DONALD THE DESTROYER & THE GREAT UNMAKING
DONALD FOR DUMMIES — THE OCCAM’S RAZOR OF TRUMP
Any sane politician - even a completely amoral one, untroubled by the prospect of slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians - would take one look at the enormous economic and political costs of continuing the war in Iran and would rush to lower the temperature and find the nearest available offramp. Not Donald Trump, who’s been paralyzed for weeks now — caught between his relentlessly aggressive impulses and the unsolvable monkey trap that is his war in Iran. Just last week, Donald Trump declared the Iranian response to his latest peace proposal to be “stupid” and “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE”, and he’s said that the current ceasefire is “on life support”. A week earlier, in a telling response to the previous Iranian peace proposal, Trump posted on social media that he “can’t imagine that it would be acceptable in that they have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years”. If Trump’s war in Iran was motivated in any way by a desire to bring peace to the Middle East or to fix or improve anything at all - as he’s repeatedly claimed (though what exactly he’s fixing and how he claims to be fixing it has never been clear) - then such an offhand dismissal of an actual peace proposal would obviously be completely insane. To dismiss the proposal while saying - out loud and in public - that peace can only come after sufficient punishment has been imposed just makes it that much crazier.
As for Trump’s motive in Iran, “fixing” and “improving” things aren’t really what Donald does, at least not for anyone other than himself. Likewise, Donald doesn’t have any demonstrated aptitude for peace - or a clear understanding of the concept, frankly - though he expects to win a prize for it nonetheless. Donald’s interests lie elsewhere. Donald Trump is reliably racist, sexist, anti-gay and pro-billionaire. He’s always looking for a new way - legal or not - to put more money into his own pockets. Bigotry, greed and aggression are Donald Trump’s brand. They’re also as close as he comes to having an identifiable governing philosophy. For this reason, his presidency is and always will be a traveling roadshow of transgression — from Greenland, to Minneapolis, to Iran and then on to the next Breakable Thing. Beyond this permanent circus, Donald Trump does not have any enduring legislative or foreign priorities. He has no lasting alliances or allegiances to anyone but himself. He is not an anti-Communist or a free market warrior or a neoconservative, or an adherent of any of the other passé, right-wing orthodoxies of the last 80 years. Nor is he simply transactional or corrupt in the traditional sense, though he is of course both of these things, to the bone. Like a mafia boss, these are not peripheral activities for Donald, they are his essence.
For Donald Trump, I believe the main attraction of the war in Iran is the high-profile opportunity it provides for him to indulge in his favorite pastime, to practice his one - and only - true skill: destruction and the spectacle of performative dominance. This while also hopefully making a quick buck on the side. Being racist and sexist and anti-gay explains why Donald might target DEI programs and immigrants, and why he’d invade a country he sees as a non-white villain, but it doesn’t explain why he’d be willing to destroy NATO, the regional balance of power and the international economy in the process of waging his pointless war in Iran. It explains why he’d go after brown folks getting benefits from the VA, and abortion rights and students coming here from abroad, but it doesn’t explain why he’d gratuitously destroy the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the healthcare system in general, or American leadership in education and scientific research.
In order to prevent Donald Trump from destroying our world one piece at a time - in order to resoundingly defeat him and drive him from power - we need to have a very clear and specific understanding of what, exactly, makes him tick. Our attempts to stop Donald Trump this past ten years have been greatly complicated by our failure to understand him at the most basic level. I believe we’ve been overthinking it. Donald Trump is way less complicated than we’ve made him out to be.
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In the previous essay we explored the four act structure of Trump’s endless cycle of destruction, but even this risks overcomplicating our understanding of the Donald. By focusing on the outwardly observable stages of the process we risk assigning strategy and order to the underlying impulses. To simplify further, we could state (as above) that Donald Trump is primarily motivated by an insatiable need to exert dominance - which is clearly true - and that he does this by attacking anything that resists his will, or that threatens in any way his absurd and apparently necessary fantasy that he is all-powerful.
But, again, even this extremely basic explanation still presumes a degree of cognitive effort and engagement on Donald’s part. It implies a back and forth: an acknowledgment of an independent, external world and an internal deliberative process about how best to control or destroy that world. Most importantly, this explanation also presumes that Donald Trump’s actions are fundamentally - or even just largely - the result of some sort of rational or deliberative process: a claim that often appears to be at odds with the most basic observable facts. In all these ways, even this extremely uncomplicated explanation fails to properly convey the brutal simplicity of Donald Trump.
Seven hundred years ago, the English philosopher William of Ockham championed the principle - now known as Occam’s Razor - that when choosing between alternative explanations for a particular phenomenon, the simplest reasonable explanation is generally the better choice. With this in mind, I offer the following Extremely Simple Explanation for the actions of Donald John Trump. I propose that Donald Trump sees the world through a very simple binary lens: all things are either “Donald” or “Not Donald”. Those things that are Not Donald are acceptable to the extent that they offer a tribute of money or power or flattery to Trump. All those things that are Not Donald that do not serve him in this way are an affront which Trump can remedy by Unmaking them. Through the process of Unmaking, Trump takes possession of those things which have caused him existential pain through their insinuation that he is not all-knowing and all-powerful. The ensuing wreckage then becomes part of that which is Donald, and all is once again right in the world. Trump can now slap his name on the outside of the derelict building, or pave over the space where it once stood, or simply erect a tacky statue of himself on top of the wreckage and then move on to Unmake the next thing that catches his eye. The list of Things Unmade by Trump is long and sad and gets longer every day. So far, just a few of the more prominent casualties on this very long list include: the White House Rose Garden, the East Wing of the White House, the Kennedy Center, USAID, the nuclear agreement that Obama worked out with Iran (the absence of which has become Trump’s primary justification for his current war), livable climate policy, public health generally, NATO (soon), much of Gaza, and now Iran. Once you see the pattern it’s kinda hard to unsee it, and seeing the pattern makes it unnecessary to go looking for some more complicated, four-dimensional chess explanation for Trump’s inexplicable and irrational actions. The Occam’s Razor of Trump is that he just likes blowing things up, unless he perceives them as being somehow an extension of himself. Donald Trump will seek to co-opt or destroy all those things that do not benefit him in obvious ways, or that he does not understand, or that threaten his understanding of himself as the supreme authority on all things. Destruction is his nature. It’s what he does. It is his art form, if you will.
Iran - with it’s potential for massive, widely broadcast destruction and fabulous, ill-gotten wealth - represents Trump’s biggest canvas yet. He’s made it abundantly clear from the beginning that an acceptable outcome to the war could simply involve bombing Iran into the stone age and taking all of Iran’s oil, if possible, for himself. Iran is a chance for Trump to paint his masterpiece - to show the world his vision of The World Remade by Trump. So far, it’s not going as he’d imagined, but the shambolic, blood-covered failure of Trump’s war is giving the rest of us a very explicit preview of what awaits, should Trump’s uncontested reign of destruction be allowed to continue much longer.