In 2016, Donald Trump told supporters, “The only important thing is the unification of the people — because the other people don’t mean anything.” The message was unmistakable: there are “the people,” and there are “the other people.” Only one group counts.
Trump has never pretended to be a unifier. His political power has always depended on sharpening divides, not healing them. What many once dismissed as impulsiveness or incompetence has, over time, revealed itself as something far more deliberate: a governing strategy built on chaos, conflict, and the constant widening of America’s internal fractures.
Analysts have long noted that Trump’s political instincts are rooted in generating conflict. As WBUR reported, Trump’s ability to “manufacture conflict about culture war issues is in overdrive,” a tactic that keeps him at the center of public attention while destabilizing the institutions meant to check him. This chaos is not merely noise; it’s a tool that exhausts the public, overwhelms the media, and blurs accountability.
A Fulcrum analysis goes further, arguing that Trump’s governance “fractures institutions, fuels anxiety, and tests America’s democratic core” by leveraging polarization as a political resource rather than a problem to solve. In this view, chaos is not a failure of leadership — it is the leadership.
Nowhere is Trump’s chaos‑as‑strategy more visible than in his approach to immigration. From the earliest days of his first term, Trump framed immigrants—particularly Latino and Black migrants—as threats to national security, crime, and cultural identity. This framing wasn’t incidental. It created a permanent state of emergency that justified increasingly aggressive enforcement tactics.
In 2025, as his second administration took shape, he escalated the language further, telling a rally crowd that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that drew condemnation from historians for its echoes of 20th‑century authoritarian movements.
Under Trump, ICE was encouraged to operate with maximal force. Reports throughout his presidency documented racial profiling, neighborhood sweeps, courthouse arrests, and raids that targeted entire communities rather than specific individuals. Civil rights groups and legal observers repeatedly warned that these tactics were designed not only to detain undocumented people but to instill fear across immigrant neighborhoods, chilling cooperation with police, schools, and hospitals.
The recent killings of Alex Jeffrey Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents echo this history. Within hours, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good a “domestic terrorist” — despite incomplete footage and no independent investigation. CNN’s interview with Noem showed her doubling down on claims of “unpublished evidence,” mirroring the administration’s long‑standing habit of defining the narrative before facts are established.
This is the same playbook used throughout Trump’s immigration agenda:
- Escalate enforcement.
- Justify it with fear‑based rhetoric.
- Defend agents reflexively, regardless of evidence.
- Frame targeted communities as threats.
It is chaos deployed with purpose.
Trump’s political identity depends on the existence of enemies — immigrants, the media, Democrats, “RINOs,” protesters, bureaucrats, and sometimes even his own appointees. Unity would collapse the narrative architecture that sustains his movement.
A unifying president seeks to lower the temperature. Trump raises it. A unifying president tries to build coalitions. Trump breaks them. A unifying president sees political opponents. Trump sees existential threats.
Division is not a side effect of his leadership. It is the fuel.
As the country faces rising polarization, institutional distrust, and political violence, Trump’s strategy of governing through chaos is destabilizing and dangerous. Democracies depend on shared facts, functioning institutions, and a basic level of civic trust. Trump’s leadership style corrodes all three.
The question is no longer whether Trump thrives in chaos. The evidence is overwhelming. The real question is whether the country can withstand another era defined by it — and what citizens can do to strengthen the guardrails that democracy relies on.
That work doesn’t begin in Washington. It begins with people choosing to engage rather than withdraw. It means supporting local journalism that verifies facts instead of amplifying outrage. It means participating in civic life — voting, attending public meetings, serving on boards, and holding leaders accountable through lawful, democratic channels. It means refusing to let disinformation go unchallenged in our own circles, and choosing dialogue over dehumanization even when disagreements run deep. It means reinforcing the institutions that make self‑government possible: independent courts, professional civil servants, nonpartisan election workers, and the peaceful transfer of power. And it means voting in the midterm elections.
Midterms are one of the few structural tools Americans have to rebalance power, impose oversight, and correct course when any administration — regardless of party — operates without meaningful checks. They determine who writes the laws, who conducts oversight hearings, who controls budgets, and who can restrain or enable a president’s agenda. In moments of heightened instability, those levers matter even more.
Voting in midterms is not about endorsing one personality over another. It is about deciding what kind of governance the country will tolerate, what level of accountability it expects, and whether the institutions designed to prevent excess will be empowered or weakened. When turnout drops, the loudest and most extreme voices fill the vacuum. When turnout rises, the system reflects a broader public will — and becomes harder for any leader to bend toward chaos.
Citizens cannot control the rhetoric coming from the White House, but they can control whether they participate in the process that shapes the nation’s future.
Chaos thrives when people feel powerless. Democracy survives when people remember they aren’t.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum, the publisher of the Latino News Network, and twice president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.