It occurs to me that what Donald Trump did leading up to his first election was not accidental, mysterious, or misunderstood. It was deliberate. He discovered a constituency already primed for resentment—Americans who distrusted their own government, who felt ignored by institutions, who believed vague conspiracies about “deep state” enemies rather than acknowledging the often-unremarkable reality of career civil servants—and he told them their anger was righteous. He validated their suspicions not by solving them, but by amplifying them.
They didn’t simply elect a president.
They elected someone who promised revenge on their behalf.
They believed his disdain would be directed outward—at elites, at liberals, at immigrants, at whomever they’d been told to fear. What they didn’t realize was that Trump’s contempt has always been indiscriminate. It extends to anyone who refuses to kneel: opponents, allies, the press, sacrifice, law, democratic norms, and eventually even his own voters.
He did not drain the swamp. He replumbed it.
He flooded it. Then he built a second pool for the corrupt and the confused to wallow in.
The only reason America did not fully collapse under his first presidency is because institutional guardrails existed: military officers who refused illegal orders, ethics officials who still believed laws mattered, career bureaucrats who quietly continued serving the country even when attacked for doing so. In the end, many within his own administration functioned less as staff and more as containment.
That should terrify us.
Because when a president must be protected from himself in order to protect the nation, democracy is no longer functioning normally. It is surviving.
He left office, but accountability never truly arrived. So he returned. And what did he do with his second chance? He removed competence. He tore out every remaining safeguard. He replaced experience with loyalty tests and surrounded himself with sycophants who understood that their survival depended not on serving the American people, but on serving him.
This leads to the essential question:
Why would Trump want chaos, distrust, and institutional failure?
Because in a functioning democracy, power belongs to institutions.
In a broken democracy, power belongs to the man who breaks them.
If Americans trust the press, he cannot rewrite truth.
If Americans trust elections, he cannot declare losses to be victories.
If Americans trust courts, he cannot dismiss legal accountability as political persecution.
If Americans trust government itself, they do not need him to “save” them from it.
So he attacks everything that is not him.
He undermines civic trust because distrust centralizes power.
He delegitimizes expertise because expertise limits him.
He polarizes because division creates dependency.
He normalizes abnormality because outrage fatigue eventually becomes acceptance.
This is not ideology.
This is not conservatism.
This is a survival strategy.
It is deeply personal and ruthlessly effective.
A psychologically fragile leader cannot coexist with strong institutions. A narcissistic leader cannot tolerate independent thought. A leader obsessed with image cannot admit error, and therefore must destroy the credibility of anyone who points it out. This is political authoritarianism powered by emotional insecurity. That is a dangerous combination.
The tragedy is not simply what Trump did to his base.
It is what he did to the entire country.
He did not merely exploit distrust.
He constructed a political reality in which distrust is the default state of civic life.
He turned cynicism into an organizing principle.
He made disbelief in democracy itself a partisan loyalty test.
And it worked. Not only within his movement, but beyond it. Even Americans who despise him now question institutions more than ever. The damage is not contained; it is ambient. We are living inside a psychological climate created by one man’s ego and broadcast across a nation.
Mary Trump, a psychologist who knows both the pathology and the person, has warned repeatedly that this is not simply political harm. It is psychological contagion. It rewires how people perceive truth, identity, belonging, and power. Once learned, distrust is not easily unlearned. It lingers. It metastasizes. It becomes cultural.
That is his legacy.
Not accomplished policy.
Not vision.
Not leadership.
His legacy is corrosion.
His legacy is destabilized civic faith.
His legacy is a democracy taught to hate itself from within.
America is now facing a reckoning—not just with Trump, but with the environment he cultivated. Removing him alone does not fix the damage. It does not restore trust. It does not rebuild respect for reality. It does not heal a country that has been conditioned to believe its own system is always lying.
That requires accountability.
That requires truth.
That requires the uncomfortable work of democratic adulthood.
Until that happens, we remain trapped inside the psychological weather system of one deeply flawed man—still paying the price for our failure to take the danger seriously when it mattered most.
This is a mind no nation should be forced to live inside.
And yet, here we remain—still, and again.
Trump’s strategy isn’t complicated. It’s the ancient tactic of bullius shittius: overwhelm the public with so much nonsense, chaos, and contradiction that truth becomes impossible to track, outrage becomes normal, and exhaustion replaces accountability.
AKA...
1️⃣ “Flood the zone with shit”
A phrase directly attributed to Steve Bannon. The idea is overwhelm the public with so much misinformation, scandal, and outrage that truth becomes impossible to track and accountability collapses.
2️⃣ “Firehose of Falsehood”
A formal RAND Corporation term describing high-volume, rapid, repeated, shameless disinformation campaigns. Features:
- floods information space
- contradicts itself freely
- prioritizes volume over credibility
- works because it overwhelms cognition and attention
3️⃣ Gaslighting + Chaos Governance
Creating so much instability and contradiction that people doubt their own judgment and turn to the leader as the only “reliable” source.
4️⃣ Authoritarian Playbook Tradition
Variations of this tactic have been used by 20th-century propagandists and demagogues globally: normalize the abnormal through sheer repetition and speed.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
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