Who’s Really Driving This Thing?

I keep circling the same uneasy question: is Donald Trump really the strategist behind the authoritarian creep we’re living through, or is he simply the showman—the blunt instrument—while colder, more disciplined minds around him draft the blueprints?

It’s not an idle question. For ten years now we’ve lived inside this paradox. On the one hand, Trump is impulsive, repetitive, and shallow in thought. He stumbles through syntax, blurts out motives other politicians would hide, and seems unable to follow the thread of his own policies for more than a few news cycles. On the other hand, the pattern of what’s happening is not random. It is systematic. It is precedent-breaking in sequence. It is chaos deployed as cover.

So which is it? Is Trump the strategist—or is he the performance while the strategy comes from elsewhere?

A Stage Set Long Before Trump

History offers a warning here. Mussolini was bombastic, but it was the Fascist Party’s legal theorists and industrial backers who cemented his power. Nixon had a paranoid instinct for vengeance, but it was Kissinger and his circle who reshaped foreign policy into realpolitik. In every case, the spectacle captured public attention while the machinery of power was assembled out of sight.

I learned a version of this lesson myself across decades in government. The loudest person in the room is rarely the one shaping the memo that determines the outcome. Spectacle is useful—but only if someone is behind it, sharpening the knives.

The Case for Trump the Strategist

To dismiss Trump as a simpleton is a mistake. He has a kind of animal cunning. He knows how to test boundaries with a grin, then pull back just enough to call it a joke. He knows spectacle better than anyone alive. He floods the space with so much noise that people stop noticing the fire in the background.

He’s also practiced at turning delay into victory. His entire life in courtrooms and bankruptcies taught him that if you can stall, you can often win without ever prevailing on the merits. That instinct—file every motion, drag every hearing, swamp every prosecutor—has metastasized into a political weapon.

So in that sense, yes, there is strategy in Trump. Not the slow-burn variety of policy craftsmanship, but the predatory strategy of a man who knows how to work chaos in his favor.