So I've changed my mind: Donald Trump is pursuing a rational, intelligent strategy

Great Debates
1

I had just finished reading why Donald Trump is like Frank Sinatra, which came after getting the scoop on why Donald Trump is a lot like JFK, and was halfway through learning why Donald Trump is like Liberace when I suddenly had an epiphany.

Donald Trump is a lot like Teddy Roosevelt.

Both are from New York. Both worked an impressive variety of jobs before going into politics. Both were married multiple times. And both eventually became President of the United States. But that’s not really what I had in mind.

During the Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt lead his unit, the Rough Riders, in a famous charge up San Juan Hill. Despite their name, the Rough Riders were on foot. Only Teddy was on horseback. When he lead the charge, every defender on that hill was going to be aiming their shots at the one guy on horseback. This allowed most of the foot soldiers to reach the top of the hill alive.

I now believe that Donald Trump employs a similar tactic in the media environment. His primary weapon throughout the campaign was Twitter, and whenever he tweeted something outrageous or nasty, everybody focused on that. They still do. Now that he’s President, he can expand slightly and also use press conferences and interviews and such to grab attention as well, but clearly Twitter is still his main thing.

We may first note that there’s an imbalance of time here. It takes Trump a few seconds to post a Tweet. When he does so, it sends the media into a huge tizzy, with almost every news outlet reporting it, commenting on it, and obsessing over it. This goes through TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and then filters down to blogs and Facebook and everywhere else. So Trump spends a few seconds of his time, and it consumes probably millions of hours of time from other people, mostly those who hate and oppose him.

Meanwhile serious things are afoot in Washington. Confirmation votes for his cabinet are underway, and he has already started issuing executive orders. The Republicans have plans for major legislation to be pushed through as soon as possible. It’s a massive agenda, much of which they are hoping to rush through in a very short time. And a lot of the most important things are getting very little attention in the liberal media, because the liberals are too busy expressing their outrage and indignation about what Trump just tweeted about a Broadway star or a Ms. Universe contestant or whatever the topic du jour is. The analogy should be clear. Trump’s Twitter is like Teddy Roosevelt on the horse, getting all the return fire from the enemy. Cabinet appointees, Congressional Republicans, and their staffs, think tanks, lobbyists and others working behind the scenes are like the Rough Riders, accomplishing things and winning the battle because no one thought to aim at them.

It’s worth noting that one of Trump’s most successful tactics is lying. Right now, the liberal media are busy debunking his claims that illegal immigrants voted in millions and that his inauguration crowd was the largest ever. A month ago he was lying about other things, and a month from now he’ll by lying about something else, and the liberal media will be proudly showing off their intellectual superiority by debunking his lies. By doing so, they play right into his hands, being distracted and distracting their audience from the substantial policies debates that will determine the future of American government.

2

Nonsense.

Trump isn’t diverting attention away from some secret agenda. Calling attention to himself is his agenda.

Trump is throwing away two important assets: personal credibility and presidential mystique. And he’s throwing them away on trivia during his first week on the job. He’s going to need those assets some day and he won’t have them.

Trump is self-destructing faster than I thought he would.

3

“Never, ever, ever underestimate Trump!”

~Harry Reid

“You can’t win! He will always find a way to outsmart you!”

~Former wife Ivana Trump

I have no idea whether I’m going to wind up happy or pissed off about the things that guy does. But I have no doubt whatsoever that he’s going to be very effective at it.

You’ve posted a very interesting hypothesis that fits pretty well with what other posters are deriding as my saying that he’s playing 4th or 6th or 10th dimensional chess. I’ve said many times before that Donald Trump is rarely doing what he appears to be doing on the surface, and if your theory is correct this would be a perfect example of that.

4

I think you’re way over thinking it. Similar claims were made about Bush the Younger having a lot going beneath his folksy moron persona, but at the end of the day, there was not much evidence of that.

Regarding, Teddy Roosevelt, he was married twice. His first wife died after two years of marriage, at 22 years old. That’s hardly comparable to Trump’s situation. Also, not to knock on TR’s courage, which was considerable, but if everyone had been aiming at him at San Juan Hill, he would have been killed.

5

Yeah this Trump is crazy like a fox meme has got to stop. Trump was always going to push through his radical agenda. As President Obama said, “elections have consequences.” Trump is president and resistance to him means limiting the damage he does, but he’s going to be able to do a lot of damage because he’s president and the GOP controls both houses of Congress.

We’re not going to beat Trump on facts, if facts matter he never would have become president. We are going to beat Trump by doing what we are doing: defining his presidency as a failure, painting him accurately as mentally unbalanced and illegitimate and standing on his neck so he doesn’t catch his breath. We need to make sure he stays historically unpopular so that other politicians abandon him and his agenda.

6

Not much of a meme, really. So far as I know I’m the only one who’s been promoting it. :smiley:

Actually this kind of behavior from the left is a large part of why he got elected. Painting him as a failure and calling him mentally unbalanced, etc., didn’t work before the election so I’m at a loss to understand why you think it’ll work now.

7

Actually, this is working. Trump has a 45% approval rating, the lowest approval rating for a newly elected president in history. An AP story reports that Trump is complaining that all the negative press is making it impossible for him to “enjoy” the Whitehouse and that he thought the negative press would stop once he took office.

This is a mentally unstable man, keeping pressure up on him makes it likely he will continue with his bizarre behavior, alienate more people and lash out in bizarre ways. At this point we’re not trying to influence him, but local, state and national politicians who will start to abandon him and his agenda to save their own jobs.

ETA: Report: Trump Complains Negative Press Means He Can’t ‘Enjoy’ White House - TPM – Talking Points Memo

8

Well, time will tell. One thing’s for sure though. It’ll be interesting to see how things play out.

9

If by interesting, you mean terrifying, I agree. We have a mentally unstable president spinning out of control in his first week in office. I think the GOP is our best hope for the country because I’m hoping that there are a few who still love their country enough to stand up for it and use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Graham and McCain are the best bets to lead the movement, but Trump’s approval ratings have to get low enough that other Republicans feel comfortable enough joining the effort.

10

That sort of thing is not new, and there’s still no evidence it’s true. It seemed like wishful thinking before, and only seems more like it now.

I get it. It’s just so staggeringly hard to believe he’s as bad as he seems. Even someone who is some Machiavellian mastermind seems more comforting than what is staring us in the face. At least then we could trust him not to royally fuck up everything.

11

I agree BigT, it’s comforting to think that Trump is playing some kind of game with the public to push through his agenda and distract from his corruption because it implies that there is a rationality behind it and rational people don’t blow up the planet. I am of the opinion that Trump behaves like a thin-skinned madman because that’s what he is.

12

Author Alexandra Erin said this yesterday on Twitter which is getting a lot of attention:

[QUOTE=Alexandra Erin]

So, here’s a thing about Trump and his competence/mental state. I’m going to list three things that have happened since he was elected.

Thing the first - when asked about his/the GOP’s plan on ACA, he said, repeatedly, that the Democrats “own Obamacare” and its failures. He said that they “should” let it fail and the Democrats would “own it”, but they’re not going to.

Thing the second - when he visited the CIA, he said outright that he was visiting them first to put to bed the idea of a rift with them.

And thing the third - he described the purpose of sweeping regulatory rollback as being to allow companies to do something “monstrous” fast.

These three things all have one thing in common - saying them in no way helped him, in no way advanced his case or achieved a goal.

So why did he say them? I’ll tell you why. It’s the other thing they have in common: they are internal talking points. Strategy points. Donald Trump told us he wanted the weekend off. He had no intention of going to the CIA, or anywhere else. So how did he get there? Like so:

Someone close to him says, “Donald, you need to go talk to the CIA.”
“I don’t wanna. They’re out to get me.”
“That’s why you have to go.”
His advisor (handler) says, “The media’s talking about this rift, this rift. You have to go talk to them right away, show there’s no rift.”

So Donald Trump gets up in front of the CIA and his paid cheering session, and honest to God the only thing he says on topic is that. He repeats, probably almost word for word, the rationale his advisor told him he had to be there. He doesn’t understand what they actually wanted him to do, which was to get up and praise the CIA and act like there was no rift.

The other cases? Same thing. He’s repeating to reporters the verbiage his aides and advisors explain to him why he wants to do things. It was probably Bannon the nihilist who told him that the regulatory rollback would help companies that want to do monstrous things.

My point here is - Donald Trump was never a complex or nuanced man, but at this point, he’s… well, “far gone” is the only way to put it. It’s unfortunate there is so much loaded, ableist rhetoric around both evil and incompetent men, but there is something going on here. When you read the text of a Trump interview or speech from ten years ao, compared to one today? The degradation is very obvious.

Remember the report that the Russians had prepared all this kompromat on Trump but found they didn’t need it? He just does what they say. And his close aides/associates outright saying he basically does what the last person he talked to (that he trusts) suggests.

I’ll put this very bluntly: I don’t think Donald Trump understands what the people in his life are telling him to do, even as he does it. If he were playing poker and Steve Bannon were helping him and Bannon said, “Donald, you’re showing an ace but you’ve got nothing, bluff” Donald would say, “I’ve got nothing so I’m bluffing.” and then get very angry when he doesn’t win, because he was told that would work. There are at least those three times in January alone that he has repeated what was obviously an internal talking point, to reporters.

This is not to say he’s entirely a puppet president. I think he’s doing two things right now: his own impulses, and what he’s talked into. Both kinds of things are dangerous for different reasons. His unchecked id, unrestrained temperament, could literally get us all killed. And his tendency to go along with whatever the people he relies on press him into doing puts very dangerous people in powerful positions. And our supposedly “liberal media” spent ages blandly reporting on “concerns” of Clinton’s health that were clearly deflection/projection.

Mark my words, if things continue, he’s gonna pull a talking points gaffe like the ones I mentioned during an important negotiation.

I’ve kept waiting for anyone in the media to notice this pattern but no one seems to be picking up on it, among the other weirdness. I’m sure to Donald it makes a kind of sense, he’s always subscribed to the idea that it’s all just “moves” in a negotiation anyway. The idea that you don’t tell the person you’re buttering up you’re there to butter them up, or reveal your scapegoat plans to the public seems to have slipped away from him, though. He’s lost what little sense of subtlety he ever had.

A scene I’d bet has happened:
Advisor: Donald, you have to say X, because Y.
Donald: So I say Y.
A: You can’t say Y.
D: But I’m president!

And then there’s a ten minute argument about why did the advisor tell him Y if he can’t say Y, why can’t he say Y if Y is true, etc. And the advisor tries to convince him that he can’t say Y because it looks bad, but that turns into Donald wanting to say THAT. And then they run out of time and the advisor gives up, figuring (mostly correctly!) that it will all be overlooked anyway. That’s how we end up with Trump rambling about the Democrats owning Obamacare if the repeal/replace fails. That’s how we end up with Trump telling the CIA he’s visiting them first because of appearances. That’s how we end up with Trump explaining the purpose of the regulation rollback as allowing companies to do monstrous things quickly.

Now, if you think this is worrying, here’s the scary part: the people working with him in the White House and the GOP leaders must know this. And their collective reaction to this ongoing and likely spiraling state of affairs is not “This is bad.” but “What a golden opportunity!”

Tomorrow, God willing, I will wake up. And I will find Trump’s online supporters saying, “How do you know that’s what his advisors said?” And it’s true, I have no inside knowledge. It’s just conversational algebra. You start from the actual outcome and work backwards. See, with a few exceptions, people rarely say things that make no sense. You just have to figure out how they make sense. And while it’s tempting to dismiss what Trump spews in his rambles as “word salad”, a lot of it does make sense from the right perspective. And I’m telling you, a lot of what he’s been doing is repeating fragments of advice he’d get from advisors, things from strategy meetings. And I have never had a high opinion of him, but I don’t believe he would have done that, ten years ago. Make of that what you will.
[/QUOTE]

This is a very interesting observation. It shows Trump’s lack of intellect, or possibly ongoing dementia, and that he’s just a puppet of a crazed GOP, mad with its new power.

13

I am stunned anyone believes he listens to his advisers, to be honest.

14

And she said it in 140 character chunks!

15

Yeah, that is what I’m thinking, as well – keep up the pressure! I have no idea how he would react, but just maybe he will lose some important allies.

16

You are parroting, using the same phrases, what Scott Adams has been saying for quite some time, and what a lot of his followers have been saying. Your wording’s so close I honestly wonder if you got it from him.

17

The OP has put forth a theory that has a great deal of logic behind it and makes perfect sense - and it would be genius ***if ***Trump were employing such a strategy - but I don’t think Trump is that nuanced or complex or strategic.
This reminds me of a Mark Twain story, “Luck.” The main character, Scoresby, makes a series of foolish decisions, but somehow through improbable luck, all of his foolish errors have spectacularly successful results, and because of that, people hail him as a genius, when in fact it was nothing but luck. In battle, Scoresby mistakes his right hand for his left, and so orders a suicidally ill-advised attack on the enemy, but because the enemy just so happens to be caught off guard, it actually is a successful military move.

18

Nope, never heard of him actually. Why is it you guys never give us righties credit for coming up with anything on our own? To hear you tell it our opinions only come from Fox (who I don’t watch) or Rush Limbaugh (who I don’t listen to), etc., etc., etc. The reality is that certain truths are self-evident if one isn’t biased against them to begin with.

19

Well, Scott Adams came up with it on his own, and I give him full credit. I am simply making the straightforward observation that you are not the only person saying these things; it’s a common claim, actually. Adams is hardly the only one who’s said it.

20

Sorry, I momentarily forgot the SDMB propensity for pedantry. I would have thought it obvious I was talking about being the only one on the board promoting that view, and not that I was the only person in the world doing so. Your correction, FWIW, is duly noted.