It’s interesting to think about, and I acknowledge here that we’re getting farther into the area of opinion and interpretation.
Where I disagree with your base assumptions, I think, and where I think you’re making an error, is in your attempt to view Trump’s behavior as logical and rational and strategic. He just doesn’t operate that way. He’s a creature of almost pure id, I believe, highly reactive in the moment, with very little long-term thinking. Everything is about satisfying his urges right now. None of his words or actions from last week have to line up, objectively, with his words or actions of this week. They simply don’t, because he genuinely doesn’t care. His whole worldview is, I want something immediately, and everything he does feeds into that. If he doesn’t get it quickly (which includes getting a commitment from an underling that it will be done), he gets bored and moves on. There are dozens of anonymous stories from White House staff where he’s getting a briefing on some topic, and he asks questions and makes decisions that demonstrate he has no memory of the last time he asked questions and made decisions on the same topic. I repeat, his faculties are broken in a way that are difficult for a normal person to grasp. If you were inside his brain, hearing his thoughts and feeling his emotions and perceiving the world the way he does, he would feel like an alien to you.
In addition, it argues against your “he’s lucky” hypothesis to recognize that he’s been using this exact same schtick for literal decades and it’s worked for him all this time. He wants something, he bullies, he blusters, he deploys minions. Either he succeeds, or he fails and he spitefully pokes the opponent in the eye on the way out. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, to be clear, I do agree that there’s an element of chance involved here, but not in the way you might expect. Trump is clearly a very stupid man with no long-term strategy. And yet he’s continued to be “successful,” for a rather narrow definition of the concept, despite his limitations. My opinion is that he happens to be built in a particular way that short-circuits the normal functioning of social groups. He didn’t manufacture his personality on purpose; he simply is who he is, completely and absolutely, and his combination of traits represents a specific archetype of masculine-primate energy which triggers an instinctive response in many people.
An analogy might be a virus. In this pandemic year, people still don’t seem to understand exactly what a virus is. It’s not a living thing, like a bacterium. It doesn’t eat, excrete, and reproduce; it has no biological imperative. Rather, a virus is more like a bug in the genetic code. It’s a specific assembly of proteins and genetic material that happens to line up with the receptors in the cells of a living organism in such a way that the virus attaches itself to the machinery of reproduction and causes the cell to make more copies of the virus. The virus doesn’t want this to happen, it just does because of how the virus is formed. And there are literally millions of other free-floating protein bundles that aren’t viruses because their structure doesn’t line up with cell receptors the same way. Out of the vast pool of drifting genetic fragments, a few of them are formed in such a way that when they attach to a host cell, they make the cell go haywire, and we call these fragments viruses.
Trump is like this. He’s got a particular framework of neuroses and behaviors that triggers a response in large numbers of certain people. The only difference between Trump and a virus is that Trump has enough self-awareness to understand the fact of his celebrity. Beyond that, I honestly think that Trump doesn’t have the introspective capability to understand why he’s “successful.” He does things the way his father and Roy Cohn taught him, it seems to work and he generally seems to succeed, and he shrugs and keeps doing them. If he had the capacity for contextual self-perception, he would adjust his tactics when he’s in a situation where they don’t work, but he doesn’t. He never course-corrects. He doubles down, and either he wins or he runs away.
As for the ability of Trumpist cult members to actually perceive the contradictions and inconsistencies in all of this, that’s an even bigger reach. These are people who see a picture like this and, with absolutely no irony, perceive him like this. This is not logic. There is no thinking here. It’s pure instinctive submission, a manifestation of sub-rational primate loyalty. Trump brays and beats his chest, and his zealots feel good, and that’s it. Literally nothing else is happening.
We’ve strayed pretty far from the original topic, and I’ve got work I need to do, so I’ll wrap up there. Ultimately, he believes in his version of The Secret because he’s a stupid, incurious man who doesn’t have any other way to understand himself and his apparent success.
