With Donald Trump, another lying Baron Munchausen was born. And like Munchausen, Trump too, can pull himself out of the swamp by his own hair.
In Trump’s version, the pussy-grabbing family value representing man was saved by God to become president.
Easily missed by many Trump commentators, Donald Trump is not unpredictable but rather a predictable president. He is by no means acting randomly as he actually follows a script with defined patterns.
In addition, he is always playing off the same rulebook showing the same repetition over and over again. The following is an attempt to outline the handful of principles that define Trumpesque politics and his predictable moves.
In one interview – Welsh comedian Terry Jones, a member of the British comedy group Monty Python – explains how it works.
The fundamental idea of their comedy show, the Flying Circus was that it did something completely unpredictable at every moment of the show.
That’s why they produced sketches that abruptly broke off without a punchline. The Flying Circus coined the memorable words, and now for something completely different.
Donald Trump too, delivers something completely different – reliably, and very predictably.
In many ways, this reminds us of one of Trump’s most predictable behaviors. Again and again, one reads and hears that Trump is erratic, unpredictable, and impulsive.
He makes inconsistent decisions and floods the zone. His political style is unpredictable, so the claim goes. Yet, Donald Trump can be predicted.
In any case, Monty Python’s intention was to create a completely unpredictable humor. Sadly, it has largely failed and has been proven by Terry Jones himself.
Interestingly, the term pythonesque that is used for jokes that are erratic and not working so well is now listed in the Oxford Dictionary.
Like many right-wing populists and adjacent neo-fascist demagogues, Donald Trump has demonstrated that politically manipulative and deceptive rhetoric does not have to be cohesive, free of contradictions, and fact-based in order to be persuasive.
Plenty of books have already been written about Trumpism. Yet, his approach to politics follows the same patterns repeatedly.
Successfully, the master-manipulator Trump has managed to fool the public, and particularly those he called the poorly-educated – again and again.
In other words, what we are forced to watch on our Orwellian Telescreens – now on our TVs and increasingly via Facetime, YouTube, Twitter (X), Telegram, etc. – is Trump’s very own flying circus.
Welcome to the circus stage of sold-out vanities. Trump focuses primarily on the feelings he wants to trigger in his followers. One of Trump’s main propagandistic tools is his manipulative theatrics.
This is used so that his adoring followers could identify with him. His circus resembles a backyard sled in which the viewer can go on a fast-paced roller coaster ride.
Through fast-paced curves and twists of – often rather delusionary story, paranoia and outright conspiracy fantasies – successful demagogues steer the irrational feelings of their followers in a well-calculated manner.
The skilled manipulator leads the mesmerized and spellbound crowd to unimagined heights, and then suddenly let them plunge into the depths and spin loops.
Here, again, there is an important parallel to Donald Trump. In the election campaign, the hyper-elitist Trump – riding on his very own golden escalator that his adoring devotees will never be able to even touch – turned his deep resentment against those he targeted.
He denounced them as the elite establishment. In Trump’s world, this is not his business elite but the inconsequential and never defined liberal elite. Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump is part of the powerful corporate and business elite.
While being part of the US’ business elite, he pretends – successfully – to come from the outside to save ordinary people from the clutches of his illusive liberal elite.
Since the ridiculed entertainer was never recognized as a genius for what Donald Trump has convinced himself he is, he became vindictive against many.
Donald Trump presents himself with offended vanity as an identification figure of all the short comers who adore him.
For decades, TV showman Trump knows how to play on the emotions of his disciples – in a virtuoso way.
Donald Trump has successfully transformed himself from a reality TV host to media illusionist to political propaganda artist. Yet, the “public” Donald Trump is a fictional character. He is a creature of the off-the-cuff actor Donald Trump.
For years, he worked hard to perfect his overbearing bullying style as a real estate slumlord first, and a B-celebrity on television later.
Armed with this, he skillfully serves the expectations of his devoted fan base. He dances masterfully and with the naturalness of a reality TV actor on the fine line between reality and fiction.
In today’s online media society, the line between lies and truth no longer runs along the facts.
Trump understands truth and reality as social agreements. Reality, conspiracy fantasies, paranoia, and fiction coincide in the digital nirvana.
Trump’s predictable scripts – no matter how bad they are – are repeated in endless media loops. And it works with the necessary manipulative persuasiveness.
One of Trump’s preferred conspiracy fantasies is that his election defeat was fraudulent, throwing democratic elections themselves in doubt. Creating doubt is the far-right manipulators’ business.
Worse, Trump’s conspiracy fantasies also include that the violent killer mob of the 6th January were in fact hostages and victims of a political justice system.
Master manipulator Trump knows and uses this kind of digital amnesia to reinterpret facts in a highly deliberate and targeted manner. This, too, is predictable.
Overall, Trump’s five most predictable modus operandi are: influence, provoke, distract, intimidate, and blackmail.
As a real estate thug, Trump learned early on how spectacular stories could significantly influence the price of a property.
In this way, he realized from an early age onward that making the media his playing field fosters his personal interests. Most importantly, he can profit from this. Predicting the behavior of a thuggish rent-collecting slumlord means predicting Donald Trump.
It is no coincidence that Trump threw his Bitcoin on the market just before the second inauguration. As soon as Trump is threatened, he gets on the offensive. He re-grabs public attention with well-engineered provocations.
It remains imperative to comprehend that much of what comes from Trump’s magic box, is called flooding the zone. The media is – literally – flooded with lies, provocations, and all sorts of other rubbish.
The drowning of the media with we-buy-Greenland-style nonsense is to distract the public, voters, and his disciples – from other topics. Trump has reduced the defining issue of the 21st century – global warming – to being another issue.
Instead of discussing global warming, the public suddenly discussed, in one incident, the supposed culinary habits in Springfield/Ohio – after the second TV duel.
When the fault-lines among Trump’s followers – libertarian tech-giants versus far-right ultranationalists – came to light in public, the media master illusionist Donald Trump conjured up the hallucination of annexing Canada and Greenland.
Predictably, the media jumped on it. The purpose: while coming out of his magical hat, it was invented to keep his MAGA pack happy and put the public on the wrong track.
The nightmarish variation of his basic propaganda – Make-America-Great-Again – shows that Trump not only incites the hatred of his followers, but also uses his own strength to specifically intimidate other political actors while spreading fear and terror.
This is a well-trotted strategy ever since it was successfully applied by Italian fascism in the 1920s. Spreading fear is yet another very predictable motive:
- Donald Trump threatened Mark Zuckerberg to put him in jail.
- Trump also sent a message to Hamas, if you do not accept the deal, all hell will break loose.
- Last year, he announced that he would encourage Putin to do whatever he wanted with NATO members unwilling to pay.
- Punitive tariffs also fall into this category.
It is always the same – and very predictable – game of fear. It is the media-manipulative reliance on the carrot (offers) and stick (fear) approach.
Trump’s adviser Ken Weinstein gave a remarkable insight into Trump’s propaganda toolbox in a recent interview with Germany’s Deutschlandfunk called, this is how Donald Trump works. He said,
He repeatedly offers complete opposites and reconciles them. This is exactly what we saw in North Korea. Threats of armed forces to stop their nuclear program … a little later there were talks again about denuclearizing North Korea and boosting the local economy, for example in the form of condominiums on the beach in North Korea. That’s how Trump ticks. He thinks unusually. No normal politician thinks like he does.
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s thinking is actually as original as Ken Weinstein claims. It is interesting, however, that Trump not only uses the whip to bring his counterpart in line but also keeps the carrot at hand. This, too, is predictable.
What’s to be done? In short, with Trump, one should always pay attention to what he does, and not what he so grandiosely announces.
The media and the people should immunize themselves against Trump’s manipulation of the public and pay much less attention to almost everything he says.
Yet, Trump’s indignations fuel authoritarian forces. Those forces as well as Trump himself need indignation in order to divide. They need division to ascend.
Instead of falling into Trump’s media trap, media reporting should focus on what is real rather than on Trump’s very predictable provocations.
Whenever Trump’s rings his manipulative propaganda bell – be it lies, threats, or other non-factual monstrosities using this as his next but also very predictable rhetorical maneuvers – these must be classified for what they are: predictable manipulations.
It is foreseeable that the US president will, at some point, try to intimidate almost everyone he dislikes. Then, it is important to keep a cool head and not to fall into Trump’s predictable behavior of spreading fear and disunity.
Thomas Klikauer wrote a book called: Media Capitalism – Hegemony in the Age of Mass Deception.
