The Gonzo Administration
Understanding Mad King Don
Cries to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the current President from office are resounding throughout the land, and while I don’t disagree that would be a great idea, I don’t have much hope that the spineless U.S. Congress will be able to unite and assert their power as an institution. Let me just give my complete layperson’s1 perspective for dealing with the endless torrent of insane shit that pours out of the White House these days.
I’ve written here before that this administration is best likened to a criminal organization.
That comparison can be made on vibes alone.2 Trump’s leadership style is reminiscent of that of a Mafia crime boss: mean, aggressive, demanding of loyalty and respect, comfortable with using threats and violence to get his way, and completely disregardful of the law to whatever extent he can get away with.
No one should be surprised that he is ignoring the Constitution to which he swore a meaningless oath, nor that he is ignoring international law, not to mention all the precedents, domestic and international, of the past political era. He won’t follow the rules unless someone makes him, and with the wildly compromised Supreme Court having given him carte blanche to crime to his heart’s content, he will keep smashing the rules-based order, international and domestic, until his battery finally runs out.
In his own words, “My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me,” which means we’re all fucked.3
That explains why there is no limit to what he will do.
As for how chaotic he is, coming up with some wild new outrage on a day by day basis, startling us with his mendacity and lack of awareness, there are a couple of ways to look at it.
One is that Trump has always had a strategy of trying anything and seeing what sticks. He gets made fun of for being a “TACO” Presdient, but that’s just part of his approach - he is fine with backtracking on a “policy” if he thinks that’s in his best interest. He doesn’t stick to any principle, in other words, since he has no principles beyond the demand for respect.
So maybe, in the back of his mind, he thinks that if he draws American flags on Greenland enough times, the world will throw up its hands and just let him have Greenland. He got a Nobel Peace Prize simply by acting petulant, after all. And if he doesn’t get Greenland, what did it cost him to make a stupid PowerPoint? Plus there’s the bonus fun of watching everyone scurry around in a panic.
It’s a kind of gonzo leadership, with no pretense of objectivity, no need for rational guidelines. Just go wild and see what happens.
That’s what you get when you elect a reality TV show celebrity as your President.
The other way to look at Trump’s chaos is to consider the possibility that he really is suffering from mental decline. That’s why his crazy shit keeps getting crazier with time. In that sense he would be a true Mad King, and given my previous observation that he is also unconstrained, that is obviously extremely dangerous to us all.
That explains the chaos and irrationality of what he does.
As for the MAGA movement in general, remember that Trump’s mob boss mentality means rewarding loyalty and punishing dissent. It’s all about being part of the gang.
Trump’s cabinet is made up not of competent people, or of people who balance out his weaknesses, but simply of sycophants. The worst of the worst. It’s how we ended up with the worst possible form of government.
Again, when trying to make sense of his regime and his supporters, it’s best to just think of the crime TV show The Sopranos.
I know this is stereotyping, but when thinking of MAGA, just think of the guys from Tony Soprano’s gang. You just know that if any of these fictional characters were still alive in the current era (the show ended in 2007 and a lot of them didn’t make it to the end), they would be Trump supporters.
These guys were crass and crude, unashamedly racist, misogynist and homophobic. They reveled in cruelty. And they did anything they could get away with it.
That’s this administration and this movement in a nutshell.
Meaning I’m just an Internet blogger guy, I have no political science credentials or gravitas or anything like that.
Journalist Sarah Kendzior has gone much deeper than vibes and has traced Trump’s connection to actual organized crime syndicates and outlined how they have literally taken over our government and are looting it Putin-in-the-2000s style, but that is not the specific topic of my post. You can find her here on Substack: Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter.
Also, check out this excellent exposé: Kendzior, Sarah. Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. United States: Flatiron Books, 2020 (ISBN 9781250245397).