Donald Trump has no coherent plan, other than self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.
He is making this stuff up as he goes along. He is impulsive and changes his mind constantly. He lies pathologically and is often incoherent. He promotes actions that are overtly illegal. He is hostile to every form of expertise. Others, most notably Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, are making decisions in his name that he doesn’t seem to know or care about.
Asked if he has to “uphold the Constitution,” he replied “I don’t know.”
He is also flailing. His approval rating is badly underwater. Judges have blocked many of his most consequential actions. His impetuous tariff proposal is backfiring massively, leading him to lie about imaginary trade deals as the economy teeters. Ordinary people are getting outraged by the administration’s hate-fueled cruelty toward nonwhite immigrants. His self-dealing is increasingly overt.
This is important context for any news article or segment about Trump, and yet it’s almost entirely left out of the daily coverage that he gets in mainstream media outlets.
Yep.
The President in particular is very much a figurehead, he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had - he has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all