This piece is adapted from a recent episode of The Gist.
Donald Trump is chaos, and chaos is Donald Trump. We were told of this before a single vote was cast in 2016, when Jeb Bush, in perhaps his finest (only?) rhetorical sally warned America from the debate stage: “He’s a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president.”
A few days ago, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway confirmed that this prediction had come to pass when she said, “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”
Indeed chaos is Trump’s brand; that is how he governs, to the extent that he governs at all. It is undeniable that Donald Trump sows chaos, but it is less clear that he reaps it.
I understand the allure of assuming Trump benefits from chaos. It’s an explanation that’s tempting to a class of observers who not only despair, but disbelieve what they’re seeing. His success is, to a large extent, inexplicable. The dissolute, unmoored nature of his presidency is unprecedented. Add those two radical deviations from the usual together, and it seems logical to assert a connection, that it must be the chaos that leads to the success. But does it? Does the dirt help Pig-Pen or just cling to him?
In fact there is ample evidence that Donald Trump doesn’t truly harvest the chaos, or in any way affirmatively use it to create wins for himself or his agenda. It actually seems that the more things spin out of control, the more they hurt Trump’s standing with party stalwarts and Republican voters.
In Charlottesville, chaos rained down, and Trump weighed in—to poor effect. He was hurt by those statements; advisers quit and the public soured on him.
When Trump pepper-sprayed protesters outside Lafayette Square in the quest for a photo op, it was his own image that took a beating.
Trump has, in fact—like a normal president and a normal human—benefitted more from control.
It might seem like all he does is throw sand in the eyes of opponents to create a distraction, but to what end? The chaos is less like a strategy than a spasm, and it’s unclear whether he would be better off without it. You might say that without it, he wouldn’t be Donald Trump, and that’s true. But is Donald Trump a guy who prospers from chaos, or a guy who has prospered and has done so with chaos swirling around him? Trump has certain advantages; in life, the presence of chaos mostly marks the places where he squandered those advantages in the worst ways. Donald Trump has acquired a large amount of wealth, mostly from his inheritance, but also from his drive, and his eagerness to associate his name with buildings and lifestyle brands that create the perception of luxury to a certain kind of consumer. Many of Trump’s commercial properties have made money. Some of his golf courses have made money. Mar-A-Lago, Trump Winery, and other assets that Forbes dubs “trophies” are prospering, and his TV show paid very well. But none of those successful parts of the portfolio were marked by chaos. The buildings didn’t fall down, the TV show didn’t shut down, the private clubs were run smoothly, and the golf courses have well maintained greens. Chaos didn’t help him in the parts of his portfolio that we can prove have been profitable. In his ventures that have failed—such as Trump University and his casinos—he has created chaos via, for instance, illegal activity that invites lawsuits or his father trying to loan him money with massive chip purchases.
Those gambits don’t work. Perhaps you can argue that in generating a miasma of distraction, the public finds it difficult to attend to any individual failure—but failures they all are. Perhaps you can argue that chaos is a way for Trump to manage the defeats, or distract from the collapses. But remember the claim about Trump and chaos isn’t that he uses it to limit his downside exposure; it’s that he cunningly wields it, or I said before, that he reaps it.
Is chaos a tool for Trump, or an aftereffect of the fact that he just lies so much and sues so much and fights so much, and hires the likes of Michael Cohen to fix so much? Let’s take Michael Cohen, sometimes a bumbler, sometimes a goon, but sometimes a fixer who has lived up to that name. Cohen, over the years, did fix problems by making them go away, but not by blowing them up and drawing attention to them. That would have fit the notion of Trump as Neptune and chaos as his swirling ocean, but it’s not what Cohen did. Or consider whatever tapes Survivor producer Mark Burnett might have, or might have burned. They haven’t surfaced; they haven’t been loosed upon the world. Burnett’s box has a tighter lid than Pandora’s. That’s an act of control, not chaos.
Trump has, in fact—like a normal president and a normal human—benefitted more from control than chaos. The accomplishments of his presidency, such as legitimately crippling ISIS, sprang from dedicated and efficient military precision, not chaos. One could argue, as he does, that killing terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was among the great achievements of Trump’s tenure. Again, there was no chaos to that; there was rigor, skill, and operational discipline.
By contrast, his decision to pardon or offer clemency to soldiers and a naval officer accused or convicted of war crimes was made chaotically, and that’s the military undertaking that caused the greatest consternation with Trump within the military itself.
The idea of Donald Trump as the Tallyrand of Tumult is unusual in that it’s equally attractive to Trump’s biggest fans and greatest critics, to say nothing of media pundits searching for an explanation for his success, and a clever one at that. Members of Trump’s team have admitted as much. Before Kellyanne Conway’s comments a few days ago came former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s, who said in 2018 that his strategy was to “flood the zone with shit.”
It is undeniable that Trump is the most powerful man in the world and also that the world is the most chaotic it’s been in some time. So we throw our hands up and shake our heads at the chaos and then squint as we see, once again, that delicately stepping through the swirling eddy of noxious bedlam is this guy with a too-long tie and a ridiculous haircut. The chaos candidate. The chaos incumbent. But also maybe, the chaos casualty.
Listen to the monologue this piece was adapted from below, and subscribe to the Gist on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join Slate Plus, and enjoy ad-free episodes of the show.
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