What is Donald Trump’s strategy here? He doesn’t have one.

| 3:00 pm EST November 6, 2023
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Now that Donald Trump is facing justice for his life of crime, and now that Trump is too cognitively gone to react to what’s happening to him in any coherent sort of way, we’re seeing a new cottage industry surfacing. It’s where people on TV and Twitter look at Trump’s incoherent, senile, self defeating behavior and try to reframe it into some kind of strategy.

It’s easy to see why this kind of faux-analysis is so popular. No one wants to believe that the “Trump movie” they’ve been watching for all these years is wrapping up with an ending as simple as him going senile and falling by the wayside of his own accord. What kind of movie climax is that? Of course this isn’t a movie, but the media long ago convinced most observers that it is one.

So we now have everyone from political pundits to legal experts taking turns trying to convince us that Trump’s incoherent behavior – the stuff that automatic losses are made of – is instead part of some novel strategy on Trump’s part to save himself.

“He’s playing to his base,” they’ll say, without explaining why playing to his base in a closed door trial would in any way help him. “He’s trying to unnerve the judge and intimidate witnesses,” they’ll say, without acknowledging that the judge clearly isn’t unnerved and witnesses clearly aren’t intimidated. “Trump isn’t even trying to win this trial and this is all a distraction” they’ll exclaim, without bothering to explain why losing a billion dollars in this trial would make a good distraction, or what he’s supposed to be distracting from.

This is all starting to feel like that scenario where someone gives a toddler a paintbrush and puts the result in front of a bunch of art critics and tells them it’s a real panting. The critics then feel compelled to pretend that they see an artistic approach to the painting that’s not there. They’re afraid that if they admit that it just looks like incoherent crap to them, they won’t sound smart or knowledgeable.

That’s what the political media, the pundit class, and unfortunately even large chunks of the legal expert class seem to be doing this week. They’re looking at Trump’s actions, which are nothing more than incoherent brushstrokes from someone with the mind of a toddler, and they’re pretending to see some kind of strategy on his part that they know can’t possibly be there. If they were being honest, they’d admit that Trump obviously has no strategy, that he’s too far gone to even attempt a strategy, and that his life as he knew it is obviously over. But if you go ahead and admit all of this now, how do you keep up the suspense? This movie, they’re still insisting, surely needs a bigger ending than that.