Donald Trump Does Not Have a Plan

He has dictatorial desires. But not everything is a brilliant distraction or part of a cunning masterplan. Let’s not turn incompetent agents of malice into omnipotent supervillains.

By Thomas Zimmer, April 11, 2026

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the essay, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

To start the week, the President of the United States threatened to erase “a whole civilization.” It doesn’t feel right to simply move on. As Donald Trump’s madness will continue to ramp up and - excuse me for sounding dramatic - threaten humanity, it is urgently important we grapple honestly with what is happening here.

As Trump kept escalating his threats, prominent elected officials and political observers suggested there was some method to what he was doing – that it was either all a cunning distraction (Si apre in una nuova finestra) from matters Trump wanted to obscure or perhaps all part of a devious long-term scheme (Si apre in una nuova finestra) that would ultimately lead to a Trump dictatorship.

I strongly disagree.

This regime and its unstable leader are not systematically implementing a masterplan. I don’t say this to downplay the threat. In fact, it is imperative we confront the distinct dangers we face. What we are dealing with is chaotic destruction wrought by an increasingly delusional wannabe-dictator who leads a comically incompetent government and a movement drowning in its own conspiratorial hyperreality. They will continue to escalate because they are ideologically, temperamentally, and psycho-politically incapable of anything else. But there is no strategic genius at work here.

If we suspect coherence and foresight as the main drivers behind what Trump and the extremists around him are doing, we fail to understand the inner thinking of this regime. If we insist there must be strategic deliberation underneath the escalating chaos, we risk sanitizing what this government is doing and what fuels the man who leads it. Although borne out of an understandable impulse to emphasize the authoritarian threat, this nevertheless constitutes a form of sanewashing that does not help us counter the Trumpist threat. The man who is president is acutely dangerous; his dictatorial desires are limitless. But he does not have a plan.

So, let’s first examine why the assumption that everything this regime does is strategic in nature, either deliberately deceptive or part of a devious masterplan, is utterly implausible – and why other frameworks are a lot more helpful in grappling with the escalating chaos. And let us then investigate why so many pundits and commentators are nevertheless clinging to the idea that everything the MAGA regime does is a clever distraction or comes out of a carefully executed “playbook” – and what makes the assumption that there must be a secret scheme behind Trump’s actions so attractive, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?