Understanding the Trump Administration

I wrote a version of this over a month ago to help my international business partners, who are all Aussies, better understand what is going on here. Based on the events of the past five weeks, I still think it is pretty useful.

Share

I am not a psychologist, a political scientist, nor an expert on the Far Right but I have synthesized the following principles for understanding the behaviors of the current Trump Administration from a lot of reading, observation, and thought.

I wanted to share them with all of you to help you to understand what is going on in the US.

• Trump has no ideology. His mind is simply too disorganized and disordered to fully understand one, never mind adhere to one.

• Trump’s reality is basically line-of-sight and is totally moment-to-moment. People that have no ability to benefit him are of no consequence to him. Places that he will never visit basically don’t exist, to him. The past, unless it relates to something useful to him, also does not exist.

• Trump acts based on simple impulses and transactionally. That’s it. Appealing to ideology, loyalty, and logic are dim propositions. Appealing to fairness and compassion, in and of themselves, is laughable (but it might work if he thinks he will be lauded for being “nice”).

• Trump’s drives are simple:

  • Enrich himself,

  • Feel like he is special/powerful, and

  • Revenge.

• When he acts on impulse it is to attempt to satisfy one of these drives and satisfying these drives is also the route for those around him to get him to act.

  • Enriching Himself: Trump is open to anything, and I mean anything, that enriches him. And to be clear, by him, I mean all entities related to him, including PACs and his campaign funds. Sure, those technically aren’t his, but he certainly views those funds as his money.

  • Feeling Special/Powerful: This is a broad one and includes a variety of behaviors and feedback loops that I would generally lump in two categories:

    • Anything that generates praise or applause from anybody, or really anything that makes him the center of attention.

    • Getting away with breaking norms, acting capriciously, being generally outrageous, and (especially) being cruel all make him feel powerful.

      • It should be noted that getting away with behaving as he does confers to Trump the additional psychic pay-off of seeing sycophants, the MAGA rabble, and, increasingly, the mainstream media defend the indefensible.

  • Revenge: This one is obvious. The interesting twist here is that the targets on his list aren’t just people and organizations that have “wronged” him, but also words, ideas, and inanimate objects that have hurt his feelings.

    • For instance, his hatred of “windmills” seems to primarily derive from the fact he lost a lawsuit over wind turbines “ruining the view” at one of his properties in Scotland.

    • Many of the targets on his revenge list can get off it very easily though. All they need to do is sufficiently satisfy one of his drives (i.e. suck up to him or pay him off). We’ve seen this a lot lately (e.g. Zuck).

• Any entity that wants to get Trump to take some action (like writing an Executive Order or bestowing an appointment) simply has to offer him something that satisfies one or more of his drives. The more the better. Anyone offering to satisfy all three will be his new best friend, for a while.

  • (Trump’s transactional nature is well-understood. What seems less understood is that any transaction that isn’t skewed in his favor is “unfair”. So, he is totally willing to abandon deals and allies as soon as the next available alternative is more appealing to him.)

• Entities that have any chance of influencing his behavior and decisions fall into one of three categories:

  • Money – corporations, billionaires, and traditional “business conservative” groups

  • MAGA – think of this in the broadest sense. It includes all the Right Wing culture warriors, including both the more “mainstream” Evangelical interests and more extremist (often overtly racist or anti-democratic) RW groups. The one thing it does not include is the actual needs of his voting base.

  • Non-US actors – this includes both allies and other countries working through traditional diplomatic channels and other countries/non-state actors who are doing anything but legitimate diplomacy.

• As an American, the most worrisome elements seeking to influence him are the people and organizations that straddle Money and MAGA. These include think tanks (e.g. the Heritage Foundation) and people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Oh, and also Vladimir Putin. That one is extra worrisome.

• It doesn’t take a lot of foresight to see that there are going to be inevitable frictions between the policies and actions preferred by each of these groups. Resolving those frictions proactively is of no consequence to Trump. The incoherence of policies that will result will only be dealt with reactively.

• It is also important to remember that it is a fool’s errand and a waste of time to try and make sense of this incoherence. There is no real master plan for Trump. He is currently enacting most of the Project 2025 plan because it is available and because Trump has been incentivized to do so. But he no more believes in it than he does in anything else.

  • (Some of the people seeking to influence him definitely do have very coherent plans. And those plans are usually very scary, frankly. But those plans are going to come into conflict with each other and with other Trump Admin policies.)

• Trump will deal with the problems that arise from these frictions the same way he does with everything else: by using it as an opportunity to satisfy one of his drives. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Actually solving problems that he created is incidental, if considered at all. Which will inevitably result in more friction and greater policy incoherence.

• It should be glaringly obvious that one of the scariest things about the Trump Administration is how easily he can and will be manipulated by anybody who understands his pathology and drives.

• We can glean which among the competing forces trying to influence him is “winning” in the moment through observation, but we shouldn’t impute a grand narrative of policy ascendency to any of them; doing so will only result in more confusion. Policy reversals will be frequent because Trump is Trump.

• Trump’s apparent affinity for dictators and hostility to our allies (and pluralistic liberal democracy more generally) is genuine though. It’s probably the result of a bunch of different things, but it’s definitely real.