Chaos-Monkey Trump, Tomahawk Missiles, & the Art of Sanewashing: On the Nearly-Irresistible Temptation to Normalize Nonsense
Trump’s behavior is stochastic, not strategic. Smart people keep retrofitting “grand design” onto random flailing—and look foolish when reality shows up at the door an hour or so later. In the Holy Name of the Storm God of the Semites, why do this?…
That trick never works!
Or, perhaps:
Never eat at a place called “Mom’s”.
Never play cards with a man named “Doc”.
Never deal with a man with two titles.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Never sanewash Donald Trump—you are highly likely to look like an idiot, perhaps in short order.
Witness:
Niall Ferguson: China Holds the Cards? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5Kxl1C8Lyg>: ‘The Russians turned up in Alaska…. They basically trolled Trump. Lavrov wore a USSR sweatshirt. They never took it seriously. Trump was pretty mad about that, made it clear that he was mad, and I think it’s led to a significant change in his posture towards this conflict.
I don’t think that President Trump is going to restore the Biden approach, which was: Aid to Ukraine. Just enough so they don’t lose it. But not enough that they can win.
I think we’re seeing something different here…. President Trump is saying: “Conduct your deep strikes. Hit the Russians where it hurts. Hit their oil refining capacity. Here, we’ll sell the Europeans some Tomahawk missiles and they can give them to you.” It’s Europe’s problem.vEurope needs to do the aid. But the United States is going to provide weapons for sale, and, I think, intelligence sharing, without which Ukrainian deep strikes would be harder—though not impossible.
So I think we’re seeing a change here. And if President Putin hasn’t got the memo yet, his position is significantly weaker than it was at the beginning of this year. If he doesn’t realize that he soon will…
Within hours after the posting of this interview, we had:
Kaitlan Collins & Kristen Holmes: Trump declines to give Ukraine long-range missiles as he and Zelensky are split over future of war <https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-government-shutdown-updates-zelensky-meeting-10-17-25>: ‘Trump and Zelensky met for several hours…. [Meeting] described to CNN by several people familiar as… tense, frank and, at times, “uncomfortable” discussion. Trump made clear… the Ukrainian leader would not receive the long-range missiles that can reach far into Russia that he was seeking. One official said Trump was under the impression that Ukraine is seeking to escalate and prolong the conflict and is worried about potential losses during an upcoming harsh winter…. Trump pushed for a ceasefire along the current battle lines and called for an end to the killing, arguing there was too much devastation and too much killing…. “Both sides need to make a deal,” another official said, arguing the conditions are only going to get worse. Zelensky cast the meeting as a “pointed conversation”…
So, lo and behold, Putin’s position, it turns out, is not significantly weaker than it was at the beginning of the year. He may have been mad—probably was—at Putin two months ago in Alaska. But he is not mad now.
There are signs that Niall did not really believe what I quote him saying above, but was simply expressing hopes about things that might be true—that Trump was about to releases Tomahawks to Ukraine:
Putin still thinks he can win this… grind out one of those Russian victories that relies on manpower and readiness to take casualties. That’s why he’s not particularly serious about negotiation. But… we can make the costs to him too high for him to continue. That’s the key, I think, to what President Trump has to do in the remainder of this year and into next year. Real pressure needs to be applied before we get to the spring and summer of next year…. I worry a lot about the manpower imbalance. Russia is recruiting fresh reserves for its infantry. Ukraine is not. A war like this can’t be fought exclusively by drones. You do need infantry and that’s where I think Ukraine is most vulnerable…
He does not say “that’s the key… to what President Trump will do”. He says “that’s the key… to what President Trump has to do”. Not: this is the future that Trump—the most consequential leader of the West since Reagan—will create. Instead: this is what his advisers who want to avoid disaster on the Pontic Steppe need to chivy Trump—chaos-monkey that he is—to do, or else there will be disaster on the Pontic Steppe.
And if Trump doesn’t—as he didn’t, and, it is overwhelmingly likely, won’t? Well, then, in Ferguson’s estimation, disaster is indeed likely. For, Ferguson goes on to immediately say: Putin is in fact winning the war. It is Ukraine’s relative position that is deteriorating. It is more likely than not that it is Ukraine that will look back next summer, and will then regretfully conclude it should have strained every nerve to settle the war right now.
So why do smart, highly articulate people with a wide range of knowledge do this? Sanewash Trump, that is? Rather than say: “The right interpretive frame is this: chaos monkeys throw feces at random targets—it is what they do”?
I cannot say that I know the answer. The thoughts of people who are still in the sanewashing-Trump business are opaque to me.
I do, however, have my guesses:
Consider how somebody used to using their words to be smart and analyze situations is likely to respond to something that is, at bottom, ungovernable and uninterpretable chaos. What are the pressures, in terms of their short-run incentives to say things that the system will be rewarded, their long-run vision of their identity as an intellectual doing worthwhile work, and the epistemic traps that their training and history lead them to fall into?