How to understand Trump's second term

As expected, Donald Trump has started his second term as president with a whirlwind of executive orders and controversies. It’s easy to get caught up in any one of these and emerge mentally battered without necessarily any greater insight into what’s really going on. The purpose of this piece is to step back from the maelstrom and look at the overarching dynamics. Many individual issues might be hard to interpret or predict, but the overall pattern and trajectory is much easier to understand.

I’ll start by stating a few preliminary positions. First, that Trump is largely the anti-establishment figure he claims to be. Note that ‘anti-establishment’ does not mean a person is inherently good or bad. In my view, Trump was supposed to be the repellent Republican candidate that would secure victory for Hilary Clinton in 2016. Instead, whether due to Russian interference, widespread dislike of Clinton, or other factors, he won the election. Second, as I argued previously, the available evidence also suggests that the US establishment did not want Trump to win in 2024 either. It seems plausible the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was the last straw attempt to prevent that in the face of Harris’s terrible performance on the campaign trail.

The key point: Trump’s lieutenants despise him and are there to control and direct his actions

So much for the background. The most critical point that you need to appreciate to understand Trump’s second term, is that many of they key figures he has surrounded himself with or appointed are people who think he should not be president and have no intention of implementing what he wants to do.

Here are some specific examples.

Elon Musk: has been critical of Trump only until after the failed assassination attempt. Musk backed Ron De Santis in the Republican primaries and as late as March 2024 said he would not donate to support either Trump or Harris. Back in 2022 Trump called Musk ‘a bullshit artist’:

Recall, also, that in 2017 after a very short stint, Musk stepped down from the Trump advisory councils he had been appointed to. In 2022 he called for Trump to ‘hang up his hat’ and leave politics:

Another example is JD Vance. Here’s a compilation of scathing remarks about Trump by now-Vice President Vance:¹

Also Trump’s new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio:

Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence: in 2020 Gabbard accused Trump of “inciting racism and violence in our country as a whole”.

In short, what is going on here is that the establishment (or ‘deep state’ if you prefer) has ensured that it positions its proxies in key positions that can control how Trump’s wild and eccentric declarations actually get implemented. These people have all credibly indicated that they did not support Trump being president and in some cases despise him.

Of course, in each case there’s a cover story for why these individuals supposedly change their views on Trump — there has to be. Here is one on Rubio’s earlier change of heart. The narrative with Musk is that his mind was changed by the assassination attempt.² Gabbard supposedly became sympathetic to Trump because of the way he was being persecuted by the ‘deep state’. But I just don’t think the supposed change in heart of these pivotal individuals is plausible.

Other prominent examples are Joe Rogan and Mark Zuckerberg.

Consider this article on Joe Rogan from 2022 and in his debate with Bill Maher he said ‘[Trump] might be crazy. He might be a sociopath.’ In 2022 Rogan made it clear he did not want to have Trump on his show ‘I am not a Trump supporter in any way, shape or form…I am not interested in helping him’:

Even in Trump’s supposedly pivotal interview with Rogan before the election, Rogan was luke warm and appeared to cast doubt on whether Trump’s ear was really injured in the assassination attempt.

Mark Zuckerberg has supposedly become favourable to Trump since becoming part of the MMA community. Back in 2017 Zuckerberg was criticised by Trump for Facebook’s alleged bias against him. In 2021 Facebook followed the lead of Twitter and removed Trump’s profile. Only recently, after Trump’s election, has Meta taken a range of steps to ingratiate itself to Trump. The overall impression from Zuckerberg’s behaviour is that he dislikes Trump but will ingratiate himself when Trump is in power.

Converting Trump from a ‘deep state’ liability to an asset

Controlling Trump is of course far from easy. But he is, potentially, a major asset to the US deep state in ways that are already becoming apparent at this early stage. In game theoretic terms, and the deep state loves game theory as the RAND corporation has demonstrated since the 1950s, Trump is an irrational player. And an irrational player is one who can make otherwise implausible threats plausible. That means the people who direct Trump’s actions can take advantage of this to promote their own strategic agendas.

One important example of this from Trump’s first term was the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was a senior Iranian military leader who was assassinated in Iraq at the instruction of Donald Trump. If a president like Obama had taken the same action, it could well have set off a direct conflict in the Middle East between Iran and the United States. It would also have fundamentally undermined the US’s positioning in global affairs, showing up the Obama administration to be grossly hypocritical in violating international law when convenient. But when Trump did it there was no direct response, largely because he is seen as such a wildcard that it can be claimed he does not represent the US more broadly. (Incidentally, this assassination is why Trump believes Iran might want to assassinate him).

In a similar vein, that’s why General Mark Milley controversially used backchannels to reassure China that there was not an imminent military attack from the United States and thereby prevent a potentially disastrous escalation.

Ukraine as a first example of these dynamics

Trump’s recent intervention in the Russia-Ukraine conflict may be the first example of this in his second term. The superficial narrative — reinforced this weekend at the Munich Security Conference — is that Trump is an admirer of, or even functionary of, Vladimir Putin and therefore is throwing Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky under the proverbial bus.

Closer inspection suggests otherwise. Trump’s first ceasefire proposal, communicated by Marco Rubio, involved a freezing of the conflict along current lines and for the borders of those new regions to be maintained by a peacekeeping force of European or British troops. But these countries are members of NATO, so practically this means installing a large number of NATO troops in the middle of Ukraine: when Putin’s main justification for the original invasion was encroachment of NATO towards Russia’s border.

And there is another angle. The growing rumble from European countries is that ‘if the USA abandons Ukraine we will step in’. Now it is useful to know in this context that a major criticism by the US of Europe, for decades, is that it had been shirking in its contributions to NATO. In the view of certain US hawks, European military expenditure was too low, and European countries were cosying up to Russia for cheap oil and gas. The sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline, most likely by the United States, was a partial response to that. Germany appears to have received the message, subsequently participating in the cover up of that attack on its own critical infrastructure, increasing military spending, and becoming much more belligerent towards Russia.

It would be a major victory for the ‘deep state’ if the extremely expensive and increasingly (domestically) unpopular US support for war in Ukraine was ended, and European countries picked up the cost. Using Trump’s apparent flaws to their advantage, they may secure an outcome that could not be achieved under Biden. Alternatively, they may use Trump to coax Putin away from his recent alliances with China and Iran, leaving those countries as easier targets for subsequent US action. Or some combination of all these things.

So my overall point is this: Trump creates as many opportunities as threats for the ‘deep state’ he is supposedly dismantling, and they are far more sophisticated operators than he is. The interplay between them, I suggest, is what you should expect to characterise Trump’s second term — however long that lasts. And this means that it would be advisable to take very little at face value.

1. I got this useful compilation from here: https://x.com/resist_vanessa/status/1890757527580573896

2. Even after this, when Musk was actively participating in and funding Trump’s campaign, I noted that his intervention was not necessarily positive for Trump.