has over Washington to do something about it, to show Americans that he’s doing something about it.

I don’t like any of this. I certainly didn’t vote for it. But Trump promised, and Americans voted for, the biggest deportation operation in U.S. history. It was always going to be ugly and cruel.

With no due respect, that is utter bullsh*t.  First, only 49.8 percent of the American citizens who were allowed to register and then were able to vote (which assumes that they were not in precincts where Republicans had guaranteed long lines and voter challenges) voted for this.  That is not to say that he did not win under the twisted rules of the American presidential election system, although it is clear (because he said so many, many times) that he would not have accepted losing and would have used every tool in his kit -- including inciting another violent mob to attack at his command -- to become president again.  He "won" in the sense that a very non-democratic system in a country that kids itself into thinking it is a democracy made him the President again.

Even setting that rather devastating reality aside, however, Klein is wrong that Trump is "just doing what he promised."  He did not run on coercing mothers to take children with cancer who are American citizens out of the country.  He did not run on a platform of sending people to a Central American gulag.  His people even mocked anyone who claimed that Trump would create concentration camps, but now we have "Alligator Alcatraz."

What he did say is that he would get rid of the immigrants in the US who are murderers, rapists, and drug dealers (supposedly numbering in the millions), but we have no idea whether anyone he deported fits into any of those categories, because there is no due process provided to ensure that the people who are being deported are in fact the bad guys.  Similarly, he did indeed spend "years railing about crime levels in our major cities," but he is not "do[ing] something about it."  We know that he is doing nothing about it, because the "it" is a figment of his imagination.

I could run for mayor and say that I am going to make sure that no children are harmed on playgrounds, and after I won (legitimately or not), I could then shut down all of the playgrounds while enacting policies that harm children more seriously than a dislocated wrist from falling off a jungle gym.  At least I would have literally done what I promised, which is more than Trump has done in our reality.  "He grunted 'immigrants,' and now he is harming immigrants" is not proof that he is doing what he promised to do, and it is certainly not what the people who supposedly voted for him because of his promises had any reason to think they would get during a second Trump presidency.

The fact is that Trump is lazy and easily bored.  He reportedly was originally going to go along with a process of pardoning only the nonviolent January 6 convicts, but after finding out that that would be time-consuming and possibly a bit nuanced, he simply said, in essence, "Screw it, let 'em all out!"  No one "voted for" that, either, at least not people who were otherwise undecided in November 2024.

In the end, Trump is not deftly running circles around other world leaders or dutifully delivering on his campaign promises.  He responds to his id at all times, and if one squints and recasts the discussion at a high enough level of generality, it is possible to describe failure (or even failure to try) as some kind of success.  But make no mistake, this is failure.  Pretending otherwise wastes people's time and causes them to feel that they have no right to complain.  Moreover, it redirects people's efforts into trying to out-think someone who is not thinking at all.

 

- Neil H. Buchanan