The label wars for Trump miss the point. Look at the wreckage
For more than a decade, political observers have been trying to put Donald Trump in a neat box to explain him — and to contain him. This has not worked.
To his followers, Trump is a great man of history. He is a role model, prophet and genius who breaks the rules and wins anyway. To his opponents, he is a fascist. He is a “dotard,” corrupt and an existential threat to American democracy.
The evidence strongly favors the second view. But neither fully explains the president or his MAGA movement. Donald Trump is best understood as a chaos agent. Chaos is the unifying theme of his political project — and his life. His main political strategy has been to “flood the zone” and deploy a “shock and awe” onslaught against democracy, the rule of law and any sense of normalcy. Like other authoritarian leaders, Trump uses chaos as a weapon to confuse the public and the opposition, break institutions, and consolidate and expand power.
Internationally, the Trump administration has battered the rules-based international order by pivoting toward autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who was voted out of office on April 11 after 16 years in power — threatening to leave NATO and invade Greenland, and invoking the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” and its militant nationalism — a declaration of America’s supposed right to violate the sovereignty of other nations at will. His war of aggression against Iran has been a strategic and moral defeat for the United States on the global stage.
But Trump’s chaos is hurting the American people. The cost of food, gas and housing is spiraling. The economy is stagnant and worsening. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill gutted Medicare and food assistance to deliver hundreds of billions to the country’s wealthy and corporations. Hospitals are closing, and more Americans are unable to afford healthcare. America’s schools, colleges and universities have been targeted with deep funding cuts, lawsuits and attacks on academic freedom and free speech under the banner of “patriotic education.” On a more personal level Trump’s chaos has contributed to what psychologists have termed “political depression.” This is a public health crisis.
The president’s critics have taken to calling his behavior “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out. The mocking makes them feel good. But it also diminishes the harm that is taking place at home and abroad, helping to frame the president’s job as head of a nuclear-armed country of 342.5 million people as a reality TV show or game show.
As we have seen with Trump’s war against Iran, the TACO behavior is lethal and disastrous. TACO is also a way for the president and his forces to manipulate the political environment to their advantage by keeping the media, the larger political class and the public off balance and vulnerable. They are lulled into a smug confidence that his threats will always be toothless bluster.
Writing in the New Republic, Jason Linkins argued that “TACO theory always gives you the out when it comes to worrying about Trumpian misrule… Once you crack open the shell of this TACO, what you’ll find isn’t a source of reassurance or a fun gibe to toss in Trump’s direction. It’s all the same misrule, criminality, and corruption.”
Ultimately, the TACO framework is a self-soothing narrative that offers empty comfort because it does little if anything to stop Trump’s chaos.
Ultimately, the TACO framework is a self-soothing narrative that offers empty comfort because it does little if anything to stop Trump’s chaos.
In a recent interview Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told journalist Ian Masters that Trump’s motivations are not complex. In fact, Dodes insisted, he is fundamentally simple.
“It has always been about him,” Dodes said, offering an analogy. “Look at the path of an ant crawling along a beach. The beach has mounds and depressions. The path is extremely complicated. But the ant is extremely simple. It is like that with Trump.”
He continued, “It drives me crazy to see people analyzing the financial purpose behind something, or the international relations calculus — as though there is some deep meaning in it. He is the ant. He is only pursuing his own ego and survival. Once that is understood, everything else becomes easier to follow.”
But the labels applied to Trump matter far less than the great reckoning that must take place.
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The great challenge is fixing the wreckage and destruction that is being left in Trump’s wake, and rebuilding a healthier, more secure American democracy that will prevent another authoritarian leader from taking power again.
As Hungary recently demonstrated with Orbán’s ouster, authoritarian and autocratic movements do end. American fascism will not last forever. But it must be actively defeated; it would be a grave mistake to assume it will dissipate after losing momentum or cannibalizing itself.
After all, the American right spent decades developing detailed plans, such as Project 2025, to transform America into a White Christian authoritarian plutocracy. Trump, acting as a chaos agent, was able to enact those plans to great effect starting the first day of his second term. America’s pro-democracy movement needs to borrow from and model that deep level of strategic planning and vision. But even now, 10 long years into the Trump era, they do not have an equivalent plan, a fact that largely explains why it has taken so long to slow down the MAGA movement.
What will a new Reconstruction and a Marshall Plan for American democracy look like? Who will fund it? What is the infrastructure? Who will lead the coalition? What policies will be enacted on day one after Trump — or his MAGA successors — are no longer in the White House and in control of Congress?
These are the core questions that will need to be answered.
Trump is planning his own MAGA celebration of America’s 250 years of independence this year. What plan does the pro-democracy movement have for the next 250 years?
Diagnosing the Age of Trump is necessary but not sufficient. The much harder work is getting out of survival mode — the all-consuming pressures of eternal presentism and perpetual crisis — and into a mode and discipline of building what comes after. Over the last decade, Trump and his forces have unleashed great destruction on American democracy and society. It will take at least that long to begin to repair it. But the restoration cannot take place without a solid plan — and a bold vision for what gets built from the wreckage of Donald Trump’s American carnage.
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