Donald Trump's chaos strategy: Why Americans continue to fall for his game of distraction

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Donald Trump's chaos strategy: Why Americans continue to fall for his game of distraction
At the root of Trumpism's rapid ascendance, and the pitiful resistance to it, is a profound failure of imagination

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published February 9, 2025 6:43AM (EST)


(Salon) President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms. Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since Jan. 20, the most in a president's first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law. It has only been three weeks since Trump returned to power; these are the good times compared to what will come next.

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America’s center is rapidly collapsing, and it has not been very difficult for Trump and the MAGA movement and the other fascists and authoritarians to break it. During these last three weeks, I have been repeating aloud, on the bus, during my walks, and at random times throughout the day, William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” particularly his warning that “the centre cannot hold":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand….

At the root of Trumpism and American fascism’s quick ascendance, and the pitiful resistance to it, is a profound failure of imagination. The phrase “failure of imagination” can trace its popular use in the United States to the Apollo 1 disaster and testimony by astronaut Col. Frank Borman. As depicted in the 1998 TV miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon”, Borman told Congress that:

A failure of imagination. We’ve always known there was the possibility of fire in a spacecraft. But the fear was that it would happen in space, when you’re 180 miles from terra firma and the nearest fire station. That was the worry. No one ever imagined it could happen on the ground. If anyone had thought of it, the test would’ve been classified as hazardous. But it wasn’t. We just didn’t think of it. Now whose fault is that? Well, it’s North American’s [the capsule manufacturer] fault. It’s NASA’s fault. It’s the fault of every person who ever worked on Apollo. It’s my fault. I didn’t think the test was hazardous. No one did. I wish to God we had.

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Throughout the Trumpocene, these “reasonable” and “mainstream” voices were confident that “the walls were closing in” and heroes would rise, like in an old Hollywood movie, to vanquish the bad guy and save the day. First, it was Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Then the hero was Attorney General Merrick Garland. Then it was Special Counsel Jack Smith. The state prosecutors and attorney generals would supposedly be a heroic firewall and last line of defense against Donald Trump and his perfidy. The walls never did close in. Trump would become more popular following his prosecutions and trial(s) than before. Trump now wears “felon” as a badge of honor and courage, one that his MAGA followers and other Americans who are disgusted with the system flock to. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/02/09/donald-chaos-strategy-why-americans-continue-to-fall-for-his-game-of-distraction/