Trump is Governing a Country that Doesn't Exist—And Destroying One That Does

A big difference between the second Trump administration and the first is, I think pretty clearly, Trump's information environment. It's not the only difference, but Trump has, in the past, responded consistently to certain signals in ways that modestly moderated him. Those now don't exist.

Trump, more than anything, wants to be popular. His sense of what leads to popularity is deeply broken, as are the moral values around it, but it's just a fact of the man that he wants people to praise him and doesn't like it when they don't.

In Trump 1, this personality trait led him to back down on policies that the public hated. Not all the time, and not enough in any "respecting liberal institutions and norms" sense, but it was still there. We're not seeing that in Trump 2, except when things look off-the-charts bad for him.

I don't think this is because Trump, in his second term, is hardened to bad news and criticism in a way he wasn't in his first. I think instead it's that he's less aware of acute unpopularity when it happens. He genuinely believes people love him and what he's doing.

What's different is the nature of the information coming into Trump's head and how he's processing that information. So his cognitive decline plays a role, making it even harder than before for Trump to update his understanding or beliefs. But it's not just cognitive decline.

In Trump 1, his administration and staff were often relatively normal people with a relatively normal connection to reality. They weren't great, but the comparison to Trump 2 is stark. His staff are epistemic lunatics, cooked in online spaces, and postmodernly addicted to AI as truth manufacture.

All the information arriving at Trump's eyes and ears is, intentionally or unintentionally (and it likely moves between them), constructed to reinforce a reality in which he's popular and succeeding. It takes a lot (e.g., Minneapolis) to break through.

And Trump, never a particularly bright or inquisitive guy to begin with, now entirely lacks the cognitive capacity to notice how detached he is or how corrupt the information coming to him is. He just accepts it in a spirit of self-flattery. Which means he can't course-correct the way he used to.

The upshot of Trump's cognitive decline and entirely rotten information environment is that he's ruling a country that exists only in his head. And in that country, everyone always wants more of what he's doing. Unfortunately, his goons are then carrying that out in the country that does exist.