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How Trump Outfoxed Himself

18 24
21.01.2026

President Donald Trump kicked off the new year with a cacophony of policy decisions which have diverted attention from his disastrous 2025. 

The first year of Trump 2.0 has been soundly rated a failure in all major national polls and in each dimension of national and international priorities. Gallup found that only 36% of Americans approve of the President’s job performance. And according to a CNN poll, just 37% of Americans say that Trump places the good of the country above his personal gain and 32% say that he’s in touch with the problems ordinary Americans face in their daily lives.

Faced with high levels of unemployment, an affordability crisis, and being named in the Epstein files multiple times, Trump has unleashed a blizzard of divisive actions. He has attempted to change public discourse to focus on an alarmist hunt for enemies abroad, through his aggressions against Venezuela and Greenland, and at home, through his unpopular and violent ICE raids and attacks against Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell.

Chaos is often an order, misunderstood. There is a method to Trump’s madness—but it can backfire.

Philosopher George Santayana once proclaimed that “Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds." Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw chaos as a creative force to “give birth to a dancing star." The renowned psychologist Carl Jung drew upon a similar celestial meaning of chaos: "In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."

Having personally known and studied Trump for decades, I have come to believe that philosophers, psychologists, and magicians—with their........

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