A Man Flailing About Would Look No Different Than What We See Now
- john raymond
- Aug 22
- 3 min read
The spectacle of President Trump in these late months of 2025 has acquired a clarity that even his most ardent detractors once hesitated to name. He is flailing.
But the essential insight is not simply that he looks desperate—it is that a desperate man, cornered, erratic, and grasping at any stratagem for survival, would look no different from what we are seeing now.
Trump’s improvisations, his sudden lurches toward violence, his rhetorical inversions, his theater of strength: each is less a plan than it is a reflex.
Flailing as Governance
To understand the pattern one must begin with Pillar One: regime security is the prime directive.
Every move Trump makes—whether threatening to send troops into Chicago, undermining NATO cohesion, or offering himself as the sole guarantor of “peace”—is designed not to strengthen America, but to prolong his personal hold on power.
But when a ruler has lost narrative control and faces mounting pressure from abroad and within, his actions cease to follow strategy and devolve into the convulsions of survival.
That is what flailing looks like in a head of state: constant motion, reckless gestures, announcements untethered from execution.
The Asymmetric Theater
Pillar Two reminds us that asymmetric warfare thrives on appearances, lies, and inversions.
Trump’s claim that “residents are screaming” for federal intervention in Chicago is not evidence of a program but of desperation.
The man invents applause to disguise weakness. He projects control precisely where he has none.
The Kremlin could not script a more perfect puppet show: chaos in American cities, distraction from Ukraine, fissures widening inside NATO.
Yet these are not the hallmarks of a steady general but of a traitor-general who has lost his bearings and must resort to noise in place of order.
What Flailing Obscures
It would be dangerous, however, to dismiss this spectacle as harmless. Flailing can destroy as surely as deliberate malice.
A drowning man will drag down anyone near enough to cling to. In the same way, a president in panic can launch reckless wars, destabilize alliances, and deploy the tools of state power against critics—all without a coherent plan, all in the service of clinging to the surface a moment longer.
The FBI raids, the targeted attacks on political enemies, the scattershot threats of troop deployments—none of these flow from grand design.
But they all serve the corollary: if your enemy can harm you, assume he will. Because he can.
The Warning to Americans
Americans must not console themselves with the thought that Trump’s incompetence will undo him before he can undo the republic. A flailing tyrant is still a tyrant.
Trump may not know where his next blow will land, but every strike will land on the American people first—on their freedoms, their cities, their livelihoods, their alliances, their children’s future.
Every reckless order to send troops into an American city, every assault on an independent agency, every invented crisis designed to distract from his failures—these will not fall on Europe, nor on Ukraine, nor on the Kremlin. They will fall on Americans.
This is the moment for the public to recognize the danger of mistaking weakness for safety.
The president is not playing twelve-dimensional chess; he is thrashing, and that thrashing endangers the very institutions of the United States.
If Americans fail to confront this reality, if they retreat into the illusion that chaos cancels itself out, they will awaken to find that the republic has been smothered in the flailing arms of a man who cannot swim.
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