- How come that Trump still can make almost everyone crazy, hyped up and worked up about things even though he has done that now quite a number of times? While pretty much every time Trump’s actual ACTIONS and RESULTS looked much different and quite a bit more positive than the states big words. Trump seems “masterful“ in creating/fueling knee-jerk reactions in people.
One thing about Trump is that he's not necessarily the master strategist some people think he is, nor is he even "the greatest deal maker" or the greatest businessman. If you look at his career before and during politics, it's clear that the one thing he's an absolute master at is PR: he has made it by creating a real-life soap opera, a celebrity brand. He plays the media like a fiddle and drives narratives.
Which is kind of infuriating, since the resulting discourse seems so childish, stupid and ridiculous. Which it frankly is on many levels. But Western politics has been about PR for a long time, the media basically driving politics rather than the other way around. So in that sense Trump is perfect for the role, blowing smoke left and right, dominating the culture and the discourse as he does. I mean, just those phrases he comes up with/adopts, like "the wall", "the Big Beautiful Bill", the "12-day war", "Fake News", "Too Big To Rig", "Lock Her Up", "Rocket Man" etc. This translates to actual policy proposals (whether serious or not) - it's always something catchy, infuriating, funny, crazy... It's probably the only way to play the game in the US these days to have half a chance of getting anything done. He's a trash TV star above else, and Western politics today is a trash TV show, so there you go.
This obviously has its downsides, and all of this smoke and mirrors creates a lot of confusion in people and may derail many from looking at the world objectively. It certainly keeps things more "open" though as opposed to the technocratic puppet show with centralized talking points we've seen pre-Trump.