Way back in 1989 Robert knew what Trump was.
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The Method in the Madness
Why Trump’s chaos isn’t accidental—and how it corrodes democracy’s foundations
James B. Greenberg
Sep 21, 2025
Like many others, I once dismissed Trump as a clown—perhaps even a puppet of others’ designs. But that view underestimates his own tactical instincts. His chaos has method, his performance has purpose, and the damage lies not in accident but in intent.
Trump’s Art of the Deal is often shelved as business lore, but its real function is strategic. It outlines a worldview where power is extracted through leverage, not built through institutional trust. The tactics—think big, retaliate, control the narrative—aren’t just tools for negotiation. They form a template for dominance, one that translates easily into political life. When applied to governance, they don’t strengthen institutions. They bend them.
Strongmen have long relied on spectacle, loyalty tests, and enemy creation to consolidate control. What makes Trump distinctive is the setting: a system with formal constraints but exhausted citizens. He doesn’t dismantle institutions outright; he forces them to absorb disruption until their function is distorted. The result is a hazy authoritarianism—pervasive yet hard to pin down.
Governance turns episodic. Each act is calibrated for emotional impact rather than policy coherence. Firings, executive orders, and legal provocations are timed for maximum media saturation. Where institutions are slow and procedural, Trump’s moves are fast and theatrical. The mismatch is deliberate: it keeps courts, agencies, and journalists reactive, leaving oversight in a constant chase. Spectacle substitutes for substance until performance itself becomes policy.
By overwhelming the system, Trump reframes resistance as sabotage. Judges who block his orders or journalists who investigate his claims are cast as enemies of the people. This inversion lets him operate in legal ambiguity, test boundaries, and dare institutions to respond. The law, instead of constraining him, becomes bargaining space, and the tactic recodes legitimacy itself.
Some maneuvers are obvious; others operate beneath the surface. Symbols are turned into weapons that shift attention from structural problems to cultural fights: racial justice protests become threats to order, immigration becomes a proxy for national identity. The point is not to solve problems but to redirect blame. Narrative saturation intensifies the effect. Rather than impose a single version of events, Trump floods the arena with contradictions—COVID guidance, election claims, legal threats—each undermining the last. This confusion is deliberate, a strategy that erodes shared reality and turns institutional authority into partisan theater.
The pace produces exhaustion. Executive actions and rhetorical escalations force oversight bodies into constant response. The system hasn’t collapsed, but it is drowning in shocks: watchdogs scramble, norms fray, the public tunes out, and fatigue sets in. Chaos becomes a loyalty test. Adapt and you remain; resist and you’re cut out. In such an environment, competence matters less than obedience, while unpredictability functions as a diagnostic tool, revealing who recalibrates and who resists.
Drift also redistributes wealth and advantage. Chaos funnels power upward. Deregulation by disruption clears the field for corporations, financiers, and insiders who can act quickly while oversight bodies drown in procedure, allowing those closest to power to scoop up contracts, licenses, and exemptions. This short-term spectacle clashes with democracy’s slower rhythms of deliberation, hearings, and accountability. Trump governs on the tempo of the news cycle, while democracy depends on patience, and the mismatch corrodes civic time itself, leaving citizens disoriented and public life ruled by immediacy rather than continuity.
Legal ambiguity reinforces the pattern. Trump rarely violates laws directly but thrives in the spaces between them—pressuring officials, exploiting vagueness, delaying consequences. Institutions are forced to interpret rather than enforce. Accountability becomes a matter of timing: announcements dropped late, investigations slow-walked, momentum carefully managed.
Even the madman bluff—the threat to Zelenskyy, the erratic diplomacy, the rhetorical escalations—follows this logic. The threat is extreme, the delivery unpredictable, the consequence real. It forces reactive compliance and destabilizes negotiation, turning unpredictability into coercion through disorientation.
Some tools remain underused. Constitutional overhaul is untouched, though norms are tested. Surveillance is present but not expanded as a signature device. Militarized repression appears selectively rather than systemically. Judicial purges are avoided in form but achieved through appointments. These absences preserve the appearance of continuity while masking the drift, which spreads not from a single center but across networks of loyalists, media allies, and local officials who replicate tactics in their own domains.
This drift carries anthropological weight. It reshapes how people perceive authority, truth, and civic possibility. The danger lies in gradual warping: institutions lose symbolic weight, discourse turns into a contest of emotion, and trust erodes under the tempo until the shared architecture of civic life begins to fray.
Political ecology offers a parallel. Ecosystems don’t always collapse through sudden shocks; they degrade through imbalance, erosion, and stress. Civic systems follow the same pattern. The symptoms are familiar: confusion, fatigue, displacement. The response can’t be procedural alone. It must also be cultural, strategic, and narrative.
Countering this requires more than rebuttal. It demands frameworks that decode symbolic inversion, track motif drift, and restore institutional rhythm. The typology of tactics—displacement, saturation, exhaustion, ambiguity—offers a diagnostic lens for civic literacy and editorial resistance. And it calls for public life that refuses spectacle and insists on substance.
Suggested Readings
Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951.
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.
Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso, 2016.