How Trump Outfoxed Himself

 https://time.com/7353732/trump-outfoxed-himself/

President Donald Trump kicked off the new year with a cacophony of policy decisions which have diverted attention from his disastrous 2025. 

The first year of Trump 2.0 has been soundly rated a failure in all major national polls and in each dimension of national and international priorities. Gallup found that only 36% of Americans approve of the President’s job performance. And according to a CNN poll, just 37% of Americans say that Trump places the good of the country above his personal gain and 32% say that he’s in touch with the problems ordinary Americans face in their daily lives.

Faced with high levels of unemployment, an affordability crisis, and being named in the Epstein files multiple times, Trump has unleashed a blizzard of divisive actions. He has attempted to change public discourse to focus on an alarmist hunt for enemies abroad, through his aggressions against Venezuela and Greenland, and at home, through his unpopular and violent ICE raids and attacks against Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell.

Some have concluded that Trump’s frenzy is the arbitrary approach of a deranged demagogue. “Trump does not appear to have control of his mental faculties,” asserts historian Heather Cox Richardson. “When people talk about that ‘Oh he shouldn’t do this?  He can’t do this? Why is he doing this?’ and so on—you don’t make those arguments about people who don’t have any logical reason for anything they are doing excerpt perhaps, ‘I wanna feel good about myself and make lots of money.”

But this perspective misses an important point: Trump keeps getting what he wants. 

The philosopher Abraham Kaplan referred to this as “the law of instrument.” Using the same hammer with increasing fevered frenzy is not going to address the challenge when a different approach, like perhaps a saw or a wrench, is needed. Trump needs to adopt new unfamiliar leadership tools which he has no experience using and which are unknown to his current sycophantic advisors.