American Madman
The Theory of a Flailing Administration
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch, 1992
Even by Trump’s low standards, he has exhibited an erratic streak over the past month that feels surreal to the point of being hard to comprehend.
To give you a sense of the scale of what he’s done in this period, let me give you a brief recap1:
He has renamed the Kennedy Center—a monument to an assassinated President—after himself. This was after he renamed the United States Institute of Peace after himself in early December.2
He has seized the leader of a foreign country, announced the United States will control their country, and is seizing their oil to sell for the U.S.—without ever once seeking congressional authorization.
He has escalated a crisis with Europe in an attempt to seize Greenland, which he has justified by not having been given the Nobel Peace Prize, and that it is “psychologically needed” for him to have it. A Nobel Peace Prize, which he functionally extorted the actual winner, María Corina Machado, into giving to him.
He has overseen the deployment of thousands of DHS agents to Minneapolis—which has seen the death of one U.S. citizen and widespread unrest—and is openly threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in active duty forces to the city.
He has announced plans for a new class of battleship named after himself as part of a “Golden Fleet” that will cost as much as an aircraft carrier and will almost certainly never see the light of day.
There are apparently plans for Trump Credit Cards, an Executive Order requiring networks broadcast the Army-Navy game instead of any other college games, has overseen an apparent attempt to criminally indict Jerome Powell, and has floated cancelling the midterm elections.3
I could keep going, but I think you get the point.
There’s this thing in International Relations Theory called “madman theory.” It’s never been that fully fleshed out, but the most credible version of it was developed alongside theories about deterrence.
In essence, if a world leader is seen as “mad” and genuinely unconstrained, their threats will have more credibility.
Nobody would think that a sane, rational leader would ever actually carry through on threats of military force—for instance, to seize the territory of an ally—but someone who is not tethered to a rational calculus may just be willing to pull the trigger. Hence, their threats have more weight.
Historically speaking, it’s been associated with figures ranging from Nixon to Saddam Hussein—with a fairly mixed track record of success.
The trick of “madman theory” is that the leader is entirely rational and is merely acting as a madman in order to produce the most credible threats.
The theory doesn’t account for actors who are actually genuinely insane. It’s a theory for Gaddafi—not Idi Amin.
But that’s the rub of the theory. From an outside observer’s perspective, how do you actually determine if it’s an act or not?
Take everything I just said above in isolation and ask yourself: are these the actions of a sane and rational head of state?
They could equally be the ravings of someone who feels unconstrained by the limits of a constitutional order around him, or the rhetorical flourish of a man seeking to extract maximal concessions and is willing to endure the short-term reputational costs required to achieve those aims.
That is the argument, at least according to “madman theory.”
However, I think there’s usually just a simpler explanation.
It really is just mania.
Whether it was Saddam, Nixon, Trump, or Gaddafi—these were all deeply paranoid and delusional men who operated through an autocratic personalist view of their power.
The attempts by IR scholars to create formal structures around these idiosyncratic individuals obscure the fact that what they were doing—are currently doing—was detached from any normal set of political calculations.
The current administration knows they’re on a timer to achieve something—anything—and they’re becoming increasingly shrill and aggressive in an attempt to push through their vision for America and the world.
It doesn’t need a more complex analysis than this to understand what’s happening.
They’ve simply grown alarmingly erratic and delusional in their dealings with the world around them.
It’s also not a particularly effective way to wield power. If you look at leaders who are categorized as madmen, you’ll have a rather hard time coming up with individuals who successfully stewarded their nations.
It also doesn’t matter at a certain point. There is no functional difference to be made between a genuine madman and one who spends all of his time acting as one.
It’s not as though being rational as a statesman is ineffective, either.
JFK managed to assert a credible sense of deterrence in the Cuban Missile Crisis with no problem. George H. W. Bush was able to enforce his red lines over Kuwait just fine. There was no threat of the Soviets streaming across Western Europe under Eisenhower.
But you know what being a madman does get you on the international stage?
When you have a new foreign policy goal on a weekly basis, the State Department and Department of Defense will be in a constant state of disarray trying to formulate what they’re going to do. It means that your plans will always be half-baked and under-resourced—and that there will be hardly any public buy-in for your ideas.
It means that when you need your international partners to work with you, they’re going to be much harder to get on the phone.
It gets countries to hedge against you. It undermines basic trust in the treaties and guarantees that you’ve made. It makes them form coalitions. It makes them contain you.
Other States—who do behave in a rational manner—will be able to marshal a coherent and measured response to you. While they may be baffled and confused at first, such a state of affairs hardly holds over time.
When you start levying threats of force against Europe—and attempting further economic coercion via tariffs—you will produce a counterweight. It means that European nations will station tripwire forces on Greenland. It means that the Canadian Prime Minister starts creating much cozier economic relations with China.
In the end, you will be left friendless, disorganized, and lacking legitimacy. You will be facing a coalition of States that have a direct interest in checking your ambitions. Even Napoleon hit a wall eventually.
Likewise, erratic behavior at home destroys your ability to put together any sort of agenda. If you’re dispatching limited forces from city to city to brutalize their population,s your limited institutional attention span is going to be consumed by whatever crisis of the week you’re dealing with.
You have to dispatch your advisors to television networks on a daily basis to explain why DHS had to tear-gas children. You need to have Stephen Miller constantly screaming about how Democrats have become anti-government insurgents. Your Agricultural Secretary is busy explaining why an ICE agent had to shoot an unarmed civilian.
It means they’re doing everything except their jobs.
It also means you need to task entire parts of your bureaucracy to draw up plans for your new harebrained scheme to create credit cards named after you. The Department of Justice is constantly running from one political enemy to the next. The State Department is suddenly tied up attempting to process or freeze visas from an increasingly growing—and incoherent—list of countries we have frozen travel with.4
You also undermine the basic pillars of economic success.
American businesses won’t know what the tariff rate is going to be on a daily basis—or what the potential retaliation to those tariffs will be.
People wanting to establish a business don’t know what political rules to follow or who they have to bribe to avoid government harassment. If outside investors see a domestic political climate of increasing instability and repression, they’ll stop wanting to invest.
You can act like a madman all you want, but doing so is only going to burn every bit of political power you have—and if history is any guide—you’ll have nothing to show for it.
You can skip this if you don’t live under a rock. I really wish I could live as you do.
There is also a giant banner of his face flying in front of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for those keeping count.
He cannot cancel elections. This will not happen. I just find it indicative of just how insane he’s grown over a short period of time.
Not to mention also needing to manage the fallout from all of those countries that are now pissed off at us for causing a diplomatic row via tweet.
Sound analysis all around. Nothing insightful to add besides the fact that this breach can hardly be papered over by electing a sane president for a term or two. Even with Biden there was some unease with allies after Trump term 1. We could elect the second coming of George C. Marshal, I doubt any nation would expect continuity after his second term.
After the national reconciliation no more Twitter for heads of departments and states. Etc.