The Method in the Madness

Here's a sentence that should stop you cold: the President of the United States publicly called for the federal government to "nationalize" elections. Not reform them. Not audit them. Nationalize them.

Trump's exact words: "We need one system, one count, one winner. The states are a mess. We need to nationalize the vote to save it." This came days after a federal judge blocked his administration's attempt to restrict mail-in voting via executive order. The solution to judicial pushback, apparently, is to eliminate the constitutional structure that created the judiciary's authority in the first place.

Now, is this the statement of an imbecile who doesn't understand what "federalism" means? Possibly. The framers deliberately distributed election administration to prevent exactly this kind of centralized control. A constitutional scholar would know this proposal is dead on arrival.

But consider the alternative reading: Trump understands perfectly well that this will never pass. He's not proposing policy; he's seeding narrative. When he loses future battles over voting rights, he can point to the intransigent "mess" of state systems. When elections don't go his way, he has pre-delegitimized the entire framework. The imbecile interpretation requires us to believe he's too stupid to know this won't work. The conman interpretation suggests he knows exactly what he's doing.

The uncomfortable truth: Whether by design or instinct, Trump has learned that impossible proposals serve a purpose. The conversation shifts from "should we protect voting rights" to "is nationalization the solution." The Overton window doesn't just shift; it shatters.

Something remarkable happened this week that complicates the imbecile thesis: Trump secured a commitment from India to stop purchasing Russian oil in exchange for lowering US tariffs on Indian goods to 18%. If you've followed India's carefully non-aligned foreign policy for the past three decades, you'll know how significant this is.

The Biden administration spent years trying to pressure India away from Russian energy, achieving approximately nothing. Trump did it in what appears to be a single transactional phone call. "We are getting the tariffs down to a beautiful 18%, and they are stopping the Russian oil," he announced. "It's a great deal for everyone, except maybe Russia."

Now, there are legitimate questions about whether this deal will hold, whether India's "commitment" has enforcement mechanisms, and whether 18% tariffs represent a good trade-off for American industries. But set those aside for a moment and consider what this reveals about the core question.

An imbecile doesn't accidentally isolate Russia from one of its largest energy customers. This is sophisticated great-power maneuvering, using economic leverage (something Trump actually understands) to achieve foreign policy goals (something his critics insist he doesn't understand). The "useful idiot for Putin" theory looks especially strained this week when Putin is the one getting hurt.

The unsettling possibility: What if Trump's apparent chaos masks a genuine, if crude, strategic intelligence? What if the buffoonery is real on some matters and completely absent on others? We want simple explanations. Trump rarely provides them.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will close for two years. The official reason: "Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding." The unofficial reason, obvious to anyone paying attention: Donald Trump has never forgiven the Kennedy Center Honors for years of political awkwardness, nor the arts establishment for its overwhelmingly liberal tilt.

"It's falling down. It's a disaster. We're going to rebuild it, maybe make it better, maybe different. But it's closed."

That quote is classic Trump: vague enough to be defensible, menacing enough to send a message. "Maybe different" does a lot of work in that sentence. Different how? Different programming? Different leadership? A different name? The silence is the strategy.

This is where the three hypotheses converge interestingly. An imbecile would close the Kennedy Center because he's mad at it and doesn't think about consequences. A useful idiot might be serving someone else's interest in defunding American soft power. A conman closes it knowing full well the liberal outrage will energize his base and the vagueness will give him maximum future optionality.

What's striking is how often these explanations aren't mutually exclusive. Trump can simultaneously be motivated by petty personal grievance (the imbecile motivation), serving interests that benefit from weakened American institutions (the useful idiot effect), and skillfully exploiting the resulting conflict for political advantage (the conman technique). This is the maddening thing about analyzing Trump: stupidity and cunning aren't opposites when the stupidity is selectively deployed.

Iran's president expressed openness to "fair" negotiations. Trump's response: "They want to talk. We'll see. But if they don't make a deal, bad things happen. Very bad things."

This is the Madman Theory of foreign policy, first articulated (and practiced) by Richard Nixon. The idea is simple: if your adversary believes you're irrational enough to do something catastrophically destructive, they'll make concessions to avoid triggering your unpredictability. The problem, of course, is that actually being a madman and pretending to be a madman produce the same surface behaviors.

The chart above tells a complicated story. With North Korea, high threat rhetoric produced minimal results. With China, moderate threats produced moderate trade adjustments. India (as of this week) suggests high leverage can produce high results when the target has more to lose than to gain from resistance. Iran remains to be seen.

Here's what the data suggests: Trump's "madman" approach isn't random. It appears calibrated to the target's vulnerabilities and alternatives. That's not imbecile behavior. It might be conman behavior dressed up as imbecile behavior to maintain the threat's credibility. Or it might be instinctive pattern-matching that happens to produce results occasionally.

The analytical problem: We can't distinguish between "skilled practitioner of strategic ambiguity" and "lucky fool who occasionally stumbles into effective threats." The outcomes are identical.

The Department of Justice released over 3 million pages of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. This follows the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed in November 2025. "Transparency is a beautiful thing," Trump declared. "We are showing it all. No one has done more for transparency."

Simultaneously—and this is the part that makes your head spin—Trump threatened legal action against Trevor Noah for joking about Trump's own well-documented connections to Epstein.

Let that sit for a moment. In the same news cycle, Trump positioned himself as the crusading exposer of Epstein's network while threatening to sue anyone who mentions his place in it. This isn't cognitive dissonance. This is narrative architecture.

The conman reading is the most coherent here. By releasing the files, Trump claims the mantle of anti-establishment truth-teller. By threatening lawsuits, he chills specific reporting that might connect the dots to him personally. The transparency is selective, curated, and weaponized. It's not about exposing truth; it's about controlling which truths get attention.

An imbecile wouldn't understand this double-game. A useful idiot wouldn't care about self-protection. Only a conman optimizes for both offense (damaging enemies through "transparency") and defense (suppressing inconvenient connections through litigation threats).

Trump filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging "institutional bias" and "antisemitism." Legal experts are, to put it mildly, skeptical. The standing is questionable. The damages theory is incoherent. The chance of Trump collecting a billion dollars from Harvard hovers somewhere between zero and negative numbers.

"They've destroyed minds and they've destroyed value," Trump explained. "They owe us a lot. One billion is just the start."

The chart above reveals the pattern. Trump files lawsuits constantly; he rarely wins them. The win rate against universities is currently 0%. Against media organizations, it's under 6%. So why keep filing?

Because the lawsuit isn't the point. The lawsuit is the headline. "Trump Sues Harvard for $1 Billion" feeds into every narrative his base wants to hear about elite institutional corruption. It doesn't matter that he'll lose. By the time the case is dismissed (in years, probably), the news cycle will have moved on. The political work was done the day the suit was filed.

This is pure conman technique: the threat is the product. The follow-through is optional. The legal system becomes a prop in a performance that has nothing to do with law.