The Pattern Is Becoming the Story
Six months of Trump surprises later, I’m starting to wonder if the surprise is the whole plan.
Editorial Note
I don’t write Off Script to make Democrats happy. I don’t write it to make Republicans happy either. If either side walks away comfortable on any given day, I’m probably not doing my job right.
What I try to do is look at what’s actually happening, strip away the spin, and ask the question everybody else seems determined to dance around. Sometimes the answer pisses off the left. Sometimes it’s the right’s turn. Today it might piss off both, and honestly, that feels about right.
Donald Trump has never been predictable. That’s not news, and it’s not even a criticism. Anybody who expected him to govern like Dwight Eisenhower has either been in a coma for ten years or wasn’t paying attention. My cat pays more attention during a nature documentary.
Unpredictability’s always been part of the package with this guy. Fine. But unpredictability’s supposed to be a tactic. It’s not supposed to be the entire goddamn operating system, and lately that’s exactly what it’s starting to feel like.
Over the last few weeks I’ve read one headline after another and had the same reaction every time: Where the fuck did that come from?
Trump spent years selling himself as the guy who’d unleash American energy, gut regulations, and let oil companies do what oil companies do. Then prices spiked after the strikes on Iran, and he turned around and blasted the same companies for making “too much money,” telling them to knock it off and lower prices.
Whether he was right about that or full of shit isn’t really my point, and look, reasonable people can argue it either way. My point is that if you’d asked almost anybody six months ago which president was most likely to accuse Big Oil of gouging, Trump wouldn’t have cracked the top five names on that list.
If you’re enjoying journalism that follows the evidence instead of the talking points, this is usually where I’d ask you to subscribe. So consider yourself asked. Free subscriptions help this thing grow. Paid subscriptions keep the lights on and let me keep doing this every damn day.
Then there are tariffs. Love hate or them, at least you understood the philosophy going in. Protect American industry. Use tariffs as leverage. Force better trade deals. Disagree all you want, but that’s a coherent argument.
Except after getting hit with legal challenge after legal challenge, the administration keeps shifting its legal strategy to keep those tariffs alive. [source link] Not unusual on its own. Every White House adapts after losing in court. That’s just lawyering. What I keep asking is whether these adjustments are following some roadmap, or whether they’re reactions to whatever wall happened to pop up that particular week.
Same question, completely different story: the Epstein files.
Forget the conspiracy theories for a second. Forget the people who’d already made up their minds before a single document dropped. Just look at the messaging coming out of the White House. It’s been everywhere. All over the damn map, and not in a good way.
Here’s the tell, though. Supporters have spent almost as much energy explaining what the administration “really meant” as critics have spent tearing it apart. When your own people are constantly translating you, your comms shop isn’t running like a Swiss watch. It’s running like it’s improvising, because it probably is.
Now toss in another major Second Amendment fight potentially headed for the Supreme Court, with New Jersey asking the justices to take up its assault weapons ban. On its own, that’s a hell of a significant case. Stacked on top of everything else, it’s one more front in an administration that keeps generating new fronts, new controversies, new explanations, and new fires to put out before the last one’s even cooled off.
Before somebody starts typing an angry comment, let me save you the keystrokes.
I’m not saying every move Trump makes is wrong. I’m not even saying most of them are irrational, taken one at a time. What I am saying is that when this many decisions leave supporters, opponents, reporters, business leaders, foreign governments, and apparently people inside his own administration scratching their heads, it’s worth stepping back from the brushstrokes and looking at the whole damn painting.
Here’s why any of this matters beyond the news cycle.
Presidents don’t just sign executive orders. They send signals. Markets react to those signals. Businesses invest based on them. Allies build foreign policy around them. Federal agencies burn billions of dollars implementing them. When the signals get hard to read, uncertainty stops being a political story. It becomes an economic one, fast.
So this isn’t really about Trump saying one thing about oil today and something else about tariffs tomorrow.
It’s whether all these moments, taken together, are telling us something bigger than any one headline ever could.
Could there be a larger strategy tying all of this together? Sure. That’s always possible, and if six months from now all of these pieces snap into place, I’ll be the first one to admit I missed it. But after months of watching one surprise pile on top of another, it’s just as fair to ask whether we’re looking for a roadmap that simply isn’t there.
That’s the question I keep circling back to, because every presidency earns a reputation beyond its policy wins and losses. Reagan projected optimism. Obama projected deliberation, sometimes to a fault. Biden got hammered for looking slow to react. Trump’s brand has always been disruption, but disruption only carries you so far before people start asking what the fuck it’s actually supposed to add up to.
Maybe the answer’s obvious if you’re one of his supporters. Maybe you see a guy refusing to play Washington’s game and forcing every institution around him to react to him instead of the other way around. That’s a legitimate read, and if that’s what you’re seeing, tell me in the comments why you think these last few weeks fit together. I mean that.
But from the outside looking in, the picture’s getting harder to read by the week. Oil companies one week. Tariffs the next. Epstein messaging after that. Now a potential landmark Supreme Court gun case. Every one of those stories earns coverage on its own, but together they raise the harder question of whether anybody outside Trump’s inner circle can say with a straight face where this administration’s headed next week, let alone next year.
There’s one more reason this matters, and it’s not a small one.
“Government doesn’t run on rally energy. It runs on predictability.”
Businesses sink money into decisions years out. Governors build state budgets around assumptions. Military planners draw up contingencies. Allies decide how much they can actually count on us. You can love surprises in your politics all you want, but the people signing off on billion-dollar bets generally don’t.
None of this means a president can’t change course. He should, when the facts change. Good leaders adapt. The question is whether that adaptation follows something you could actually point to, or whether every week just starts over with a blank page.
That’s where I land on this.
I care less about whether Trump can still surprise people than whether surprise has quietly become the whole product. When every headline requires his own supporters to explain why the apparent contradiction isn’t really a contradiction, people eventually stop arguing about the policy. They start arguing about the pattern.
And once the pattern becomes the story, good luck reversing that.
THE RECORD
Recent developments discussed in this article include:
President Trump publicly criticized major oil companies over high gasoline prices and industry profits.
The administration has continued pursuing revised legal strategies after court challenges to tariff policies.
Public messaging surrounding the Epstein files has shifted repeatedly, drawing questions from supporters and critics alike.
New Jersey is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review litigation involving its assault weapons ban, setting up a possible landmark Second Amendment case.
The analysis in this article is my opinion. The events themselves are matters of public record.
Bullshit Detector
There’s a habit in American politics that drives me up the goddamn wall. If your guy changes positions, that’s called “strategic flexibility.” If the other guy does it, suddenly it’s hypocrisy. Same behavior. Different label. Depends entirely on whose damn jersey he’s wearing.
Bullshit.
Every president deserves room to adapt when the facts change. Not one of them deserves a free pass from explaining why. The burden isn’t on the rest of us to decode every apparent contradiction. It’s on elected leaders to make the case that today’s decision still fits yesterday’s principles.
That’s accountability.
It isn’t partisanship, no matter how many people try to pretend otherwise.
The Bullshit Detector
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The Bullshit Detector helps you separate facts from spin, statistics from manipulation, and honest arguments from complete bullshit.
Subscribers receive it free. It’s also available separately for $4.95 in the Tom Hicks Media Store.
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One Question Before You Go
Do you think this run of policy shifts and mixed messages adds up to a coherent long-term strategy, or is this administration becoming more reactive as events unfold?
I’d genuinely like to hear your take in the comments.
One Last Thing
I keep waiting for the week where all of this snaps into focus, and I finally say, “Okay... now I see the strategy.”
Maybe that week is coming.
Until then, I’m going to keep paying attention to the pattern.
Because sooner or later, the pattern tells you more than the headlines ever will.
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