As a huge fan of psychological thrillers, I love a good surprise ending – especially since I’m always looking for one.
This whole Trump administration situation reminds me of a movie with all the subtlety of an M. Night Shyamalan movie – complete with the “I see dead democracies” twist ending that half of us will say we saw coming. But here’s the thing – we’re all sitting here watching Trump and Elon Musk ham it up for the cameras, thinking we’ve figured out the plot – “Oh, Elon’s the co-president, he bought the presidency, he wants to destroy the government,it’s all SO OBVIOUS!”
But I can’t help having the feeling that when things are this obvious and straight-forward, is this just what the director wants us to think?
If you’re like me, as soon as you start feeling like you’re being led – you start questioning the motive.
What if the real mastermind lurks in the shadows, sipping tea and rolling their eyes at our collective naivety?
It’s like we’re watching “The Usual Suspects” of politics. The media keeps pointing us toward Musk as Keyser Söze, while the actual puppet master is probably hiding in plain sight, waiting for the dramatic reveal that’ll never come because this isn’t Hollywood, it’s DC.
Think I’m reaching? Hear me out…
Trump has never been this calculating or strategic in the past – you don’t need a political science degree to see that someone else is pulling the strings when it comes to policy. For example, the recent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act isn’t Trump’s brainchild – it’s too sophisticated, too precise in its execution. It’s like watching a chess grandmaster suddenly emerge from a player who previously couldn’t set up the board correctly.
Last week Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target Venezuelan gang members tied to the Tren de Aragua gang. This obscure wartime law allows the president to deport noncitizens without standard legal processes, bypassing typical immigration procedures. The strategy here isn’t just in invoking a forgotten law – it’s in the careful selection of the perfect target.
By choosing violent gang members – a group universally seen as dangerous and undesirable – someone picked a case where opposition would be nearly impossible to mount. Who in their right mind wants to defend violent gang members? The administration then defied judicial orders to carry out these deportations, even after a judge ruled against them.
This wasn’t just random defiance or Trump’s usual chaos – this was a carefully orchestrated political chess move. The MAGA base predictably provided cover, spinning the narrative that anyone opposing the deportation of Venezuelan gang members must be irrational, soft on crime, or sympathetic to criminals. Critics were instantly turned into easy targets, painted as out-of-touch elites or crazed liberals.
Trump has never shown this level of strategic foresight – this is someone who still doesn’t understand how tariffs work and thinks they’re money other countries pay directly to the US Treasury. This is a man who contradicts his own policy positions mid-speech. Something has changed.
The strategy here becomes even clearer when you look at the bigger picture. This move isn’t just about deporting gang members – it’s about setting the stage for a massive expansion of executive power. Once the administration gets away with using the Alien Enemies Act and defying a judge for a “heinous” group, it becomes easier to justify similar actions against less dangerous targets.
This is the slippery slope being deliberately constructed. By starting with the worst-case scenario – violent gang members – extraordinary executive powers begin to feel ordinary. Over time, what was once shocking becomes normalized. For Trump’s administration, this could mean using the Alien Enemies Act against broader groups of immigrants, not just gang members, with less resistance each time. Once it’s normalized, it’s a short jump to applying it to citizens.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Trump doesn’t think in terms of long-term legal precedents and systematic normalization of extreme measures. His approach has always been reactionary and impulsive. This new approach is reminiscent of sophisticated authoritarian playbooks from around the world – not Trump’s typical style.
What’s particularly telling about this strategy is how it mirrors – in reverse – the approach used by the ACLU for decades. The ACLU takes on controversial cases involving individuals with heinous backgrounds to set legal precedents that expand constitutional rights. This dark strategist behind Trump has essentially reverse-engineered the ACLU’s approach – using extreme cases not to expand rights but to expand executive authority.
The ACLU defended American Nazis wanting to march in Skokie, Illinois in the 1970s – not because they supported Nazi ideology, but because they knew that protecting even repugnant speech would strengthen First Amendment protections for all. Similarly, this shadow strategist knows that deporting Venezuelan gang members creates a precedent for broader deportation powers later.
This level of legal sophistication and understanding of precedent-setting is completely absent from Trump’s known intellectual toolkit. He’s never demonstrated this kind of methodical, long-range thinking.
I’m not sure who is actually orchestrating these moves, but it’s definitely not Trump himself and it’s certainly not Elon Musk either. Neither has the patience, discipline, or intellectual framework necessary to execute this kind of sophisticated long-game strategy. Hell, neither one of them seems to know how anything about the government works.
I can’t help thinking that someone else is robbing the bank while Trump and Musk provide the noisy distraction out front. They’re the guys wildly waving their arms and creating spectacles on social media, while the real operator works methodically behind the scenes, systematically dismantling checks and balances and establishing new precedents for executive power.
This puppet master understands constitutional law, historical precedent, and the psychological dynamics of public opinion in a way that Trump simply doesn’t. They recognize how extreme cases can be used to normalize extraordinary measures – a sophisticated understanding of how legal norms shift over time.
The evidence of this external influence is in the execution itself. The administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was immediately challenged with a federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order following an ACLU lawsuit. But the administration claimed actions were taken before the order came down – showing their willingness to push boundaries and potentially defy judicial oversight.
This carefully calibrated defiance – just enough to test limits without triggering a constitutional crisis – shows a level of restraint and calculation entirely foreign to Trump’s usual bull-in-a-china-shop approach to governance.
Consider how different this is from Trump’s first term, where policy moves were chaotic, poorly executed, and often self-sabotaging. Remember the first Muslim ban? It was so poorly implemented that it created chaos at airports and was quickly struck down. That’s the real Trump approach – impulsive, poorly planned, and legally vulnerable.
This new approach – choosing the perfect test case, anticipating opposition, preparing the political cover, and carefully testing judicial boundaries – shows the hand of a much more sophisticated operator.