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.

The Case Against Trump the Mastermind

And yet: do you really picture him sitting alone drafting legal scaffolding to gut the Federal Reserve’s independence? Or mapping step by step how to federalize police power? Or carefully charting how to turn executive immunity into a shield against accountability?

No. His attention span isn’t built for that. His intellect runs on grievance and impulse. He lunges, he reacts, he smashes locks on cages because smashing is what he does. He is an instrument, not an architect.

Which leaves the critical point: if Trump is the battering ram, who walks through the breach?

The True Architects

Look to the lieutenants and the networks around him. Stephen Miller, with his gift for language as a bludgeon. The legal theorists of the “unitary executive” who have spent years polishing arguments for near-absolute presidential power. The billionaire donors funding Project 2025 and other efforts to hollow out independent agencies and replace them with political loyalists. The Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, and Federalist Society, each seeding personnel and doctrine into the bloodstream of governance.

These are not chaotic actors. They are careful, methodical, and patient. They understand Trump’s role: he is the showman, the lightning rod, the battering ram. He draws the fire, distracts the cameras, normalizes the abnormal. And while the nation argues over his latest phrase or tweet, the machinery is quietly assembled.

The symbiosis is clear. Trump needs their discipline to turn his impulses into lasting power. They need his shamelessness and charisma to batter through the walls they cannot touch alone.

What the Cage Looks Like

If Trump were merely a narcissist shouting into the void, he would be dangerous but containable. It is Trump as vessel that terrifies me. Because behind him we see the cage already being built.

Captured courts stacked with loyalists. Independent agencies either dismantled or politicized. Military power eyed as a domestic lever. Law wielded as a weapon against enemies, while the president shrugs and says, “I can do whatever I want.”

I’ve watched citizens ask, “But isn’t this illegal?” And the dazed look on their faces when they learn that much of what seemed like steel was only paper. Norms. Courtesies. Handshake agreements. Paper trying to hold back a hurricane.

And while the performer boasts and blusters, the architects of authoritarianism build structures on the wreckage.

The Consequences for Ordinary People

What does this mean for us? It means law enforcement diverted from real crime to political theater. It means markets rattled by whimsical interference in the Fed. It means agencies once tasked with public service now serving presidential vendettas.

It means daily life warped by a government whose highest purpose is to protect one man’s ego.

And worst of all, it means a creeping numbness. Because when outrage becomes daily bread, people stop tasting the rot. That’s the point. Spectacle sedates while the real work is done elsewhere.

Where We’re Headed

Unless checked, we are heading toward an America where law becomes stagecraft, where truth is drowned in performance, and where authoritarianism looks less like a coup and more like a bad reality show that never ends.

Trump is not the strategist. He doesn’t need to be. He is the show. And the show is the strategy.

A Final Benediction

So here is the paradox, and the warning. Trump roars. Others build the cage. And unless we learn to look past the roar, we may wake to find the cage already closed.

But here’s the charge: we are not helpless. We can still expose the architects, call things by their names, and refuse to play the role they cast for us. We can still insist that law is more than performance and that government belongs to the governed.

That is the task. That is the oath. To refuse to be the audience of tyranny, and instead to become the citizens who dismantle its stage.