I think it’s very dangerous to dismiss Donald Trump as someone who simply “failed up” into becoming U.S. president—twice. I’ll say it again, because people keep trying to wave this away: it is exceedingly dangerous to treat Donald Trump as a mistake, a fluke, or some kind of cartoonish buffoonery that accidentally captured the presidency of the only superpower in the world. That story may feel comforting, but it does not explain reality.
People like to frame Trump as Bam Bam or “Hulk smash”—noise, impulse, raw force, no cognition. But even if you accepted that metaphor, Bam Bam was a remarkably capable child. He wasn’t random. He was effective. And Trump isn’t Bam Bam anyway.
The only way the “buffoon by accident” theory works is if Trump has a fairy godmother—some blue, unseen hand quietly turning six decades of public life into nothing but luck and coincidence. Otherwise, the record simply doesn’t add up.
No one has a 60-year public career, survives repeated elite attempts at removal, wins the presidency twice, reshapes the Supreme Court, and delivers something as consequential as the rollback of Roe v. Wade by accident or brute stupidity. That’s not how power works.
American presidents have actually gotten better at cartoonifying themselves—at leaning into spectacle, absurdity, or buffoonery—because it creates plausible deniability. It lets people believe that ruthless or carefully calculated outcomes were unplanned, chaotic, or dumb. That misread is the shield.
You don’t have to admire Trump. You don’t have to like him. But dismissing him as slapstick is analytically reckless. His presentation may be crude. His incentives are not. Confusing the two is how people keep getting blindsided. The rest is up to you. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
