In Politics, Your Enemy’s Enemy Is Not Always Your Friend
- john raymond
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
The most persistent tactical delusion in democratic politics is the reflex to treat any fracture on the right as a coalition opportunity on the left: if someone breaks with President Trump, they must be moving toward reality; if they criticize the regime, they must now share our basic premises.
That assumption is not merely naïve—it is strategically dangerous. The decisive question is not whether a figure has turned against a particular leader in a particular moment, but whether they have repudiated the permission structure that makes the regime possible. If they have not, their “break” is often a form of brand management that stabilizes the underlying project by injecting confusion into the public’s understanding of what is really happening.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a clean example. She has publicly separated herself from President Trump in ways that appear costly inside MAGA—announcing her resignation effective January 5, 2026 and describing a rupture serious enough that she says she faced threats after President Trump labeled her a “traitor.” But she simultaneously insists she remains “America First,” and she narrates the problem as a failure of political leadership across parties rather than naming the regime’s coercive intent as the driver.
That combination is not an “exit” from MAGA; it is an attempt to inherit MAGA’s brand while shifting blame for MAGA’s consequences onto a fog of “both sides” dysfunction.
The timing matters because the regime’s coercion is no longer abstract. In Minneapolis, Renée Good was murdered on January 7, 2026 during an ICE-related encounter that has already become a test case for the practical boundaries of federal immunity and accountability.
Then, on January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti was murdered in public by federal agents during an operation that—according to bystander video accounts and subsequent reporting—raised immediate questions about necessity, proportionality, and evidentiary control. In parallel, Minnesota is now in federal court challenging “Operation Metro Surge” and contesting whether the federal government is using an armed enforcement surge as coercion against state and local governance.
This is the context in which Greene’s posture becomes actively harmful. When she attacks the regime in parts and the left in parts, she does not “balance” the narrative—she scrambles it. She encourages listeners to treat state violence and institutional impunity as just another partisan grievance cycle rather than as a deliberate expansion of coercive capacity.
That is the functional role of the “both sides” frame: it dissolves causality. If you can’t say who is driving escalation, you can’t build counter-power, you can’t demand accountability, and you can’t impose costs.
The Raymond Method makes the motive structure legible.
Pillar One—Regime Security: Greene is not optimizing for a shared civic “us.” She is optimizing for her own continuity. Her resignation does not abolish that logic; it intensifies it. When a political figure breaks with the principal but not the movement, the movement becomes the resource they must still extract from. That forces them into a rhetorical posture that preserves identity while relocating blame. Greene’s insistence that she is still “America First” is her tell.
Pillar Two—Asymmetric Warfare: in an asymmetric environment, ambiguity is a weapon. Greene’s partial critique is valuable to the regime precisely because it is not a clean repudiation. It offers disillusioned MAGA audiences a psychologically comfortable middle position: I can admit something is wrong without admitting I was wrong about the project. That “middle” does not weaken the regime; it delays rupture by channeling outrage into a rebrand.
Pillar Three—Byzantine Traitor-General: the minimax corollary applies. If a move can be read as dissent while still producing outcomes that protect the regime, assume that is the intent until proven otherwise. Greene’s “break” can coexist with continued laundering of the system’s core tactics—especially the conversion of regime violence into generalized “polarization,” and the conversion of accountability into mere performance. The result is a self-motivated fog that leaves listeners confused about the nature of reality, particularly if they accept her initial framing.
This is why “your enemy’s enemy” so often fails as a heuristic. A person can be in conflict with the regime’s leader while still being useful to the regime’s system. They can dislike Trump’s failures while still defending the machinery that produces those failures—because their own personal “regime” is built on the same audience, the same incentives, and the same permission structure. In that situation, their critique is not a bridge to common ground; it is a pressure valve that prevents the coalition from breaking cleanly under the weight of its own brutality.
The implication is operational, not emotional. Treat actors like Greene transactionally and narrowly—never as validators of reality, never as coalition anchors, never as moral witnesses. Where their actions incidentally align with yours on a specific constraint (e.g., opposing a particular overreach), exploit that alignment without adopting their framing.
Demand costly signals of them if they want credibility: naming the driver, repudiating false equivalence, and accepting equal standards when federal agents murder, intimidate, or evade accountability. Until then, the correct stance is disciplined suspicion.
In an asymmetric environment, the price of misrecognizing a brand manager as an ally is not just certain disappointment; it is also strategic paralysis.
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