Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
I don’t care much for politicians and their works. Political government is a stupid and evil way of doing things. It makes us all less happy, less healthy, less prosperous, and less safe than we’d be if we abandoned it for voluntary means of living together.
Nonetheless, I occasionally try to “give credit where credit is due” when a politician departs, for even a moment, from evil and stupidity. At other times I seek the most charitable explanations I can find for that politician’s actions. This is one of those latter times, and the question at hand, as you might expect is:
What is it with Donald Trump?
First, a note: I occasionally receive hate mail and comments opining that I suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and have never levied the same criticisms, for the same types of actions, against other presidents.
That’s not true, and you don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve been writing political commentary since the 1980s, and you can easily find almost all of that commentary from the early 1990s on with a quick search engine query. I’ve been, on balance, at least as critical of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden as I’ve ever been of Trump.
I’ve even said some nice things about Trump for, among other things, talking with the North Koreans, feinting toward US withdrawal from Syria, negotiating the US surrender in Afghanistan, advocating for an end to taxing tips, etc. He hasn’t always followed through, but he’s sometimes come up with good ideas.
There’s something those good ideas have in common, and it occurs to me that those things may be of a piece with my “most charitable explanation” for ideas that weren’t as good.
Some commentators look at Trump and the MAGA-dominated Republican Party and conclude that “the chaos is the point.” That is, the purpose of some of the weirder and wilder actions of Trump’s administration is to build an omnipotent totalitarian state by sowing fear, discord, and confusion — to keep their opponents on perpetual tenterhooks, disorganized and unable to effectively respond, as new authoritarian measures roll out.
But what if it’s not that?
In the mid-1990s, Clayton M. Christensen introduced the idea of “disruptive innovation” into the public lexicon. By the early 2000s, nearly every tech start-up touted itself as “disruptive,” in a good way although not usually in precisely the way Christensen seems to have intended.
Around that time, Mark Zuckerberg coined a motto for how Facebook approached building itself as a social media platform. “Move fast and break things.” In other words, if you have an idea that seems like it might produce really good results, pull the trigger and see what happens.
As goes biz buzz, so goes political thinking. Quoth the late Scott Adams:
“What Trump does is he shakes the box. He just wants to see where the pieces land, because wherever they land is a different situation than the one he’s in.”
Since the 1930s, with their penchant for technocracy, American politicians and bureaucrats have generally been disruption-averse. They prefer to tweak the system, messing around at its edges with minor “improvements.”
Trump prefers “disruptive innovation.” While he’s unwilling to attack the central problem — political government itself — he’s big on “disruptive” experimentation, both in general (consider, for example, the DOGE episode) and when he’s in a situation that seems to call for distraction (“Epstein? Who’s that? Hey, look, Iran!”).
While I’m usually not ecstatic with the results, “shaking the box” may be a better explanation than “he’s more stupid and evil than previous presidents.”
