Semi-serious question; is Donald Trump a real-life Manchurian Candidate? Given all of the changes he is making, he seems on a path to destroying much of the US government, which might make Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping very happy but should frighten anyone who actually depends on it.
I found this Medium post suggesting much the same thing.
It’s tempting to engage in conspiracy to explain Trump’s mendacity; the only problem is that he’s actually really terrible at conspiracy or planning anything, and can’t keep his fool mouth shut only enough to even engage in deception. Trump is just in love with the idea of being a authoritarian ‘strongman’ and just wants to cuddle up to Putin or Orbán because they are his idea of a perfect demagogic snuggle partner (even though I’m sure both of them cannot stand him). Trump just wants to burn down the government out of sense of vengeance for all it has wronged him; there is no deeper motivation than that.
If anyone should be considered for being a “Manchurian Candidate”, it is Elon Musk. His inexplicable rise and convincing followers of his utter genius (despite being totally inept and full of shit in any technical area once you get into details), the funding he has been able to secure from SiVal venture capitalists, his fathering children with multiple women even though he progressively looks more like a reptile and acts like a twelve year old boy. He’s basically Max Zorin from A View To A Kill if Christopher Walken had brain damage. But really, he’s just canny enough to ride the wave of celebration for Silicon Valley “innovators” who retool technologies and tools developed by academic labs and Xerox PARC into ‘apps’ and overhyped products.
Stranger
No, no, that can’t be true. Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. In fact, I’ve heard other people give the exact same description of him.
Trump has a long history of cozying up to the Russians dating back to the 1980s, but I think greed was his primarily motivation for doing so. While I don’t believe he’s a Manchurian candidate, it seems pretty obvious he’s in Russia’s pocket for some reason. My best guess is that Russian money helped keep Trump in business for a number of years and he continues to benefit from remaining friendly with them.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but our Director of National Intelligence is likely a Russian asset, we know Russians interfered in our elections in 2016, they’ve paid money to conversative “news” outlets to distribute Russian propaganda, and in fact Russian propaganda has been MAGA talking points when it comes to Ukraine.
But I don’t think Trump was a Manchurian candidate. The Russians just happened to have their hooks in him and they probably laughed like loons when we elected him.
He’s a scam artist, he is doing this for himself not anyone else.
It’s been a while since I’ve watched the film, but IIRC Angela Lansbury was the ‘brains’ of the conspiracy to maneuver her husband into the Presidency. Their son was the brainwashed assassin. From what I’ve read, Trump was identified as a potential asset by the KGB in 1986, as he was easily manipulated with flattery. So in the The Manchurian Candidate analogy, it seems he bay be both the candidate (who is willingly going along with the conspiracy) and the ‘assassin’ (in Trump’s case, the ‘operative’) who has been brainwashed.
He’s too erratic and stupid to be anyone’s puppet; to the extent foreign influence is behind him he’s more a firebomb thrown into the middle of the government and America society to cause indiscriminate damage.
However, I think that’s shifting the blame too much from the US. He should not have been remotely electable, much less win; the fact that him getting into power was possible in the first place is on us. We like to imagine some conspiracy behind them or that they are secret Machiavellian geniuses because it’s more emotionally satisfying than the realization that we couldn’t stop complete fools from stumbling into power. We don’t like what it says about us.
We created a society built to protect and elevate people like Trump and Musk, them or someone like them getting into power was inevitable in the long run because we arranged things that way ourselves. They are just our version of the idiot noblemen given absolute power despite everyone knowing they are idiots, it’s just that we do it along the lines of “rich white man right wingers” instead of “noble ancestry”.
I’ve gotten to despise what it says about us. I’ve gone from thinking of my fellow citizens as “Most of 'em are basically decent” to “This is a majority-scumbag country, no two ways bout it.”
The whole point of a Manchurian candidate is to hide the malevolence under a façade of affable normality. In Trump’s case the malevolence is on full display and is what he owes much of his popularity to.
All of this shit is just so a couple of oligarchs don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes while stripping the government’s wealth to line their pockets.
Also, people who make $700 an hour have convinced people who $25 an hour that people who make $7 an hour are the problem.
I think Trump has shown us that you don’t have to be good to be successful.
No. Absolutely not. The fictional masters of the Manchurian candidate went to incredible lengths to hide the fact their candidate was not in fact an honest patriotic politician with America’s best interests at heart, and was in fact a malevolent foreign agent
That was absolutely not the case for Trump.
The old canard about “when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a bible” is defunct. Fascism came to America and it barely paid lip service to being either patriotic or Christian, it just said and did a bunch of fascist stuff. And it got voted in twice anyway 
You don’t even have to be competent.
We have vastly underestimated the assholedness of the American Public.
Indeed, Trump wrapped himself around an unsuspecting flag and could barely bring himself to touch an actual Bible. He’s the false deity of “White Christian Nationalists” who themselves don’t have much interest in actual religion except to justify their own hypocrisy, and he and his selected functionaries are so undermining the fundamental security and safety of the nation and its people (not to mention US allies around the world) that they could not be doing more damage if they were literally enemy agents, which some of them may actually be.
Stranger
He’s too stupid and greedy to be a controllable agent.
All the same, why don’t we ask him to play a little solitaire?
Trump is just a greedy asshole who has no scruples. He’s a vessel for others. Read Dave Troy.
He thinks it’s really the tech sector (musk, peter thiel, et al) along with putin who want to remake the world into tech states. It seems bizarre and out there, but there’s no doubt that trump and musk are out to completely destroy the U.S. as we know it.
I don’t think there is any ambiguity about that at this point.
Stranger
I meant the idea of remaking the world into network states (I mistakenly said tech states – it should be network states; where the current nation states no longer exist, and the world is much more like the corporate nations in Rollerball.
The impulse behind the Network State concept is that if privatization is good for some things, it’s necessarily good for everything.
Decoding the "Network State"
He’s a Mandarin Candidate.
(As in mandarin orange.)
But no, a Manchurian Candidate is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s openly a frothing, rabid wolf in the middle of ripping the sheep apart. He campaigned on being such a thing (while insisting the sheep had it coming).
