Schrödinger’s President

How Trump's power stems from the uncertainty he generates.

We all know the thought experiment (grossly oversimplified here):

• Put a cat in a box.

• Add poison.

• Wait five minutes.

Is the cat alive or dead? Quantum physics suggests that the cat exists in both states at the same time until it is observed.

But what is the observer doing while they’re waiting for the cat?

They can’t stop looking at the box.

Donald Trump is a box of cats. At any given moment, for any given situation, he maintains simultaneous contradictory opinions. It’s as if he has a cat in each pocket — one alive and one dead — and the one he pulls out is simply the one that serves him best in that moment. And until he does, all eyes are on him.

War and/or Peace

America’s bombing of Iran on June 21st shows how useful this strategy is to paralyze the media and insulate Trump from any whisper of accountability. On June 18, just three days earlier, Trump paused his verbal fellating of the best flagpoles in the world to answer a question about whether or not he was going to enter the war.

“I mean, you don't know that I'm even going to do it,” he answered. “You don't know. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do.”

“I have ideas as to what to do,” he continued in the Oval Office the next day, “but I haven’t made a final — I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due.”

By tapping into the tactic of strategic ambiguity here — using vague, noncommittal statements, so no matter the outcome of your actions you can pretend it’s what you meant to happen (if it’s good) or can blame someone else (if it’s bad) — Trump is able to consistently avoid accountability and shape the narrative in his favor.

An accompanying weapon in this bullshit arsenal is the delay tactic, where he basically kicks the can down the road so the media has nothing to write about, since it’s hard to criticize a decision that hasn’t been made. One of Trump’s favorite delay periods is “two weeks” — the fictional block of time he has used to ponder Iran, Putin, Ukraine, Obamacare, and mass deportations.

A recent post from New York Times White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh:

“It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes.

Is the United States going to bomb Iran? We don’t know. Will we actually find out the answer to that question within two weeks? We don’t know that either.”

It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary (and extraordinarily dangerous) this is when you are talking about an international conflict over nuclear weapons. The very idea that America’s commander-in-chief would invade a foreign country on a whim — and in direct opposition with the available intelligence — is a sure sign of a country on life-support. But this sort of rhetoric has become the norm at the White House because it is how a chaos agent thinks — everything is in play until I show you the cat — and because the media still hasn’t figured out how to call a liar a liar.

Truth and/or Consequences

Consider this headline from CNN, published on June 19, just 48 hours before the bombing:

When you are not used to reporting on major figures who have no regard for truth, it’s too easy to inadvertently reinforce the lies. So let’s break this down:

Trump to allow…

Phrasing this in the infinitive (“Trump to allow”) instead of qualifying it as reported speech (“Trump claims he will allow”) implies that if he says it, it is probably true. This was obviously not the case, and it rarely is — every media outlet in the country should know that by now.

…up to two weeks…

Once again, this nonsensical unit of time, often appendaged with “maybe a little more, maybe a little less.” Basically he’s inviting the press to play kick the can, and CNN is yelling I’m up first!

…for diplomacy…

Trump was not waiting for diplomacy to work. He was waiting to see how he could use the situation to his advantage, or as an excuse to capture the headlines and divert attention from the perfectly good invasion he’s got going at home.

…before deciding on US strike on Iran

…before making a final decision on US military action

This reinforces and normalizes the idea that the president has unchecked powers, particularly with regard to the military — a position he just used to invade California, and will most certainly use in the future against other states that won’t turn their children over to the king.

This headline offers no critical review of Trump’s claim. And while some of these points are brushed up against in the body of the story, most of the people who see the headline — and up to 75% of the people who share it on social media — will not read the story at all. Far fewer will remember that Trump created this crisis in 2018 when he scuttled the JCPOA nuclear agreement in a fit of Obama-envy, sending Iran into a nuke-building frenzy.

Cats and/or Other Cats

The next cat Trump pulls out of the box will depend on whether or not the current ceasefire actually holds. If it doesn’t, it’s because Israel and Iran “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” If it does, it’s because of his genius diplomatic skills in brokering a peace “that will last forever.”

“I don’t believe they will ever be shooting at each other again,”
- Donald Trump on Monday, minutes before they started shooting at each other again.

By playing this game and always giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, the media continues to enable his predictable unpredictability. I can understand why my parents support him when they skim the headlines and gather that he waited for diplomacy, carefully weighed his options, and then decisively stepped in and stopped the war. They have no reason to believe he broke the vase, glued it back to together, and then bragged about the beautiful new vase he made.

Once upon a time it was acceptable to take the president at his word. But it’s been ten years since Trump floated down the escalator on a cloud of department-store cologne, setting the bar for cringe so low that we haven’t been able to stop watching because we’ve never seen that much stoop. But we’re grownups now, and we know what we are dealing with.

It is a dereliction of editorial duty to simply repeat the words of a serial liar. The real truth is, Trump is always holding two cats — his pathological indecision forcing us to dwell in the dissonance of contradictory and simultaneous futures — and nobody can look away until he decides which pussy to grab.

Btw, here’s Steve Martin juggling cats.

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