Understanding His Sick Game

We’re being bombarded with crazy by the White House. Here’s how to handle it.

The news coming out of the White House feels almost impossible to keep up with, and that’s by design. The U.S. taking over Gaza? Seizing Greenland and Panama? Sending migrants to Guantánamo? Starting tariff wars with our allies? Withholding disaster aid for California? Targeting trans girls and women?

Whew. It’s a lot. Many people understandably want to tune out so that they aren’t retraumatized each morning by the next horrible headline. Meanwhile, the press is bouncing from crisis to crisis, dutifully reporting on everything, with the result that nothing rises to the surface and the chaos is normalized, even with Trump’s most absurd or dangerous pronouncements.

So how do ordinary citizens make any sense of this? Is there a way to understand what’s going on and get a handle on it without getting swept up in the chaos and paralyzed by fear and dread?

Every morning, before I start my day, I take time out to play word games. One of my favorites is “Connections,” where the point is to find commonalities among seemingly unconnected concepts or words. This is actually an interesting and helpful exercise for grasping today’s politics. Can we open our eyes and take in all the bonkers, random Trump noise, yet still spot the common thread running through them all?

I believe we can. So here is my best attempt at “Political Connections.” In each story I listed in the top paragraph, we can see a pattern: 1) Trump stirs up problems so he can 2) make us all freak out, and then 3) claim victory when he “solves” them.

It may be that simple. Now, let me back this up with some evidence.

Problems of his own making

Trump loves to upend things by lobbing political hand grenades. For example, he surprised everyone, including his own aides and all our allies in the Middle East, with his pronouncement two days ago that the U.S. would ethnically cleanse Gaza by moving two million Palestinians out and redeveloping the area into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Yes, he really said that.

It’s a preposterous notion, but it did the trick of truly freaking everyone out. Here’s the face of his own Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, when Trump announced his plans for Gaza. She was serving some major “Deborah Birx injecting bleach face” vibes.

(And yes, this is a picture from Getty Images, and that’s not a photoshop. He really is that orange these days.)

The Gaza announcement was not only absurd, it was incredibly destabilizing. Leaders around the world denounced it as an illegal plan of occupation. GOP apologists in Congress scrambled to figure out how to spin this.

It didn’t help that Jared Kushner had been talking about this very idea of developing Gaza’s waterfront property back in March of last year. The Trumps and Kushners don’t see genocide and war; they see real estate opportunities!

Trump’s ill-conceived idea, over which there reportedly were no White House meetings or plans, including any troop deployment plans by the Pentagon, has the effect of making anywhere else we wind up feel like a relief. Indeed, the White House and the State Department, which were both caught off-guard by Trump’s surprise announcement, are already walking back some of his most extreme statements, including the idea of using U.S. military forces to secure Gaza. As Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) remarked, “I can’t think of a place on earth that would welcome American troops less and where any positive outcome is less likely.”

Political commentators attempted dutifully to try and get inside Trump’s motives. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post laid out four main theories for what’s going on inside Trump’s head with Gaza: It’s a distraction; it’s a negotiating ploy; it’s the madman theory; and it’s his imperialist streak.

These are all possible, sure, but there’s a far simpler way to think of it: Trump creates and thrives on chaos because then he gets to be the hero who stops it, even if he was the one who started it. He’s an arsonist who puts out a fire then demands a medal for it.

The same is happening with Trump’s wild threats to take back the Panama Canal and to seize Greenland, supposedly because of their strategic value. These are terrible, destabilizing ideas that have our allies and neighbors worried about Trump’s mental state. They upend decades of the post war, rules based international order, where the first basic principle is to respect the territorial integrity of other countries.

With both Panama and Greenland, Trump stirred otherwise quiet political pots and has now threatened to cause them to boil over, even into open conflict. While that’s not a likely outcome, the very fact that he has now removed a baseline assumption (i.e., that we won’t threaten a peaceful country or even more shockingly our own NATO ally), when Trump ultimately backs down it will feel like a gift.

It’s the classic behavior of the abuser, who wants points for screaming at but not actually hitting his spouse and children, at least not this time.

Fabricated problems

The other way Trump stirs up and “solves” problems is by complete fabrication of a supposedly existing problem.

Take the so-called “migrant crime wave” as an example. Crime statistics are way down across the country, including in cities with high migrant populations. As the New York Times reported last July, “there is no migrant crime surge,” and in fact, “U.S. rates of crime and immigration have moved in opposite directions in recent years.” Since that time, crime has continued to drop, including crimes committed by migrants.

But Trump has spooked enough of the electorate, especially by highlighting single instances like the tragic killing of Laken Riley by a Venezuelan migrant, that he can now get away with some terrible things. These include building militarized camps for detained migrants, raiding schools and churches, and even sending up to 30,000 migrants to a maximum security prison facility at Guantanamo.

That last bit is pretty much solely for show, which of course is Trump’s second goal: to show that he is solving a problem, when there was never much of one to begin with. There certainly is no logistical reason to fly tens of thousands of migrants to Guantanamo rather than house them in local facilities in the U.S. As constitutional law professor Steve Vladeck told NPR, “All they're doing this for is the symbolism … to be able to say, ‘Look, I moved these folks from the detention center across town to Guantánamo.’” Vladeck added, “It's all very, very expensive flash with very little substance.”

Ben Wittes of the legal site Lawfare agrees. “Is [Trump] using this facility because it has the stain of the name Guantánamo? And, of course, the answer is yes,” Wittes said. “That’s exactly why he’s attracted to it. He’s attracted to it for the same reason that it repels human rights groups.”

As I noted earlier this week in my piece in The Big Picture about the tariff wars threatened on Canada and Mexico, Trump also manufactured the problems that led us to the brink of a trade war. He raised the specter of tariffs supposedly to stop the flow of fentanyl and migrants across our border. But both of these statistics were already way down. Further, in the case of fentanyl, nearly all of it gets trafficked by U.S. citizens through legal ports of entry, not carried by migrants across the border, which if you think about it for even a few seconds would make little sense to attempt.

Through his tariffs threats, Trump was once again attacking a non-existent problem. But when he put off the tariffs for 30 days, even after getting no substantial concessions, he still took a victory lap. His base cheered him for “solving” something that never needed solving.

The same thing happened during Trump’s performative rants about California’s supposed mismanagement of water in fighting the LA fires. Trump claimed that there wasn’t enough water in the reservoirs for the firefighters, when all the experts and even the firefighters said there was more than enough. But Trump still sent the Army Corps of Engineers to drain two reservoirs and release 2.2 billion gallons of water—but into an empty lake bed not anywhere near Los Angeles.

Trump went on social media to claim victory again, even though he had solved nothing and had actually wasted all that water, which farmers may wind up desperately needing this summer.

Yesterday, Trump made a big show of signing executive orders to keep trans girls out of sports nationwide. The American public has been gaslit by his campaign into believing that the number of trans people is many times what it actually is, and that the number of trans girls in sports is at some kind of crisis point. In fact, as ABC News reported, NCAA President Charlie Baker told Republican senators at a hearing in December that out of 500,000 NCAA athletes, he is currently aware of fewer than 10 who are trans.

That’s right, all this over 10 athletes.

Trump perpetuates debunked lies about trans women in sports by claiming that actual women, who apparently aren’t feminine enough in his eyes, are in fact men. At the signing event for his anti-trans executive orders, for example, Trump reiterated a false claim that Algerian female boxer Imane Khelif, who faced intense scrutiny over her gender at the Paris Olympics in August, was assigned male at birth.

“Solving” manufactured problems creates new ones

Even while we work to understand Trump’s M.O. of stirring chaos in order to solve it and inventing fake boogeymen to vanquish, we need to also understand that there are dangerous consequences to his actions.

On Gaza, Trump’s grand designs, however impractical, already has Hamas leaders smiling. They know that Trump had just handed them the best recruiting clip possible. “See? The U.S. imperialists really do just want to boot us out and take our land!”

Take also Trump’s debunked claim of a stolen 2020 election, which he continues to repeat to this day. He spread this lie in order to sow chaos and distrust, but the GOP seized upon it to justify new draconian voter suppression laws. These laws probably cost Democrats enough voters to lose key swing states in 2024.

Trump’s tales about migrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield were lies, too, but this sort of scare tactic still helped secure his electoral victory. Now he is using his office to revoke the immigration status of millions of people who believed they were here legally and safe from immediate deportation.

His saber rattling at our neighbors and allies are causing them to shift their long term plans and avoid dependence on the U.S. as a market for their goods. They also are understandably more reluctant to enter into new trade deals that the U.S. can simply rip up at will.

Indeed, “flooding the zone” with insane moves and threats leads to wariness in markets and among our partners generally, who no longer can rely upon the word of the U.S. government. And there are only so many times that Trump can try to pull these stunts before no one lends them much credence. Does anyone really believe, for example, that Trump will go through with tariffs on Mexico and Canada now that he has backed down from them… twice?

The fact that Trump creates problems just to claim to have fixed them is small comfort to the millions victimized by his actions, which by no small coincidence are those least able to organize and fight back. Migrants and sexual minorities were the favored targets of the Nazis, and they remain the scapegoats of modern fascists like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

We would do well to begin to call out Trump’s behavior for what it is—manufactured problems that he can be a hero for “solving”—even while we work collectively to protect the rights and lives most impacted by his policies and decrees.