It's Just Domination

Forget 4-D chess and conspiracies; even if true, they just overcomplicate things

Riot police and prison guards on alert inside the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador, April 4, 2025. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Nelson Renteria

To drive someone crazy, put ‘em in a round room and tell ‘em to pee in the corner.

I keep coming back to that saying as I try to make some kind of sense of the Trump Administration.

The ADHD-autist in me (or at least the ADHD-autist sympathizer in me) argues that, technically, there’s kinda a corner where the wall meets the floor, so one could pee along the circumference of the room and properly follow instructions, but I still feel a need to check dictionaries and go down etymological rabbit holes to confirm whether “corners” need to be composed of three right angles or planes or whatever, and I curse the fates that spun me away from any interest in geometry.

All of which is to say that I struggle for a theory of the Trump Administration.

I’m not really looking for a predictive theory, at least not one that reveals all the specifics to come. The specifics get into arcana of federal rules and 18th century laws still on the books (to our shame), and there one needs encyclopedic knowledge and great evil intent, neither of which I have. In terms of prediction, I’m cool where I am: seeing new nightmares coming fast and furious and responding with, “Oh, yeah, that tracks.”

Some folks seem to be savvy in this way, at least in their own subject-matter domains. The ACLU, for example. Jumping right up with lawsuits to challenge the administration within nanoseconds of new actions, as if they have well-gamed the evil options the hyenas have at their disposal.

Then there’s Congress, whose members keep acting like it’s 1990 or something, and God’s name is Norm, and we all respect him and his demigod clones, also named Norm. No one can think outside the deference to the Norms, so they have no plan for when blasphemy and apostasy are on parade, or worse, when all the Norms are slain and demons are in power. Congress keeps following the ancient liturgy of obeisance to these dead gods in empty churches while millions are in the streets shaking their heads.

Here’s Salon’s Amanda Marcotte dinging Gretchen Whitmer for being a sucker for the norms even now:

Gretchen gets played

The thing is, I don’t need a theory just for prediction. It’s not like I can do anything much about the Trump Administration. They have most of the power. Even the remaining power people like me have lies in masses of numbers, and for atomized individuals like Americans, that’s always an iffy proposition. (See video clip below.)

No, theories can have other advantages. For me, a good theory helps insofar as it explains how thing work.

Now, there is no shortage of theories about how the Trump Administration works or functions. There’s the “There’re all racists” hypothesis, which is true. There’s “They’re all stupid,” which is also true. There’s “They’re all Nazis,” which combines the first two, and it’s true as well. Same goes for “It’s a cult” and “They hate women and difference.”

But these explainers don’t help much because they just point fingers at huge bodies of scholarship and history—racism and racialization, ignorance and dumbing down and propaganda, authoritarianism, cults of personality, misogyny and male supremacism, cis-hetero patriarchy. Oh, yeah, and class. As such, they aren’t explainers as much as bumper stickers, accurate slurs hurled at these evil gremlins, yes, but they shed more heat than light. If we want to understand how we got here—and more importantly, how to dismantle what they are constructing and build something better and more immune to future takeovers by evil gremlins—we need light.

The problem, of course, is that all these bodies of scholarship and history overlap and intersect and ricochet, informing and amplifying the others. So trying to wrap your head around them is pretty impossible. And yet … and yet … these dumbasses in power have weaponized all the things these fields decry and turned them against us, putting everything mildly hopeful about our society and country into a wood chipper.

How’d they pull that off?

These are not bright people. The brighter ones don’t run the show. The guy who runs the show is a mad king with a brain like a decomposing roulette wheel. So what gives here?

When The Clock Broke

I’ve been Ganz-pilled for a while, which is to say, I’ve been strongly swayed by writer John Ganz’s argument, from his 2024 book When the Clock Broke, that you can clearly see the thick roots of Trumpism in the recent history of the early 1990s. Specifically, you can find it in the 1992 presidential race pitting George H. W. Bush against Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, with Pat Buchanan fighting Bush for the GOP nomination. I lived through it, and I find the case compelling.

Take the paranoid, tech-rich, conspiracist Perot who postured as an outsider but really made his money on the backs of government contracts … throw him in a blender with Buchanan, who’d long been an anti-semite and racist, and who ran as a protectionist populist trying to rip off the appeal that David Duke demonstrated was possible in Louisiana … sprinkle in the folk-hero fandom of their contemporary John Gotti in New York as he was facing prosecution—with his ethos of loyalty above all, everything’s a racket, and “sure, he’s a crook, but he’s our crook”—and you get the amino acid soup that just lacked the lucky stroke of lightning to bring it to life.

That soup percolated in our culture for decades awaiting the lightning that was a New York con man real-estate developer with a stupidly popular reality TV show.

Seriously, Ganz’s book is great, especially if you lived through those years. And it’s coming out in paperback. But something clicked for me as I questioned Ganz on his Substack recently.

You see, behind Ganz’s focus on Buchanan is a small brain trust of intellectuals who backed Buchanan, namely an anarcho-libertarian economist named Murray Rothbard and a racist populist writer named Sam Francis. They were, well, the Peter Thiel or Curtis Yarvin and Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller of those days.

My biased interest, as well as Ganz’s, I think, lies in how writers and thinkers influence political movements, so it’s understandable that we’d both find demons like Rothbard and Francis fascinating. Such guys are kinda like the ideological grand strategists, scheming out how the vibes and themes of grievance and blame have to shift in order to bring their preferred dystopia to power, then whispering into the ears of potential presidents and power brokers to help make it happen.

But I kept running into difficulties with the chasm between the intellectual influence on the one hand and the incredible stupidity of the powerful on the other, witness:

Now, Ganz has long argued that, “at the staff level”—among the 20- and 30-somethings who populate the grunt-level jobs in the administration—we see the “groyperficiation” of the GOP: the absolute colonization of the minds of these weasels by an online slop of right-wing, really nazified 4chan and 8kun meme culture normalizing straight-up hideous ideology, laundered through layers upon layers of radicalization steeped in irony and lulz but having its effect over time. (Witness rising star right-winger and intellectual fancier Nate Hochman slipping a Sonnenrad into Ron DeSantis’ campaign ads, for instance.)

So, okay, I’ll accept that. But it still doesn’t really mean the ranks of administration staffers are grands strategists and visionaries and intellectual 4-D chess players.

And it doesn’t mean that these guys have converted Trump to a particular, semi-coherent ideology he’s enacting. Remember the rotting roulette wheel that is the dude’s gray matter?

I think the answer is that philosophers do rule, just after they’re dead. Another way of saying it is this: we don’t need a living Grima Wormtongue (*cough* Stephen Miller *cough*) at Trump’s ear, instructing him on How to Dictator. Rothbard and Francis (drawing on strains long present in the right-wing movements in America) injected their prescient notions into the national bloodstream three-plus decades ago, and it just took this long for the infection they spread to ensnare the population we call MAGA.

Ganz’s focus on the intellectuals doesn’t click with present-day influence on Trump himself, but it does explain how the water supply of the larger Right was tainted even more toward the worst of the fringe ideas of the 20th century. Rothbard and Francis were key architects of MAGA through creation/prediction/permission structure of an ethos, an environment, an ideological reaction or response to the world. Everybody in MAGA world is now a disappointing failson or grandson of Rothbard and Francis, so it’s not surprising they don’t display the master strategist traits of their forebears, and because the very terms of MAGA authoritarianism call for a willful god-king to occupy a throne of complete power, Trump wouldn’t tolerate a court vizier telling him what to do to stay within some larger orthodoxy anyway.

No, intellectuals explain how we got the poisoned cultural well of MAGA. But over time, half the country drank from that well and became both evil and stupid. A thoroughgoing vibe without a specific grand vizier.

Ideology, Id, Idiot

To understand Trump, a recent episode of the podcast Is This America? with Thomas Zimmer and Lilliana Mason provided the key.

Zimmer, a history professor at Georgetown, reminded me that we tend to think of ideology in terms of what are actually the second or third dictionary definitions from, say, Merriam-Webster:

b: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program

c: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture

That is, when thinking of politicians, movements, parties, the powerful, we automatically recourse to imaginining a system, a coherent program, an integrated body of ideas, claims, beliefs, wherein the parts hand together and make at least some kind of sense, at least from the inside. Sure, we may reject certain foundational premises. We may offer critiques from the outside, but from within, these notions tend to jell, to fit together like puzzle pieces creating a picture that is intelligible to observers.

A look at the Trump Administration’s recent global trade war fits none of these criteria and invites little but conspiracy thinking. We try to make the pieces fit with the rhetoric and justifications offered by the administration—spurring domestic manufacturing, tit-for-tat tariffs against unfair practices by other countries, lowering consumer costs, Making America Great Again—none of these cohere. None of these pass the most rudimentary tests of sanity. Instead, we resort to massive insider trading narratives, a vast plot to enrich billionaires, or else “They’re stupid and burned up $6 trillion on Trump’s delusional whims,” but these conflict at multiple levels.

If there is an ideology behind this, it cannot be the coherent, systematic program variety. It cannot be the work of “intellectuals.”

But there’s a more primary definition of ideology:

a: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture

This is Merriam-Webster’s top definition. Here there’s no pretense of systematic coherence, no master plan, no ambition to make it all fit together. It’s just the throughline of how a person, or people, think about things.

If this is our understanding of “ideology,” well, then sure, Trump has one. We just have to punt the notion that it’s coherent, planned, programmatic. It can have one or more throughlines, but there’s no reason it has to make rational sense or follow a consistent moral justification.

It can just be … Trump’s Id.

I’m no Freudian, so I’ll steal from Wikipedia:

According to Freud as well as ego psychology the id is a set of uncoordinated instinctual needs; the superego plays the judgemental role via internalized experiences; and the ego is the perceiving, logically organizing agent that mediates between the id's innate desires, the demands of external reality and those of the critical superego; Freud compared the ego - in its relation to the id - to a man on horseback: the rider must restrain and direct the superior energy of his animal and at times allow for a satisfaction of its urges if he wants to keep it alive and the species healthy. The ego is thus "in the habit of transforming the id's will into action, as if it were its own."

I’m not the first by any means to say that Trump is pure Id. That he’s grievance and vice and childish whim personified. The weakness of his first term in office and the efforts put into Project 2025 were in fact premised on this idea: Trump is a loose cannon; he wants to do what he wants to do and laws be damned; there’s little predicting it; so those who would enable him should recruit loyalists to the man, not the cause, since “the cause” could turn on a dime; proposals (especially economic ones) for his perusal could be mutually exclusive and derive from contradictory schools of thought; what mattered was scheming out obscure end-runs around constraints in law and policy and norms to allow him to run roughshod over any and all limitations in his path to enact Trumpism, whatever that turned out to be on any random Tuesday.

This, of course, assumes that Trump’s Id is in the driver’s seat, and not, say, some kompromat in Vladimir Putin’s extensive files, but, as I say, I’m trying to avoid 4-D chess conspiracist scenarios. But even the “Trump is a Russian asset” theory doesn’t much conflict with Id-as-Ideology when you get right down to it: what kind of person would be easier to manipulate and predict that someone who acts out of his own blatantly manifest narcissistic wounds and drives, whether or not you’ve got extortionate dirt on him?

So what is the content of Trump’s Id? What is Trump’s lay ideology?

The simplest and best summary I can come up with is simple domination. It checks all the boxes.

His misogyny and pussy grabbing and disdain for, even disgust at, women who don’t adopt a servile, and/or inhuman caricature of themselves in his presence.

His wealth, which isn’t and has never been as vast as he’s boasted, and certainly not in comparison to the tech-bros he’s courted, but whose gaudy trappings he’s draped himself with all his life.

Even his name, which means to defeat others through greater importance or power.

Trump is not complex or complicated, except as a subject for therapy, I suppose. He simply believes in dominating others. He hates it when he can’t. He holds grudges from all the times he couldn’t. He admires those who dominate others the way he longs to. He stiffs contractors because he can outspend them in court. If he learns lessons, it’s through studying dominators, be they mob bosses and their consiglieres, political strongmen and dictators, or the people so rich they don’t have to worry about consequences.

The only thing that makes a Trump Administration difficult to predict is the enabling class, the professional justifiers who throw out every possible excuse for his actions (“tariffs will restore American masculinity!”) and the legal and policy wonks who scheme through the rat-works of obscure loopholes and laws to find ways to use the power of the executive branch to dominate civil society in ways non-sadists simply hadn’t imagined.

• Like putting targets on the backs of former Trump officials who simply told the truth about the 2020 election.

• Like yanking security clearances from law firms and their clients if they ever represented anyone the administration dislikes, unless they donate millions in pro bono work to Trump-favored causes, thus draining the pool of pro bono legal services available to the folks the administration is actively targeting.

• Like extorting universities and entire states using what amounts to impoundment of Congressionally approved funds on the false grounds of fighting antisemitism, “gender ideology,” and “racial preferences,” knowing they have fully dominated the GOP majorities in Congress, betting they have dominated a majority of the Supreme Court, which likely won’t hear cases before the universities and states suffer and maybe capitulate.

Trump’s ideology is domination. Bullying. Abuse. Trump’s people figure out devious, law- and Constitution-breaking ways to make it happen. Trump’s motives are easy to predict. His people’s implementation strategies aren’t, unless you’re as sneaky and evil as they are. I mean, who really had “A Venezuelan Gang Equals A Literal War and Incursion on American Territory That Justifies the Alien Enemies Act” on their BINGO card? Once they do it, it makes retroactive sense, both as a domination strategy and as a gambit for dominating the Supreme Court and laying the groundwork for more authoritarianism, but predicting that specific move? Not unless you’re one of those creepy FBI profilers who can so get into the minds of serial killers that everyone around you looks at you funny.

A Note—Again—On Hypocrisy

And in the name of all that’s holy, please stop expecting charges of “hypocrisy” to make a dent in this administration.

Hypocrisy is enunciating a principle and then going back on it when it benefits you or your cause or allies.

Trump’s only principle is to dominate. His administration takes all its cues from Trump’s Id, his incoherent ideology. Hypocrisy implies consistency and integrity, the integration of words and actions. The words are supposed to constrain the actions, bind them like a contract or agreement. An authoritarian cares only about being on top, about dominating all others. So saying one thing, going back on it, changes the terms of the agreement unilaterally and without even acknowledging he ever said otherwise—that’s 100 percent in line with domination. That’s the quintessence of domination. It’s gaslighting. It’s unilaterally redefining reality and insisting you never saw, heard or read what you have video, audio and printed proof of what you saw, heard and read. You hold up the proof, and the man with the power doesn’t acknowledge it, claims not to see it, claims it isn’t real, claims it never happened. Because he has the power. Not so much to make it unexist (though scrubbing historical records and libraries and curricula are underway), but because he has the power to make it not matter: he has the power to disregard the blatant contradiction, the hypocrisy, the conflict, the incoherence, because he and his power are all that matters. He makes and sets the reality now. His power determines whether you live or die, how free you are, whether you have a job or a loan or a house, whether you spend your life in a foreign torture prison. His ability to be a hypocrite is proof of his power. To be able to articulate a principle, make a promise, then go back on it and still retain power—that’s domination.

If hypocrisy meant anything anymore, then pointing it out would embarrass the hypocrite, send him crawling into apologies and explanations. He would feel intellectual or moral shame for having fallen short of the principles he articulated, the standards he sacrificed, the promises he broke. Authoritarians who have embraced their power and seek further domination gobble hypocrisies like candy: each morsel of hypocrisy just proves how untouchable they are. Moral, logical, rhetorical, ethical betrayals—each one falls harmless to the floor, testifying to the impunity and immunity of the dominant figure. The dictator rides above all laws of man and God and nature and logic and conscience and makes and breaks them all by force of his own will. That’s domination, and charging “hypocrisy” is something done only by people who still don’t understand that they live under the thumb of a dictator.

Hypocrisy is the erecting of double standards. And that is the whole point of being a dictator.

Why be a dictator if you have to follow the same rules as everyone else? Following the same rules means you’re no better or worse than everybody else, and that’s kryptonite to a person whose entire ideology is domination. No, you lay down your rules, and really, it’s simpler just to lay down one rule: don’t piss me off. Who cares if it’s vague and mercurial? Let everybody else worry about what might piss me off on any given day? Let them worry about walking on eggshells lest I shout, “Off with their head!” Now that’s power. That’s domination.

That’s Trump.

The Danger We Face

The problem right now is simple: we have one faction in America that embraces nothing but power and dominance. Another faction is so stunned by this heel turn that it barely knows which way is up. It seems to be wanting or claiming to embrace “civilization,” the “rule of law,” “sanity,” “democracy,” and the scramble for some key, mobilizing terminology is indicative of its confusion.

All the civilized methods for opposing raw power—the exercise of pure domination over and against every countervailing force humans have ever devised to restrain it—rely on, well, some amount of civilization abiding in the hearts, souls, consciences of the powerful.

It reminds me of the most stirring scenes of the films that inspired me when I was younger. In 1982’s Gandhi, when line after line of non-violent Indian demonstrators stood before soldiers, only to be beaten down, each injured man pulled away for care by comrades, while the next line of marchers stepped forward, to be beaten to the ground in turn—a mass of humans presenting themselves to be abused. A direct confrontation of domination by a human mass, designed to show the contrast between satyagraha and injustice.

I know now that the scene is much sanitized compared to the actual Dharasana Salt Works beatings, and yet, it still gets me.

The spiritual leaders of the most famous nonviolent resistance movements say they believe all people have a spark of the divine in them and are reachable in some way; if they are not moved through such witness as we see above, then many others in the wider world will be, and they will bring pressure on the intransigent, forcing them to bend and relent.

I am deeply skeptical about both propositions. I wish I wasn’t. I wish I believed in it as much as I did when I was younger.

I guess I see hope in those swinging the lathis refusing the order to strike. That may be the only hope I have along satyagraha lines.

I certainly see no hope in Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Russ Vought, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, and so many other top officials having a Road to Damascus moment and rejecting the ideology of domination.