Trump Isn’t Playing

David Remnick thinks Trump reads Machiavelli; or at least knows something about history:

More than five hundred years ago, Machiavelli, the philosopher of political practice and modern republicanism, suggested, in “Discourses on Livy,” that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness.” Richard Nixon, according to his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, apparently arrived at a similar conclusion, saying, “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

Just an aside: I’m too lazy to check the date on that quote, but it hardly matters. Haldeman was out by April, 1973. The Vietnam War (I’m still inclined to call it “the war”) ended in April, 1975. Kissinger was right: Nixon had a “meatball mind.”

Trump's intention is not strategic in any sense of the word. He craves attention, and thinks he’s most successful when he’s making a real estate deal (despite reality). That’s all. Otherwise, he makes Nixon look like Thomas Jefferson. Trump is not a student of history, or anything else. Trump is only a student of Trump.

Miller, of course, is aware that Trump’s intention, always, is to shock, to play the madman, and thus frighten his rivals and alter the terms of the debate. Maybe, just maybe, it will all dissipate, Miller suggested. Trump habitually says outrageous things, watches how they land, and, often enough, distances himself from his own provocations. (Will he seize Greenland? The Panama Canal? Make Canada the fifty-first state?) Perhaps Trump thinks he’ll be able to prop up Netanyahu at home and so deeply alarm other Middle Eastern leaders that he will be able to both muscle Iran into a deal that ends its nuclear ambitions and complete a broader regional settlement with Saudi coöperation. Or perhaps Trump’s latest performance is of a piece with the strategy of “flooding the zone” with so much chaos and deceptive rhetoric, and with so many mind-altering proposals and appointments, that, while the establishment’s collective head explodes on an hourly basis, he achieves at least some of his fondest ambitions.

Trump is not playing. He is a madman, just not in the entertainment sense by which we judge such things, where by behavior and appearance and actions the character telegraphs a mental state we understand as “mad.” It’s a stereotype. In this, Trump is not a stereotype. But he is truly deranged.

He’s deeply delusional. Being a one man organization all his life, never answering to a board or partners, he lives in perpetual adolescence, seeing what he wants, grabbing it, breaking it, tossing it aside, and grabbing something else. He will “take “ Gaza. How? With what army? More to the point, with what authority? I still shudder at ads for charities for veterans which remind me they fought for our freedom.  In ‘Nam? In Iraq? Afghanistan? Grenada? Yeah, not since WWII, really. But Gaza? Why are we going to use our military to clean out Gaza? (Trump’s press flack says he didn’t say, that other countries will relocate Palestinians and do the work. 

That is just one question at least half of the Congress will ask. I’m pretty sure more than half of the country will, too.

I get that it’s comforting to think there must be a method in the madness; that Trump has some kind of strategy, however chaotic and unruly he may be. He is not, however, unpredictable. As Remnick notes, Jared Kushner has been pushing this idea for a year. But Remnick is loathe to connect the dots. As Orwell said, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to see what’s in front of your nose.

"Donald Trump just openly committed American arms, honor, and credibility to forcibly expel Gaza’s Palestinian population and redevelop the territory into a glittering tourist hub," wrote Wilson. "Yes, it sounds entirely unhinged, and it may torpedo any remaining hope of an enduring Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It also hands every Islamist militant group an airtight propaganda victory: proof, in their eyes, that the United States is indeed the 'Great Satan.' It’s sounds insane because it is. It sounds manic because it is. It sounds deranged because it is." 

Yet the press is approaching this idea the wrong way, Wilson continued — their reaction "stems from the persistent, and persistently wrong, assumption that Trump acts with coherent intent, good counsel, sound judgment, and the nation’s interests at heart. In reality, he is a figure of chaos, a 'last-person-heard' president who leaps from one manic idea to the next." After all, he ran for office on the premise of non-intervention and resolving global military conflicts peacefully, not more American adventurism.

Do tell.

One of the most telling reactions to Trump's Gaza proposal, said Wilson, came from his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, a longtime GOP strategist with a reputation for whipping those around her into ruthless discipline; she looked on at Trump, her eyes bulging and her expression astonished. 

"The widely photographed look on Susie Wiles’s face spoke volumes: even insiders realize nothing and no one controls Trump. He is a man who is, by all appearances, is both mentally unstable and cognitively unable to process reality beyond his own mental architecture," wrote Wilson. "The damage is mounting, and even red-state leaders are slowly waking up to the danger of entrusting government after government function to the most extreme and least capable loyalists."

She speaks for all sentient beings there.