Part 2.5: I Have Been Arguing What Even Russian Asset Theory Denier, Kyle Kulinski, Can No Longer Deny
- john raymond
- Jan 21
- 4 min read
Kyle Kulinski just said the quiet part out loud: we are now at the point where it is difficult to tell whether President Trump is a “Manchurian Candidate” or simply a dumbass whose actions are indistinguishable from one.
If you accept that framing—even for the sake of argument—then the conclusion is no longer optional.
It is no longer reasonable to model President Trump as anything but the enemy. Not as a rival. Not as a misguided nationalist. Not as a chaotic negotiator. Not as a misunderstood populist. The enemy.
And the reason is not rhetorical. It is structural.
The Indistinguishability Threshold
Most political commentary gets stuck at motive. Is he malicious or incompetent? Captured or delusional? Strategic or impulsive?
Those questions matter only inside a stable regime—when the system is forgiving enough that intent determines outcome.
But there is a point where thoughts of benign intent becomes irrelevant. Call it the indistinguishability threshold.
It is the point where two models produce the same strategic output across every domain that matters.
If President Trump is acting intentionally in alignment with foreign adversaries, the damage is obvious.
If President Trump is acting out of incompetence, narcissism, or grievance and still produces the same damage, the result is the same.
Once those branches converge, the question “what is in his heart of hearts?” becomes an indulgence. The system has moved past the stage where interpretive charity is remotely safe.
Why This Forces Enemy Modeling
Enemy modeling is not an insult. It is a risk classification.
You model an actor as an enemy when their behavior reliably increases your downside risk and drives you toward ruin states.
In game-theoretic terms, you do not need perfect attribution to recognize a losing basin. If you are walking toward a cliff, you do not demand proof of whether the cliff was placed there by malice or by accident. You stop walking.
Kulinski’s remark matters because it acknowledges that we are past the point where motive changes the risk profile.
That is the whole point.
If the outcomes are indistinguishable from hostility, then strategic prudence requires treating the actor as hostile.
Not because you are certain. But because you cannot accept ruin risk while you debate a proven enemy’s inner life.
The Mandelbrot Lesson: Regime Change Is a Boundary Problem
In my earlier piece, What the Mandelbrot Set Can Tell Us About How Regimes Change, I argued that regimes do not fail in a straight line. They fail at boundaries.
Inside a stable region, a system absorbs stress. The behavior is compressible: predictable enough that you can summarize it and still be right.
Near the boundary, that compressibility collapses. Small changes produce discontinuous outcomes. The classifier flips.
That is why people say, over and over: things change slowly at first, then all at once.
The same geometry applies here.
For years, commentary has tried to keep President Trump inside a benign interpretive lobe: impulsive, erratic, transactional, but ultimately within a normal political spectrum.
That is the old regime label. And Kulinski’s statement is the admission that this label no longer holds.
We are at the boundary where “incompetence” and “hostility” converge in effect. And when labels converge, you should always choose the one that avoids catastrophe.
Minimax: The Only Rational Strategy When Ruin Is Possible
This is where minimax becomes unavoidable...
In ordinary politics, people trade risks. They take losses for gains. They compromise.
But when the downside is terminal—when the risk is alliance fracture, coercive subordination, democratic collapse, or strategic ruin—you do not average. You cannot negotiate with negative infinity.
You avoid it.
Minimax is not paranoia. It is rationality under adversarial conditions. And it produces a simple rule:
If the most defensible interpretation of an actor’s behavior points toward ruin, you treat that actor as hostile until proven otherwise.
The Raymond Method: Why This Was Always the Right Model
I have been arguing for a long time that President Trump should be modeled as the enemy. Not because I wanted the drama. But because the pattern is legible once you apply disciplined analysis.
Pillar One: Regime Security Is the Prime Directive
Autocratic behavior optimizes for control, not national interest. When survival is the goal, institutions become obstacles and alliances become leverage points.
Pillar Two: Asymmetric Warfare
In asymmetric conflict, lies and misdirection are not noise; they are weapons. The goal is not persuasion. The goal is disorientation, division, and overcompliance.
Pillar Three: The Byzantine Traitor-General
A coalition can survive external pressure. It cannot survive internal sabotage.
This is the decisive variable too many analysts refuse to model honestly: a captured or corrupted node inside the alliance changes the game entirely.
If you keep treating internal sabotage as impossible, you keep solving the wrong problem. Kulinski is now, implicitly, admitting that the sabotage model cannot be dismissed. Even if he will not say it directly, his framing concedes the functional equivalence.
Why “No Other Options” Is the Point
Kulinski said there are no other options. He is right.
Because the third option—the one many people cling to—is psychological comfort disguised as analysis:
He is not hostile, and his actions are not systematically aligned with hostile outcomes.
That option is dead. It died not because of a single quote or repost, but because the outputs have converged.
At this stage, you either accept that President Trump’s behavior is functionally hostile, or you accept that you are willing to tolerate ruin in order to avoid naming it.
That is what such a boundary does: it forces clarity.
This Idea Is Not New
Kyle Kulinski did not hand me a new idea. He admitted one he could no longer keep evading.
When intentional betrayal and catastrophic incompetence become indistinguishable in effect, the only rational model is enemy modeling.
That is not partisan language. It is risk discipline.
The question is no longer whether President Trump means to do us harm. The question is whether we are willing to keep acting as though he won’t.
And if we are, then we have chosen ruin—slowly at first, then all at once.
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