How disorder became the product, succession became the threat, and voters built the trap themselves
I want to start with something simple, something you can observe without any particular political leaning, and see if you end up where I did.
Venezuela got loud, then it quieted down. Iran got loud. Now Cuba is warming up. At some point, one of these will quiet down too, and something else will heat up. There is always something heating up. There is never a moment where the temperature drops across the board and stays down. If you step back far enough to see the whole map at once, a pattern emerges that is difficult to explain as coincidence, incompetence, or even ideology.
What if the chaos isn’t the failure? What if the chaos is the point?
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a man who has been watching American politics since Eisenhower, who moved from California to Oregon in 1975 and watched two states make similar mistakes on slightly different timelines, and who spent a sleepless night recently, courtesy of bad scallops and an overactive mind, turning this question over until it had an answer I could not easily dismiss.
This piece has two movements. The first is about chaos as a governing strategy. The second is about why that strategy is self-sealing, and who pays the price when it is.
What if the chaos isn’t the failure? What if the chaos is the point?
Part One: The Chaos Is the Product
What Normal Turbulence Looks Like
Every presidency generates turbulence. Foreign policy crises flare and subside. Domestic controversies rise and fall. This is the normal metabolism of governing a large, complicated country in a complicated world. Nobody reasonable expects calm.
But normal turbulence has a rhythm. Problems are identified, addressed, resolved or managed, and attention moves on. The temperature rises and falls. There is a discernible arc: crisis, response, resolution, or at minimum, honest failure followed by correction.
What we are watching now has a different rhythm entirely. The temperature does not fall. The resolution never quite arrives. Each crisis is replaced not by calm but by the next crisis, on a rotation that feels less like the unpredictable nature of world events and more like a programming schedule.
The Rotation
Venezuela became the focus. Military posturing, deportation flights, diplomatic brinksmanship. Then it subsided, not resolved, just deprioritized. Iran filled the space almost immediately. The language escalated. Negotiations were announced with negotiators who, by any serious diplomatic assessment, were not equipped to deliver results. The war drums are audible but the path to resolution is deliberately obscured.
Cuba is next. The signals are already there for anyone paying attention.
Now ask yourself a straightforward question: what does a president gain from resolution? A resolved crisis is yesterday’s news. A resolved crisis means the cameras move on. A resolved crisis means the public starts paying attention to other things, grocery prices, healthcare costs, whether their VA claim has been processed.
A ongoing crisis, on the other hand, is a spotlight. And the spotlight, in this administration, is not a tool of governance. It is the objective of governance.
A resolved crisis is yesterday’s news. An ongoing crisis is a spotlight. And the spotlight is not a tool of governance. It is the objective.
More Than Narcissism
The easy diagnosis is narcissism, and it is not wrong as far as it goes. But narcissism alone does not fully explain the pattern, because narcissism is ultimately reactive. It seeks approval, validation, the crowd’s energy. What we are observing has a more active quality. It is not just craving the spotlight. It is engineering the conditions that make the spotlight permanent.
Some political psychologists have reached for the term malignant narcissism, a combination of narcissistic personality, antisocial behavior, paranoia, and a willingness to cause harm without remorse. Others simply describe an autocratic personality type. Neither quite captures it.
What I keep coming back to is this: chaos is this man’s life support system. Not metaphorically. Functionally. Remove the crisis and you remove the reason for the rally, the reason for the emergency declaration, the reason the cameras are in the room. Stability is not just boring to him. Stability is existentially threatening.
That is not a medical diagnosis. It is a political observation. And it matters, because it changes how you evaluate everything that follows.
The Chaos Candidate Part 1 of 2
The Chaos Candidate
How disorder became the product, succession became the threat, and voters built the trap themselves
I want to start with something simple, something you can observe without any particular political leaning, and see if you end up where I did.
Venezuela got loud, then it quieted down. Iran got loud. Now Cuba is warming up. At some point, one of these will quiet down too, and something else will heat up. There is always something heating up. There is never a moment where the temperature drops across the board and stays down. If you step back far enough to see the whole map at once, a pattern emerges that is difficult to explain as coincidence, incompetence, or even ideology.
What if the chaos isn’t the failure? What if the chaos is the point?
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a man who has been watching American politics since Eisenhower, who moved from California to Oregon in 1975 and watched two states make similar mistakes on slightly different timelines, and who spent a sleepless night recently, courtesy of bad scallops and an overactive mind, turning this question over until it had an answer I could not easily dismiss.
This piece has two movements. The first is about chaos as a governing strategy. The second is about why that strategy is self-sealing, and who pays the price when it is.
What if the chaos isn’t the failure? What if the chaos is the point?
Part One: The Chaos Is the Product
What Normal Turbulence Looks Like
Every presidency generates turbulence. Foreign policy crises flare and subside. Domestic controversies rise and fall. This is the normal metabolism of governing a large, complicated country in a complicated world. Nobody reasonable expects calm.
But normal turbulence has a rhythm. Problems are identified, addressed, resolved or managed, and attention moves on. The temperature rises and falls. There is a discernible arc: crisis, response, resolution, or at minimum, honest failure followed by correction.
What we are watching now has a different rhythm entirely. The temperature does not fall. The resolution never quite arrives. Each crisis is replaced not by calm but by the next crisis, on a rotation that feels less like the unpredictable nature of world events and more like a programming schedule.
The Rotation
Venezuela became the focus. Military posturing, deportation flights, diplomatic brinksmanship. Then it subsided, not resolved, just deprioritized. Iran filled the space almost immediately. The language escalated. Negotiations were announced with negotiators who, by any serious diplomatic assessment, were not equipped to deliver results. The war drums are audible but the path to resolution is deliberately obscured.
Cuba is next. The signals are already there for anyone paying attention.
Now ask yourself a straightforward question: what does a president gain from resolution? A resolved crisis is yesterday’s news. A resolved crisis means the cameras move on. A resolved crisis means the public starts paying attention to other things, grocery prices, healthcare costs, whether their VA claim has been processed.
A ongoing crisis, on the other hand, is a spotlight. And the spotlight, in this administration, is not a tool of governance. It is the objective of governance.
A resolved crisis is yesterday’s news. An ongoing crisis is a spotlight. And the spotlight is not a tool of governance. It is the objective.
More Than Narcissism
The easy diagnosis is narcissism, and it is not wrong as far as it goes. But narcissism alone does not fully explain the pattern, because narcissism is ultimately reactive. It seeks approval, validation, the crowd’s energy. What we are observing has a more active quality. It is not just craving the spotlight. It is engineering the conditions that make the spotlight permanent.
Some political psychologists have reached for the term malignant narcissism, a combination of narcissistic personality, antisocial behavior, paranoia, and a willingness to cause harm without remorse. Others simply describe an autocratic personality type. Neither quite captures it.
What I keep coming back to is this: chaos is this man’s life support system. Not metaphorically. Functionally. Remove the crisis and you remove the reason for the rally, the reason for the emergency declaration, the reason the cameras are in the room. Stability is not just boring to him. Stability is existentially threatening.
That is not a medical diagnosis. It is a political observation. And it matters, because it changes how you evaluate everything that follows.
When it’s all about me
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