Trump is a hacker, and there is a patch

A better way of making sense of him would also rob him of much of his power.

Illustration made in Midjourney

Many words are conjured to describe Donald Trump’s political style. He’s an authoritarian or autocrat. A dictator or even a fascist. A chaos agent. A bull in a china shop. The one that keeps coming to my mind, though, is that he’s a hacker, exploiting vulnerabilities in systems so as to bend them to his will.

I like hacker because those other descriptions miss something out. Yes, Trump is authoritarian, but so is the careful and disciplined Xi Jinping. Yes, he thrives on chaos, but that alone implies a lack of method or direction. His method is to identify the weak points in political systems, namely those that are governed by conventions rather than by rules, and then subvert them.¹ Chaos is just a tool for carrying out the hack.

Trump’s plan for the US to take over Gaza, rebuild it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” and forcibly expel all of its 2.1 million Palestinian inhabitants to other countries, is just such a hack.

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The TL;DR: The media should spend far less time obsessively analyzing the consequences of off-the-cuff ideas like Trump’s “plan” for Gaza as if every word were meant literally. Doing so (a) serves his purpose of getting more attention, (b) diverts resources that could be used for reporting other things, and (c) may obscure his true purpose.

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That the plan is completely bonkers—illegal, impractical, and inhumane—barely needs stating, yet the world took it for granted that Trump really meant it, and reacted accordingly. Other countries, including critical Arab allies, rained down a storm of condemnation. The media scrambled legions of reporters and analysts to examine the plan’s shortcomings from every conceivable angle. Even Trump’s own staff tried to walk back parts of the plan, only to have him double down on it a week later.

So how did this serve Trump’s goals?

I spent part of this week at a gathering of senior Israeli and American journalists organized by SAPIR, a journal of Jewish ideas, and naturally the Gaza plan was one of the big topics of discussion. We had a lively debate—itself a sign of how effective the hack was, if we couldn’t agree on what it meant. But the discussion did yield a possible way to see the method in Trump’s madness.

The Gaza plan is, of course, just the latest in a series of wild-eyed Trumpian schemes. There was getting Mexico to pay for the border wall, the purchase of Greenland, and the taking back of the Panama Canal. The deportations of undocumented immigrants have begun, but deporting all 11 million could cost half a trillion dollars.

I’m not saying Trump doesn’t want these things to happen. In his mind, which seems to see ethics, law, and even feasibility as annoying inconveniences, they might all be good outcomes. Indeed, one journalist at the gathering suggested we should take his bid for Greenland more seriously, since he’s been saying it for years.

But another argued that each of these positions has a subtext that is more important than the text itself. Saying Mexico should pay for the wall was a signal that he was serious about tackling the immigration issue. Wanting to buying Greenland and take the Panama Canal signaled that he wanted the US to be geopolitically powerful vis-a-vis Russia (for Greenland) and China (for the canal).

And Gaza? In this reading, it’s a signal that he wants something—anything—to shift in the Middle East.

Why does Trump care, given his apparent dislike for American meddling overseas? Perhaps Israel and Saudi Arabia have been on at him about the need to keep pressure on Iran, since Iran will benefit if Gaza goes back to the status quo ante and Hamas, an Iranian proxy, returns to power. (He wants to strike a nuclear deal with Iran, so he understands the need for pressure.) Perhaps he wants a Nobel peace prize.² Perhaps he just sees a sweet real-estate deal in the making. Whatever the reasons, he grasps that something radical is needed. However he got hold of the idea of a US takeover (his own advisers don’t know), it sure is radical, and that appeals to him, because it forces everyone else to pay attention.

Perhaps, then, one should take at face value the spin from his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, after Trump first floated the idea:

“The fact that nobody has a realistic solution, and he puts some very bold, fresh, new ideas out on the table, I don't think should be criticized in any way. I think it’s going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions if they don’t like Mr. Trump’s solution.”

Sure enough, by February 12, Egypt was promising to come up with an alternative plan that wouldn’t involve expelling Gaza’s population, and the region’s other major powers were planning a meeting on the issue for later in the month.

So let’s return to the idea of Trump’s Gaza proposal as a hack. As I said, I don’t think he is a rule-breaker so much as a convention-breaker. What he’s hacking in this case are two systems: international diplomacy and the media. The vulnerability in both of them—the convention he’s breaking—is that what political leaders say is policy, and that they choose their words with great care, often requiring intense reading between the lines to understand the subtext.

By putting out the most provocative idea imaginable, Trump short-circuits these systems. Text supersedes subtext. The words are so extreme, so impossible to ignore, that instead of reading between the lines, the media and the diplomatic community get frantically focused on the words themselves. The media devotes vast amounts of attention to the matter, which Trump loves, while Arab leaders, facing screams of outrage from their own populations, scramble to find an alternative solution. And the best bit? If they make progress, he’s seen as the man who broke the deadlock, and if they don’t, he can blame them for the failure.

Back in 2016, the journalist Salena Zito noted that Trump’s critics take him “literally but not seriously,” and enjoined them instead to take him “seriously but not literally,” as his supporters do. I think this maxim has stood the test of time, and the Gaza furore embodies it perfectly. While most of the world was taking Trump literally and losing their minds, at least some of his Arab-American supporters were unfazed:

Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Mich., a Democrat who endorsed Mr. Trump last year, said on Wednesday that he did not believe the United States was prepared to force Palestinians out of Gaza.

“It’s all just talk,” Mr. Ghalib said as he waited for a call from the White House.

When hackers penetrate a computer system, security experts patch the vulnerability within hours. Trump has been using the same exploit for more than eight years. What’s our excuse?

So: What would it look like to actually take Trump seriously but not literally? What if instead of 20 stories picking apart all the ways his Gaza plan was illegal, impractical, and inhumane, there was one story doing that and one analyzing Trump’s subtext and underlying goals, based on the patterns he has repeatedly exhibited? And what if diplomats and politicians did likewise? Imagine how his power would be reduced if he was robbed of that limelight and capacity to shock.

To be honest, it’s not a proposal I expect to get much traction. If you’re a diplomat or politician, you probably feel you can’t risk not taking Trump at his word. And if you’re a media organization, publishing 20 stories that spark disbelief and outrage is much better for traffic than a couple of stories giving a more nuanced view.

Still: I do mean this idea both seriously, and literally.

This week’s links

Japan on the forefront of deliberative democracy. In the past 20 years there have been over 500 mini-publics there, ranging from small councils to full-scale citizens’ assemblies, possibly the most of any country in the world. (DemocracyNext)

Does the US really need Europe’s AI rules? A dozen states are about to adopt EU-style regulation to prevent algorithmic discrimination. But the heavy cost of compliance will probably outweigh the rewards, Dean Ball thinks. (Not discussed: will those states also find it harder to attract business, compared to states with lighter rules?) (Hyperdimensional)

Some good news for a safer internet. Even as large platforms scale back their trust and safety efforts, ROOST, a startup that provides “safety as a service”—tools for content moderation, CSAM detection, and abuse—has gotten a big funding round. (Platformer)

Crowdsourced justice on Taoabo. China’s e-commerce platform has an interesting way of resolving customer complaints against merchants. They can have the case heard by an online jury of Taobao users, outsourcing the platform’s governance to 4 million of its most loyal customers. (Sixth Tone)

1. You might object that Trump (or rather his designated driver, Elon Musk) has broken many rules by firing civil servants by the truckload and undermining the law that reserves to Congress the power of the purse. But that law relies on conventions. It presumes that Congress will resist when its decisions are ignored and that the executive branch will comply if the courts rule against it. The Republican-held Congress is not resisting, and there are signs that the executive branch plans not to comply. Clearly the White House is gambling that the rules are only as good as the conventions surrounding them.

2. Someone at the gathering suggested this was Trump’s greatest ambition, since it would be the ultimate middle finger to Barack Obama.