Every president was weird. Every president was flawed. Trump was just the first one who didn’t hide it.
Trump Didn't Break the Presidency—He Broke the Illusion. Every President Would Have Looked Just as Chaotic On Twitter.
We have lived, for the last sixty or so years in an age of technology-driven story wars.
For those who read between the lines and beyond the headlines - The ones who know history’s biggest stories don’t fit into a weekly news cycle - and the sharp minds who aren’t satisfied with soundbites. You’re not just catching up—you’re connecting dots, chasing the deeper thread, and thinking beyond the buzz…
Sunday is yours. Take your time. Think it through. Anyone who wants to know about the world must concern themselves with the details.
George Friedman, in The Next 100 Years, argues that the daily churn of news often blinds us to the deeper, more fundamental cycles of history shaping our world. He sees history as unfolding in long-term geopolitical and economic patterns—shaped by geography, technology, and national power—rather than the short-term crises and political dramas that dominate headlines.
Friedman’s view is that while the news focuses on immediate events, true historical change moves in waves, often unnoticed in the moment. The rise and fall of nations, economic revolutions, and geopolitical shifts take decades or even centuries to fully manifest, and their trajectory is often inevitable, driven by forces beyond any single leader or event.
A great quote from The Next 100 Years that captures this idea:
“History is governed by large, impersonal forces that are impervious to the passions of the moment. The headlines of today are usually irrelevant by tomorrow, but the deeper tides of history will carry us forward whether we recognize them or not.”
While the news cycle thrives on immediacy, the real story of the world is always playing out on a grander scale—one that requires patience, perspective, and a longer historical lens to truly understand.
That was the case this week as the story of storytelling’s changing technology and style played out as part of a 60-year-long cycle that began with Television.
This week America and the world saw a diplomatic discussion between two negotiation teams with very different levels of power, stakes, and control fail to reach a happy conclusion. Is this the first time this has happened? Nope. Is this the most heated failed negotiation in history? Nope. Is it the highest stakes, most pressing, or consequential for world affairs? Nope. Not even close.
What it was will go down in history as the first time we all got to see real diplomacy, as it actually happens, live in real-time rather than a ‘readout’ as the diplomatic corps likes to say. The revelation here is hidden in plain sight. It’s called the diplomatic corps. The people who do this work, in the past, have been diplomats. And they’re called that for a reason.
If this discussion had taken place in the era before Trump, without a live broadcast, and was instead conveyed as a "readout" by the diplomatic corps and subsequently analyzed by the media, it would have been filtered through the polished, cautious, and often ambiguous language of traditional diplomacy. It might read something like this:
Official White House Readout of Bilateral Meeting Between President Trump and President Zelensky
"President Trump and President Zelensky engaged in a frank and constructive dialogue during their recent meeting, reaffirming the strong and historic ties between the United States and Ukraine. Both leaders underscored the importance of mutual cooperation on issues of security, economic development, and regional stability. President Trump reiterated the United States’ steadfast commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, while President Zelensky expressed appreciation for American support in various strategic sectors. The leaders discussed ongoing efforts to strengthen defense partnerships, with President Trump emphasizing the necessity of burden-sharing and accountability in international assistance. President Zelensky provided updates on Ukraine’s reform agenda and underscored his government’s commitment to combating corruption and fostering democratic governance. The conversation was candid and forward-looking, reflecting the enduring alliance between the two nations. The leaders look forward to continued engagement on these and other critical matters in the months ahead."
Media Interpretation in the Pre-Trump Era
Political analysts and foreign policy experts would have parsed this statement for underlying meanings, relying on diplomatic leaks and off-the-record briefings to infer the true tone of the conversation. Journalists might have noted:
"Frank and Constructive" – A diplomatic euphemism often used when tensions were evident but not openly acknowledged. This might have signaled that the discussion contained points of contention but remained civil.
"Burden-sharing and accountability in international assistance" – Likely interpreted as a veiled reference to Trump's insistence on other nations contributing more to their own defense, possibly hinting at conditions placed on U.S. aid.
"Ukraine’s reform agenda and commitment to combating corruption" – A subtle way of indicating that Trump pressed Zelensky on internal governance issues, potentially as a prerequisite for continued support.
"Candid and forward-looking" – Another diplomatic phrase used to indicate a conversation that may have been unusually blunt or direct but positioned as ultimately productive even though there was literally nothing accomplished and no useful result.
Without a live broadcast, the discussion’s normal messiness—Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks, the awkward moments, Zelensky’s attempts to both appease and dominate—would have been smoothed over into a predictable, formal, and largely uncontroversial diplomatic interaction. The media would have focused on "signals" rather than quotes, parsing subtle phraseology and consulting anonymous sources to determine the "true meaning" behind the official words. In short, it would have been reported as business as usual, instead of the chaotic and unfiltered spectacle we witnessed in real time.
The larger spectacle—Trump, his supporters, and his outraged critics—is a deeply human drama, playing out with all the contradictions, blind spots, and irrationalities that define our species.
Trump himself, for all his bluster and self-assurance, is just another deeply insecure human, desperate for love, approval, and a sense of significance. His bravado is not a mark of strength, but a carefully assembled armor against the unbearable possibility that he might not matter as much as he wants to. He lies, boasts, and postures not because he is uniquely monstrous, but because, in his own tragic way, he is doing what we all do—just at a scale so exaggerated that it horrifies polite society.
His supporters, feeling pushed to the brink by a new ideology that vilifies, undermines, and even criminalizes their understanding of life and the order of things, are not a uniquely irrational mob, but a group of people who, like all of us, are seeking security, identity, and a coherent narrative to make sense of their world. History is filled with people who, feeling unheard or overlooked, have latched onto leaders who offer them simple solutions to complex problems. Their loyalty is not necessarily to Trump the man, but to the emotional balm he provides—the feeling that someone, at last, is speaking their language, acknowledging their fears, and offering them a sense of belonging.
And then, there’s the rest of us—the critics, the legions of smart, well-intentioned people who see Trump as a harbinger of doom and raise the alarm with increasing urgency. Our outrage, while often justified, is also laced with its own set of human weaknesses: the need to feel morally superior, the thrill of collective righteousness, and the comforting illusion that history is always on the side of those who shout loudest for the good and the right. Our intelligence and moral certainty do not make us immune to fear-based thinking, nor do they guarantee wisdom. The impulse to see Trump as an existential threat, rather than a symptom of deeper societal tensions, is itself a form of magical thinking—the belief that if only he were gone, everything would return to normal.
At times, the current presidency has felt like one long blooper reel, a never-ending parade of ill-chosen words, terrible timing, missed cues, and bad ideas. But Donald Trump is merely following the example set by generations of previous presidents and candidates. The most powerful people in America have been weirdos screwing up badly in private… mostly in private… for 250 years, it’s just that propagandists and the media kept it tight. Cameras and tape recorders just weren’t there to capture it. Until now.
Would it bring you any comfort if I could show you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that every president since—and including—George Washington was every bit as weird, as flawed, as self-contradictory, as Donald Trump? Would it help you if I could demonstrate how your simultaneous beliefs—that Trump is both an evil mastermind only interested in his own enrichment and a bumbling fool who couldn’t successfully run a lemonade stand—are not a direct contradiction to each other?
What if we could see Trump as a flawed human, his followers as lost and searching, and his critics as panicked but sincere? What if we were invited to accept that we are all, in our own ways, ridiculous, broken, and in need of understanding? And perhaps, if we could recognize that, we might approach politics—not with less conviction, but with more humility, and a little less certainty that our enemies are demons, that the world is the worst it’s ever been and on the brink of disaster, and that we ourselves are free of blame.
Let’s try.
Throughout American history, presidents have been just as strange, extreme, and willing to push controversial policies as Donald Trump. Andrew Jackson was known for his volatile temperament and implemented the Indian Removal Act, leading to the infamous Trail of Tears. John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, making it illegal to criticize the government. Thomas Jefferson, while expanding democracy, also tried to have political opponents arrested and enforced the disastrous Embargo Act, which wrecked the U.S. economy. James Buchanan openly defended the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Black Americans had no rights. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing the government to arrest citizens without trial. Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the federal government and imprisoned political dissenters under the Espionage Act. Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Lyndon B. Johnson used government agencies to spy on his political opponents. Richard Nixon had an "enemies list" and engaged in illegal wiretapping, leading to Watergate. Ronald Reagan ran a campaign fueled by racial dog-whistles and ignored the AIDS epidemic. Bill Clinton cut the federal civil service by over 200,000 workers, proportionally more than Trump's goal of 10%. Barack Obama expanded Bush-era surveillance programs, allowing warrantless spying on Americans. These are just a few examples that show Trump’s behavior is not new—every president has been controversial, and a weirdo in their own way.
So what’s really different?
It’s well known that the first televised presidential debate was transformational for America. Richard Nixon, the serious and experienced candidate, sweated and stumbled under the hot studio lights. Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy, the handsome war hero, looked composed, confident, and camera-ready. The reality? Nixon was far more prepared on policy, and Kennedy was on amphetamines. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was how they looked, how they performed in this first great moment where politics met the Hollywood standard of storytelling. It had always been this way, of course—image mattered—but this was the first time America really saw it in high-contrast black and white.
Less than a decade later, the Vietnam War became the first war in history to be genuinely televised - and in colour. War, told as a daily story that unfolded before our eyes, became something the American public simply couldn’t brook. The good and decent engaged citizens of the time rose up against it—not necessarily against war itself, because war had existed forever, but against the story of war, and as they optimistically imagined it, this specific ‘bad’ war. Against the messy, visible, human reality of it. Against the fact that they could see it at all. And here we are, a generation later, seeing something new, something equally unsettling: the inner circle and internal thoughts of a president, unfiltered, unspun, laid bare.
Once, the president was a symbol—of power, leadership, wisdom, even a kind of idealized perfection. He was the country’s father, its voice, its avatar. The most powerful man in the world. But what happens when that man is suddenly revealed to be deeply flawed, contradictory, inconsistent, and unpredictable? What happens when we see him up close and realize he is just another sad soul, trapped in the life that destiny dictated for him? What happens when we see, in other words, that he is human? That he is just like us?
We like to think of the presidents of the past as towering figures of competence, wisdom, and statesmanship. Washington? The stoic leader who held a young nation together. Lincoln? The brilliant, tragic emancipator. FDR? The steady hand who guided America through its darkest hours. But what if I told you that Washington was riddled with self-doubt and once signed a disastrous treaty that almost led to another war with Britain? That Lincoln, at times, spoke of resettling freed slaves outside the U.S. because he wasn’t convinced racial harmony was possible? That FDR, while orchestrating the largest wartime mobilization in history, also signed the executive order forcing Japanese Americans, citizens, into internment camps? These men were flawed. They were great, but they were flawed. The difference? They lived in a time when an army of propagandists—both in government and in the media—managed their image, and an infant media, incapable of capturing their every moment and steeped in tradition, decorum, social rules, and respect however misplaced, let their contradictions slide into history’s gray zone.
This is where Trump breaks the pattern. He exists in the age of total transparency, where even his most unpolished, unwise, unpresidential moments are instantly transmitted to the world. There is no historical softening, no editorial discretion, no waiting for the passage of time to strip away the excess and leave behind a carefully curated narrative. His presidency—his very existence—is happening in real time, in high-definition, in all its chaotic, unscripted absurdity. He grew up in a world of gossip, tabloid journalism, and never-ending tawdry social scandal, into a world of reality TV and late-night political comedy. Sure he’s rich by many measures, but he absolutely knows what the brink of financial disaster looks like at a scale of humiliation and despair few can imagine.
Think about the contradictions you hear about him: He’s a ruthless manipulator, yet a bumbling idiot. He’s a puppet of foreign interests, yet an unpredictable loose cannon. He’s a lifelong playboy, yet somehow a fundamentalist hero. He’s the leader of a movement, yet also its greatest liability. These paradoxes exist not because he is uniquely strange, but because all leaders, all presidents are strange—it’s just that we’ve never been allowed to see it before. And what his followers get, that we don’t seem to is - we’re all a little strange. More than we care to admit.
The presidency has always been a story, now it’s a reality show, a viral video, a spectacle, and we are its captive audience. The difference with Trump is that he tore down the fourth wall. He ranted. He tweeted. He took off the mask that every president before him wore so carefully, and let the world see what real political power looks like: flawed, erratic, human. And in doing so, he became the perfect villain for those who preferred the illusion, and the perfect hero for those who resented being lied to.
So what do we do with this new reality? We can, with childlike innocence, pretend that what we’re seeing is unprecedented, that this is a one-off mistake, a glitch in the system that will soon be corrected. Or we can recognize that the presidency, as we once naively understood it, is dead. The modern world—with its 24/7 media cycle, its omnipresent cameras, and its insatiable hunger for content—has permanently altered what it means to lead, and what it means for us to follow. Presidents will never again be distant, dignified figures shrouded in mystery and managed perception. They will be flawed, exposed, and unfiltered, for better or worse. That hasn’t changed in centuries. What we have to decide is what we will do now that we have changed.
Trump is not the anomaly. He is the inevitability. And the real question is: now that we’ve seen behind the curtain, no that we have changed so dramatically, how will we return to our democratic mission to build a more prosperous and peaceful world?
The real story here is not about Donald Trump, nor about Zelensky, nor even about the substance of their discussion. It is about the transformation of media itself and how it reshapes our perception of leadership, diplomacy, and power.
In the past, political discourse was carefully mediated through layers of interpretation—diplomatic readouts, polished press briefings, and journalistic analysis that softened the sharp edges of human interaction into something structured, deliberate, and controlled.
Today, the raw immediacy of live broadcasts, social media, and unfiltered access has stripped away that buffer, exposing the chaotic, contradictory, and deeply human nature of governance. This shift has not only changed how leaders communicate but how we, as an audience, experience and judge them.
Once, we could be led to believe that diplomacy was conducted in hushed, dignified tones; now, we see it as the messy, awkward, and often absurd spectacle it has always been—but was previously concealed. The medium has changed, and in doing so, it has changed us, leaving us to navigate a world where power is no longer just exercised, but performed, and where truth is no longer sculpted, but streamed in real-time.
Marshall McLuhan would likely view the live-streamed Trump-Zelensky exchange as a perfect illustration of his famous assertion: "The medium is the message."
In the pre-digital era, the way information was delivered shaped not just what we knew, but how we understood it. Diplomacy, once filtered through formal statements and newsprint, carried an aura of decorum, expertise, and stability. But in the digital age, where immediacy trumps interpretation, we no longer read diplomacy—we witness it, unfiltered and unprocessed.
The shift from text to real-time video doesn’t just transmit information differently; it alters our relationship with power itself.
POST SCRIPT - The careening course of the American empire, for all its chaos and noise, is not the end of the world but the opening of a door. It is an invitation—not to despair, but to step forward, to remember that nations, like people, are not bound to a single fate.
Too much and for too long, we have been pulled along by an economy of waste, mistaking consumption for prosperity, growth for vitality, and accumulation for wealth. But what if, in this shifting order, we find our chance to build something more enduring? What if we root ourselves not in the trade of plastic and distraction, but in the work of real creation—the making of things that matter, the cultivation of land and mind, the tending of culture and craft?
This US mess is an opportunity for us and the world to build better, more prosperous, more creative, nations with more to offer the world than the trade of junk consumerism.
A world left to its own devices without the old American Corporation’s shadow need not descend into disorder; it might, instead, rediscover its own strength. Nations once content to follow can learn to lead, not through domination, but through excellence, through richness of imagination, through a deeper sense of what it means to prosper. This is not a moment to mourn what was; it is a moment to reimagine what could be.