No, Trump isn't a Bond Villain

Deep clever analysis of elaborate clever plans by the populist right is misguided.

I was just watching Emma Vigeland interview Naomi Klein on the Majority Report. While I very much respect the journalism, depth of discussion and knowledge there was something that bothered me about the whole conversation. In fact it is something that has long bothered me about left-wing discourse on the right.

They overanalyze right-wingers and turn them into someone who is playing James Bond villain style 4D Chess. But let us take a step back and reflect on how believable that is.

Do you really think Donald Trump is a clever guy? He regularly says the most absurdly stupid things.

Dr. William Kelley (Chapman, 2017) called Trump the dumbest student ever. Students said Trump rarely came to class and was always unprepared. The family friend who gave Trump special permission to get into the U of Penn later said he regretted doing so (Fearnow, 2019). After all, as a child, Trump was a failing student until he was sent to military school because of incorrigible behavior. In military school, anyone who committed a dishonest or disruptive act was called “DJT" after the student who had the worst record (Miller, 2016).

So tell me what is more believable?

1. Trump engineer an economic crisis in the US to somehow make himself and his cronies rich.

2. Trump cause an economic crisis because he is stupid and does not understand how economics work.

I am going with number one. In my view people need to use Hanlon’s razor more when analyzing politics:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

We humans have a desperate need to imbue everything with purpose. We can see this through religion going thousands of years back. If crops fail, or we get sick we assumed it was because we angered the Gods. We assume everything happens for a reason rather than accept that so many bad things are random occurrences or stupidity.

If crashing an economy was a genuinely smart idea to enrich yourself then it would have happened a lot more frequently. You also would not see rich people speak out against the tariffs to loudly.

That doesn’t mean the rich cannot make gains in a crash. There will be ways to exploit a crash, but generally speaking the opportunities for making money is greater in a growing economy.

A lot of bad people are also very incompetent. Look at Russia’s war in Ukraine. They made endless number of mistakes which has left them with massive losses and minimal gains. On paper Russia should have been able to crush Ukraine easily, but they didn’t. And much of that is down to their own incompetence.

The same happened with Nazi Germany. Hitler inherited a very well developed army and some of the best engineers and scientists in the world. He got far on that but ultimately the stupidity of the Nazis sealed their fate.

The mistake people make is that they overestimate the intelligence of the bad guys and underestimate their brutality and the effectiveness of brutality. Look at Trump. How has he gotten so far? It has not been through cleverness but in large part due to brutality and our own reluctance to hit back hard. That Trump was not imprisoned after January 6th was not due to cleverness on his part but cowardice on the part of the opposition. Likewise both impeachments against him failed in large part due to the cowardice of fellow Republicans. Through his vindictive streak they knew he would punish them if they did not fall in line.

Brutal bullying and intimidation works. You don’t need to be that clever. Dictators and organized crime has gotten very far with that tactic without being all that clever. Look at WW2:

Appeasement policy, the policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini, operating jointly at that time, during 1937 and 1938 by continuous concessions granted in the hope of reaching a point of saturation when the dictators would be willing to accede to international collaboration.... It came to an end when Hitler seized Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, in defiance of his promises given at Munich, and Prime Minister Chamberlain, who had championed appeasement before, decided on a policy of resistance to further German aggression.

— Walter Theimer (ed.), The Penguin Political Dictionary, 1939

I must admit I have often hated the word appeasement because it has so often been used as an excuse for overreaction against any small infraction. It was used about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq e.g. to rationalize invasion. But often this represents nations that are not much of a threat to us in the West. Iraq never threatened Western security.

Appeasement of Hitler is a far more relevant comparison when talking about Putin or Trump. Putin because he is nuclear armed and hence there is a real fear of escalation of conflict with Russia.

For Trump it was first about his hold on voters, and that he inspired hate and violence in people that silenced opponents. I remember before the first Trump presidential election there were Republicans who admitted they could not oppose Trump openly because they experienced threats against themselves and even their children in the school yard.

This is really the power of Trump. He has a de-facto army of bullies ready pummel anyone into submission. There is a ferocious internal pressure to yield to the great Führer. Remember how some of the deepest hatred and anger among MAGA was directed against Mike Pence, not radical leftists. It was an example of the danger of the in-group open opposing the Führer. Some of the first people the Nazis killed were not external enemies but internal opposition. The Night of the Long Knives is a good example:

Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhmand the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization, known colloquially as "Brownshirts". Nazi propaganda presented the murders as a preventive measure against an alleged imminent coup by the SA under Röhm – the so-called Röhm Putsch.

The Nazis killed over a hundred people primarily among their own ranks that had represented opposition to Hitler’s line.

The same happens in Mafia organization. Many who get killed are part of the same organization but in some ways disagreeing with the leadership.

We live in more civilized times today, so direct assassinations like this are unlikely in my humble opinion. But it also isn’t necessary to silence opposition. With current social media it is much easier to spread information about opponents to allies and have them act on your behalf without any direct orders.

We had an example of a female Republican voting against Trump. Afterwards he called her up and yelled at her. Trump can be extremely unpleasant if he wants to. The Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen experienced her conversation with Trump as very unpleasant when she would not give him Greenland. Bullying works because we humans have tendency to try to calm down bullies.

We lower our voices and sweet talk because we find their anger and threat intimidating. And because most of us are responsible people we do not want to cause a diplomatic crisis by angering Trump further. Because reality is that world leaders should really just tell Trump to “go fuck himself,” and not play ball. But we don’t do that because we try to be responsible and act like an adult.

But the end result is that he is never put in his place and is allowed to go around terrorizing everyone. His success thus does not rely on any kind of brilliant 4D Chess playing. It all relies on flaws of human psychology. We are just weak when facing bullies. We are conflict shy. We just want things to stay the way we are used to or at minimum not get any worse than it already is.

But fighting Trump means making things a lot worse than they are now, because he will not tolerate opposition and he will strike back. It will escalate quickly but what other option is there really? Putting your head in the sand and hoping that Trump becomes a decent honorable human being tomorrow?

People go all the time “Why is Trump doing this very stupid thing?” and in the next sentence conjure some clever explanation as if the universe requires evil to be brilliant. Take the stupid tariffs. So many people manufacture absurd rationalizations for these tariffs. Some think crashing the economy is somehow a way to enrich Trump and his oligarchs. No, it isn’t. His biggest oligarch supporter, Elon Musk, is deeply hurt by it.

Elon Musk, as many others on the left make the stupid mistake of thinking Trump cannot be that dumb. Yes, he can. Many right-wing Trump supporters think the tariffs are a clever negotiation ploy to get “real” free trade in the world. Again, no it isn’t because Trump has long believed in tariffs. Long before Trump I spoke to many right-wing tax haters who all loved tariffs. Why do they do that? It is a special American phenomenon. Americans on the right have visceral hatred of personal income taxation. Particularly libertarians. Many have told me that a country doesn’t need taxes to work. And their argument is usually America before personal income tax. And we know that the way America funded itself before income taxation was through tariffs.

In fact this is the old way countries obtained tax income. We know this even from Biblical times. They would tax people entering towns to trade at the market. Why was this type of taxation so popular? Because it is easy to implement. An income tax is more sensible and more fair, but more difficult to implement. It requires a more advanced government bureaucracy to do so.

Taxation has always been limited by the sophistication of government. That is why countries used to have odd taxation such as window tax, or taxation based on the width of your house. For instance Dutch houses are very narrow because they got taxed on the width of the house.

A lot of odd historical architectural features stems from historical tax rules. Taxes got implemented that way because measuring the area of a house was a far more complicated endeavor for a relatively simplistic bureaucracy that existed in the 1600s Netherlands.

Trump of course doesn’t get any of this because he isn’t a deep thinker. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t reflect. But this is about more than him. It is about a deeper American problem: A naive and nostalgic view of the American past.

I have debated hundreds and hundreds of American right-wingers over the years, so I know their thinking very well. A reoccurring belief is that America is constantly slipping away further and further from an idealized mythical “original” America. They will acknowledge to me that America has many problems, but they insist that has nothing to do with the American constitution or founding but everything to do with corrupt politicians and the fact that they are no longer following the constitution as they see it.

In their minds the US government needs to be scaled back to 1776 level and everything becomes perfect again. The founding fathers are worshipped as Gods. Somehow everything they thought about how America should work or be run was 100% perfect. Their narrative is simple: America has drifted away from this perfect state due to liberals expanding the power of government, social services, welfare and taxation.

This is why completely outdated forms of taxation and organizing government holds sway in conservative minds. Trumpism is just taking this kind of conservative mythology to its extreme conclusion. In other words this is not some kind of clever ploy or deception. This is literally what these people believe.

Suggesting that it is a clever ploy is like implying that Christians cannot seriously believe Jesus died for their sins or that there is a man in the sky listening to their prayers. No, that is literally what they believe. It is not part of some 4D Chess to gain some special advantage.

There are people who died of COIVD19 because they refused to believe it was real, and refused treatment. People can have all sorts of absurd beliefs that are not to their own benefit. Elon Musk thought Trump would be his savior. Look at him now. Tesla is crashing down. I highly doubt Elon Musk will get out of the Trump presidency as a richer man. In fact I think there is a real chance he may lose his fortune.

To give some context for why I write this: I absolutely hate conspiracy thinking. It is one of the worst parts of the American right. Belief that COIVD19 was a hoax. That climate change isn’t real but a ploy by government and scientists. Or all the nutty ideas about world governments.

But here is the thing. Conspiracy thinking isn’t magically limited to the political right. As an outside observer I have noticed that conspiracy thinking seems to be a sort of natural part of the American psych. Perhaps because Americans have a general deep distrust of people in power and authority.

Left-wing conspiracy thinking is simply not quite as noticeable because it is rarely about a flat out rejection of science. The left are not the ones who rejected the effect of tobacco on your health, dangers of pollution, CO2 emissions etc. Instead the left is more prone to see attempt at grabbing power, money or wealth where that is not necessarily the case.

Elon Musk is an excellent example of left-wing conspiracy thinking. For instance many would in earnestly argue that Elon’s Mars plans was a ploy for the ultra rich to escape all the pollution problems on Earth. Which is utterly absurd. The very soil on Mars is radioactive. To make Earth as bad as Mars you would have to nuke the whole planet, burn down all vegetation. Kill all animals. Remove all the oxygen, get rid of most of the water and put enough dust in the air to reduce solar radiation into Earth four times. And then we still haven’t added the problem of much lower gravity.

So the left in America has some of the same problems as the American right: An assumption that the other guys is doing everything for some evil reason. But Trump isn’t destroying the American economy because he is evil but because he is stupid and arrogant.

Likewise Elon Musk’s desire to colonize Mars is ultimately a form of teenage geek dream. In some ways it is also a form of stupidity. The kind of stupidity a man who understands rocket engines very well but not the human condition, might have.

Mind you none of this means that Trump and Elon are not horrible and immoral people. They are both bullies. They fire people taking away their livelihood while laughing about it. There is plenty of evil actions on their part. You do not have to add deliberate destruction of the US economy. That is just plain old stupidity.