Game of Trump: A Primer on How Court Rule Works
- Karl Johansson
- för 6 dagar sedan
- 13 min läsning
Or Game of Trump, A Song of ICE and Fire, Donald I of House Trump's Court.
Of all politicians in power today, Trump is the one most confusing for commentators. Anyone trying to piece together a coherent ideological framework which explains the second Trump administration’s policies will tear their hair out in frustration, and any model they come up with will turn out to be a post-hoc rationalization without any predictive power. The reason why is as I’ve argued that Trump does not run an administration but is the figure at the head of a court. With the professionalization and bureaucratization of Western politics having completed decades or centuries ago, commentators generally lack a model for how to understand courts, and the dynamics of court rule. In absence of a readily available and generally well-known historical example indulge me in a fictional one instead.
Liberal commentators often see Trump as a kind of queen Cersei Lannister figure: someone vain, vengeful, and overconfident. But in reality, Trump is much more like king Robert Baratheon: charismatic, disinterested in the business of ruling the kingdom, but very invested in being king. Cersei is proactively making bad decisions, whereas Robert passively allows others leeway to make bad decisions in his name. Similarly, Trump thinks that him being in charge is enough to make America great again, and so does not concern himself much with the day to day running of his kingdom. Instead, he delegates to people he sees as loyal and spends his time remodeling his palace and playing golf.
Disinterest is the driving force in holding the Trumpian court coalition together, as anyone who wants to get a policy passed is free to do so as long as the big man is not explicitly against it; it does not matter if it contradicts other parts of the administration’s goals. In Westeros, this form of politics makes perfect sense as no one is pretending that all the nobles are on the same team with the same goal. A pro-Lannister policy will often be bad for the Starks or the Martells and vice versa, and that’s the nature of the game. Meanwhile in America, Pete Hegseth’s goals seem to directly clash with Marco Rubio’s goals and that is highly aberrant in a system which assumes a unified administration.
This form of government puts old hands like Rubio and Scott Bessent at a disadvantage as they know how the system is supposed to work and is unused to the way it really works now. It also benefits people like Hegseth and Steven Miller who realise that they have broad powers as long as they don’t piss off the boss. You never wanted to tell Mao or Stalin that their plans were stupid, and you never wanted to give them the bad news that their plans led to bad outcomes. But those regimes were built on the premise that the leaders led, both intellectually and politically. Trump has no plans and almost never takes ownership of his policies, so that leaves his underlings to design their own plans and since he does not seem to care much how things are going they are also free to tell or not to tell the boss how well those plans work out. I fully believe Trump when he says that he respects what the supreme court decides. But Steven Miller doesn’t seem to, so the administration can be lawless despite the intentions and wishes of Trump.
What’s interesting about court politics is how it has mechanisms for representing your coalition of supporters, just in a dramatically different way from democracy and the administrative state. Both in terms of how coalition members see themselves represented, and in the way a coalition gets cobbled together. It also creates a less stable administration more prone to disagreements including the fact that this form of governance means that the administration can be actively fighting itself as with Rubio and Hegseth.
Secretary of war Pete Hegseth is one of the isolationists in the Trump court, who wants to focus on getting out of helping Ukraine to free up resources to counter China. His view is that America should only get involved if it really has to, and if it does, it should intervene masculinely with maximum lethality. Secretary of state Marco Rubio meanwhile is an older kind of Republican, someone who believes in America’s exceptionalism and the neo-conservative project of exporting American ideas and governance structure with the use of force, if necessary. If we want to sketch out the houses they represent at court, or in modern parlance the voters, I would say Hegseth represents the soldiery and Rubio the officers. Whether those groups voted for Trump or not is irrelevant, you don’t get to pick your guy at court, and if you are lucky enough to have an influential courtier to look after your interests they may be given a bad position to do so; no one would voluntarily choose Joffrey Baratheon or Ramsey Bolton as the representatives of their house.
The soldiers would bear the brunt of any war and as such they want to minimise the fighting in terms of duration, preferring short and intense bursts of violence directed at targets who cannot fight back, like Iranian nuclear facilities and alleged South American “narco-terrorists”. Officers on the other hand, whether they want to admit it or not, and as a class if not as individuals, want war. It is disappointing to spend your life in the military and never get to actually fight, or rather lead a fight. How do you advance in a military organization if your mettle is never tested? And with older peers having fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam the young officer will struggle to be respected if their entire career is spent in the barracks.
Rubio and Hegseth are both imperfect representatives for their classes, though Hegseth seems outmatched by Rubio. Whether America goes to war with Venezuela or not shouldn’t be the decision of individual ministers, but a whole of government decision complete with parliamentary authorisation in a well functioning administrative bureaucracy. Unlike in an administrative government in a court the favoured courtiers have a lot of discretion to make decisions without consulting others. According to the New York Times, Venezuela seems motivated to make nice and seems liable to accept almost any deal which ensures that the American military stays away from Venezuelan soil. The fact that no deal has been reached seems like the work of Rubio to impose his will on the administration’s policy.
Still, I would not be surprised if any Venezuelan offensive gets overruled before it goes ahead. Rubio is old school and will probably want to do things by the book, Hegseth however was never in the bureaucracy, he arrived in Washington in the court era and seems to better understand the new reality. The Song of Ice and Fire parallel is that of the principled Ned Stark and the unscrupulous Petyr Baelish, though it feels too generous to cast Rubio as Stark.
The issue of competition at court is not limited to life and death issues. A similar clash is afoot in the economic arena where Scott Bessent and David Sacks are battling over crypto, Bessent and Howard Lutnick are battling over trade – with the added wrinkle of the sovereign directly intervening to protect his pet issue, Steven Miller and Brooke Rollins are battling over immigration etc. I could go on, but the point is that intra-administration battles are not just common but encouraged. Being the recognized adjudicator in these sorts of spats is a method for the monarch for remaining the most powerful actor at court without having to micromanage all issues.
As mentioned with respect to Rubio, establishment figures are wont to play by the old rules of administration rather than the new rules of court. Any time the boss decides to use his prerogative and try to make changes it tends to push the government more towards a court and farther from the administrative-bureaucratic form it used to have. Scott Bessent needs to follow the rules and tries to implement whatever unworkable idea Trump has in the least disruptive way possible, or failing that, to get rid of the bad policy without making a big deal of it. Meanwhile, upstarts like Miller, Lutnick, and Dan Bovino will face no pushback from the boss when they interpret his missives in the most expansive, aggressive, and unaccountable way possible.
The drive to expel illegal immigrants is an instructive example. As has been widely reported, the way in which Trump has gone about fulfilling his campaign promise to decrease the amount of illegal immigration into the US and to repatriate foreign nationals who have committed crimes while in the US illegally has resulted in armed masked men turning up to Home Depot parking lots trawling for people to arrest. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been given wide ranging jurisdiction and a massive budget to expel foreigners, while also being largely devoid of bureaucratic oversight, instead relying on key people to serve oversight functions. The result is a powerful, unaccountable, and personally loyal standing paramilitary outfit; like a medieval retinue except with AR-15s instead of swords.
Nepotism is also a key feature of courtly politics which can be readily seen across both Trump administrations. The reason for why a sovereign wants to stuff their court with family is that family is the most important form of political organization in a government defined by personal relations. You naturally expect your family to stick together, and for family members to be loyal to the family, whereas in political systems where ideology and party are more important familial bonds can stand in the way of party interests and ideological commitments. Furthermore, in a political system defined by personal relations between people with wide ranging powers over narrow subject areas, a disloyal courtier can create a lot of problems, like how Lord Varys and Petyr Baelish routinely use their powers of office for their own ends, private gain, and social advancement. When you have given the head of ICE an armed retinue you have to make sure the head of ICE is loyal, and who better to trust than family?
In this light, calling it nepotism is not entirely accurate. The goal with appointing friends and family to important positions in government for which they may not be well qualified is not primarily for the sake of giving these friends and family members money, power, or prestige through a patronage network, but rather to ensure that powerful members of the court are loyal. Of course, that distinction is largely academic in the sense that it does not matter why exactly Trump has appointed incompetent people like Howard Lutnick and Steve Witkoff to important posts, they are fucking it up regardless.
Trump is famous for his obsession with loyalty and obedience from his party colleagues. This should not be seen as an ideological anchor point or a fundamental feature of Donald J. Trump’s personality, but a necessity for the kind of politics he practices. Trump is almost completely uninterested in details, policy, and day-to-day governance, and does not really rule through his appointments, but rather let’s them rule by his grace so long as they recognize who’s the boss. That kind of system cannot work without obedience and loyalty, and since Trump does not have the will or energy to check that his courtiers are actually doing what they say they are doing, obedience and loyalty in public are proxies for knowing who’s the boss.
Trump then, is unlike all leaders in bureaucratic-administrative regimes in that he is anti-instrumental in his governing. The theory of legitimacy implicit in Trump’s political career is that America is fallen and needs restoration, not by changes in laws but a change in personnel, and America’s greatness cannot be materially measured. High inflation during the Biden years is not an indictment of bad policymaking or adverse forces in the global economy but a manifestation of America’s fallen status. Biden could not have made America great again no matter the level of inflation, growth, or public debt because in the Trumpian view societal problems are symptoms, the treatment of which is pointless; Biden had lost the mandate of heaven. In a very fantasy way, Trump’s view seems to be that American greatness is contingent of a restoration of the True President, like the way Melisandre sees Stannis Baratheon as the one true king who needs the throne to fulfil his destiny of being the prince who was promised.
Q-anon and other quasi-religious conspiratorial or millenarianist movements which place Trump at the centre of their cosmologies buy into the idea of the True President and can therefore support Trump even as he makes America generally and their lives specifically worse through bad policy and prolonged government shutdowns. Obviously, this is a small cohort of the American public and of Trump’s voter base, but it is both terrifying and fascinating to see that Trump’s exuberant confidence can convince others to internalize his self-conception. His strange form of charisma and narcissistic tendencies makes him well suited to lead a court while also making him so very poorly suited to wielding political power.
This anti-instrumental nature of the Trump regime is evident in its legislative record. The Republicans have had two years of a trifecta – meaning majorities in both chambers in congress and the presidency – both times Trump won the election, and yet they have only one major legislative achievement: the 2018 tax cuts. In an ideological party based political system this is a dismal record, and it is not for lack of policy proposals. The conservative movement produced a ‘bible’ for Trump 2 in the form of project 2025, and last time around Trump failed to repeal Obama care and to build the infamous border wall. Trump does not have a vision for America other than that he should be in charge. On one hand, that leaves his opponents in a tough spot where attacking Trump’s record is difficult because almost all of his policy proposals are poorly though through non-starters. On the other hand, it means that he will likely only ever be able to remake America through destruction rather than construction.
Trump has disregarded, disempowered, and dismantled all kinds of institutions in his time as the American president. Partly because he does not recognize the legitimacy of legal-administrative forms of power, partly because he does not want his powers restrained, and partly because interest groups have managed to convince him or his underlings to do it. If he had a constructive, positive vision for a better America undermining those institutions would eventually come back to bite him, but since his only goal is to retain power the efficacy of government is not really an issue. Two of the three longest government shutdowns in history have been under Trump’s watch. If you have no bills for congress to pass nor policies for departments to implement it does not really matter whether or not the government is shut down. Like king Robert not showing up to most small council meetings as he found them boring, Trump probably likes government shutdowns as it leaves more time for remodeling the White House and visiting foreign leaders.
This anti-instrumental stance leaves the Trump administration acutely vulnerable to being hijacked by ideologues, interest groups, and conspiracy theorists; since there is nothing important for the government to do, it might as well do Trump’s chums a few favours. Mostly, this serves to sabotage the Trump administration. While rightwing populists often flirt with fringe movements to get more votes they rarely implement conspiracy theorists’ policies like restricting vaccinations as the detrimental public health effects of doing so are well documented. There are also sound reasons for being skeptical about legitimizing and promoting crypto currencies as mainstream financial products, and for not taking a blanket stance against all immigration.
This is why “Trumpism” is impossible to explain as any kind of ideology or worldview. It is made up by a myriad of groups trying to hijack federal policy by convincing one of the powerful courtiers, or planting one of their own in Trump’s court and hoping he gives them the correct policy portfolio. By all measures, this strategy has been an unqualified success for several groups throughout Trump’s two reigns. The anti-abortionists managed to get Trump to appoint enough conservative judges on the supreme court to overturn abortion rights. Trade skeptics have been able to get Trump to impose sky high tariffs on dozens of countries. Xenophobes have been able to get Trump to impose some of the harshest immigration policies imaginable. To be sure Trump would probably have cracked down on trade and immigration anyway, but these interest groups have successfully imposed their preferred version of those policies on America.
There is an ongoing debate over whether or not Trump and the MAGA crowd are fascists, and whether Trump’s administration is moving America towards fascism. My sense is that Trump himself is not a fascist. As loathsome as it is, fascisms is an ideology, and Trump simply does not think ideologically or have a cohesive worldview. But there are people in Trump’s movement who are fascists, and it is fair to say that some of Trump’s policies are in line with what fascists want. The “intellectual” leaders of the MAGA movement like Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, and Tucker Carlson are one shade of fascist or another, and while the coalition of voters Trump cobbled together to win the presidency only includes a minority of genuine fascists, the lack of vision at the heart of Trumpism has allowed the movement to be hijacked.
A party of genuine fascists would be more methodical and complete in their transformation of society. But that is not reassuring in a system where access to political power is so readily available for anyone with the right contacts or willingness to spend money. As the top most authority in America Trump is ultimately accountable for what his government does whether he is aware of it or not, whether he approves of it or not. The fact that Trump has the power to stop fascist elements in his government but does not do it is all that matters.
A Song of Ice and Fire is at its core critical of feudalism and monarchy. No matter who rules in Westeros or Essos, time and again it is shown that the price of the nobles’ games of power, extravagant life styles, and petty conflicts is paid by the servants, farmers, and soldiers. The real life parallels in America are both clear and heartbreaking. While Trump and his cronies are making hundreds of millions of dollars poor families are going hungry waiting for food aid to be restored after a government shutdown, people in poor countries are dying of preventable and treatable diseases after America stopped giving foreign aid, and thousands of migrants are being harassed by unaccountable ICE militiamen.
The most poignant description of Trump’s first term was that it was defined by malice tempered by incompetence. That was at a time when the court still had to comply with the administrative state’s rules, even as it was being dismantled slowly. Now American government is defined by court rule, and that form of government is inherently malicious and incompetent. There is a reason why we stopped using that form of governance, indeed many reasons. For all the misery Robert Baratheon and his successors caused they were tempered by the comparatively low level of technology present in that world.
In my view, the biggest errors most commentators of Trump make is to assign to much malice to the man for his deputies’ policies, not enough incompetence for not realizing what those appointments would mean, and focusing too much on what he is tearing down and too little on what is being erected in its place. Trump is undeniable far better at the personality driven politics of a court than the policy and ideology driven politics of an administrative democracy, but he and a small coterie of his friends are the only ones who benefit from the move from the latter towards the former. If you want to understand the second Trump administration you should read A Game of Thrones or medieval history and remind yourself why we moved away from royal courts in the first place.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about executive pay here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my essay on Silicon Valley and AI called 'No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley'. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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