This is how Trump rides the tiger. He doesn’t fight against the deep state or electoral inevitabilities head on; he makes fool proof strategies that take these as givens in ways that ultimately subvert them.
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Liberal media are required by virtue of their DNA to caricature Trump as a reactive half-wit egomaniacal president firing staff in a blind fit of anger, when the totally unplanned-for midterm electoral outcome smacked him on his orange spray-tan chin like a ton of bricks. The liberal critique of power is little more than demagogic voter flattery. At the same time, countless analysts across the spectrum had concluded long before the election that Democrats would easily retake the House and probably even the Senate. But within the rubric of liberal criticism, Trump is not a person but an object. As such, his moves are like the trajectories of cosmic bodies, like the predictable itineraries of Jupiter or Mars, and he has no understanding of his own inevitable course. Therefore, Trump had no idea what was going to happen and had no strategy because celestial rocks are inherently incapable of thinking.
Before imagining Trump didn’t foresee the inevitable electoral outcome long before and craft his plan around that obvious inevitability, we should recall that the biggest folly is in underestimating one’s foe. The most seductive route to downfall is in imagining that they are fools just because it satiates the ego and flatters a self-satisfied, virtue-signaling upper-middle-class boomer demographic.
Trump shows his hand
Contrary to expectations and the media caricature, Trump has given a series of interviews in the past few days acknowledging that his immigration policy was a bit too rough, and that Americans like neither the war on Iran nor its impact on fuel price and that this cost the party dearly last week. In that interview, he agreed with the substance of a scathing 600 word essay posted to X.com that Vice President Vance wrote on why Republicans took such a beating on mid-terms. Based on consulting a trusted pollster, Vance wrote:
“He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war; 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation; 3) Put America First; 4) Change our relationship to Israel”.
All of this points to what we might expect in the coming two years. What many outside the U.S. and unfamiliar with our system fail to realize is that the opposition party as a rule of thumb will win the mid-term elections. Would it not make the most strategic sense then to pack all the unpopular policies into the first half of a term, and kill several birds with one stone?
If a congressional loss was entirely predictable, why would a strategist try to avoid it rather than weaponize it?
What does an election actually secure if keeping Congress means keeping the AIPAC backed faction you actually need to purge?
If the defeat was a known cost, what were they actually buying with it?
If the Democrats will successfully attack whatever you do, then why wouldn’t you do the thing you want to be attacked?
Trump operates through a reverse-leverage method where he forces the opposition to attack the very things he wants scrutinized. Because Democratic resistance fixes on Trump personally rather than objective policy, he cannot directly name the Likud lobby, point out that Netanyahu is sabotaging his peace plan, or state that a war with Iran is unviable due to depleted armaments and projected catastrophic casualties. He could never say during this term, the way he said it so clearly during his first term, that U.S. bases in the Mideast should be closed down. Why not just have Iran so thoroughly eviscerate those bases that this becomes the apolitical conclusion of Pentagon strategists looking at fresh objective data themselves? If he stated those exact goals openly, the deep-state media apparatus would instantly attack as they have before, accusing him of antisemitism, weakness on Iran, and isolationism, and here we would also find that alignment we saw in the first term between establishment Democrat-facing liberal media and neocon war hawks. The AIPAC establishment would have gone full force against him, and given their influence (though less so) on the DNC itself, they would have had enough votes to impeach Trump. In the first term, we saw this numerous times, with each failed impeachment attempt. Even Republicans had a majority in the Senate in his first term, Trump needed Netanyahu and AIPAC’s support to keep him from being dethroned. One thing Trump hates is being controlled by someone else, and the thing he hates just as much is when everyone else can see it.
So instead, he applies political judo by inverting the vector. By donning the mask of a traditional neocon, he forces the Democrats and their liberal media to take the bait, attack those entanglements, and attack him on grounds that undermine the policies he’s taken up which he himself wants to see attacked, which therefore colors voters’ expectations of the incoming Congress. In so doing, he creates his opponent’s talking points, and shapes the discursive theater of conflict, while also keeping the neocon wing close to his side instead of joining forces with Democrats. During his first term (but also during this term re Venezuela and Israel’s attack on Iran in the summer of 2025), neocon talking heads like Bolton and Pompeo were given an open platform on otherwise very pro-DNC networks like CNN and MSNBC (MSNOW) because the only real common theme the deep state cares about is attack Trump regardless of ideological or political incoherence and inconsistency.
Get your opponents to champion your real policies
Trump doesn’t care so much about political parties as he does about policy outcomes and his personal power; that’s where his legacy lies and the historical mission he has accepted finds fruition. So if Democrats follow through with reining in Israel and pulling the IDF out of Gaza, causing blockages on Iran war funding and so on, then Trump wins. The Trump and Kushner clans are all in on Gaza development, which not only needs buy-in and investment from Gulf monarchies but also requires that a more Democrat-vibing approach to the Palestinian question is pursued, and that settler-driven politics in Israel is defeated. If Democrats fail, their voters are disaffected, and the balance of power shifts back in 2028 to his machine, where JD Vance is likely to be the Republican presidential candidate, and they can get it done that way. Drained military stockpiles decrease the chance of a real war, and record fuel prices harm Europe more than anyone else and dovetail with Trump’s sober assessment that whatever the U.S does, Russia will prevail in Ukraine: these are features, not bugs.
We have analyzed Trump’s moves for years now through various strategic lenses, including game theory. Back in April of this year, we summarized Trump’s standard modus operandi including his reverse-leverage method into a seventeen-point outline in The madness of King Trump: Decoding 47.
So while accidents happen, politics rarely operates on coincidence. Given how predictable these outcomes were, the real answer to the riddle of Trump’s first two years in office is how those inevitabilities were harnessed into a larger and intentional strategy.
Trump discovered early in his first administration that you cannot attack the CIA, the deep state, AIPAC, or neoconservative networks head-on. When he initially staffed his administration with figures like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, he attempted to co-opt or manage that apparatus from within, or at least project the optics of including known deep state operatives.
Instead, they tried to corner him into an irreversible war with Iran. When Trump ultimately put the brakes on that escalation, the media reaction exposed the foundational bias of the institutional, enemy-of-the-people press. You would expect anti-war liberal organs like the New York Times or the Washington Post to praise a decision that averted catastrophic loss of life. Instead, they ran headlines mocking him for “chickening out”, even though the fact that TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is a good thing for the world, revealing that publications like the Washington Post, with people like Max Boot in the editorial section, remain fundamentally war-crazy Bush-era neocons disguised as center-left liberals.
Experiencing this dynamic taught Trump a permanent lesson: these organs, backed by the unyielding pressure of AIPAC and allied foreign lobbies, will attack him no matter what, weaponizing the opposite of whatever he attempts. Because he cannot openly call out AIPAC’s grip on foreign policy without triggering immediate charges of antisemitism and a coordinated institutional march towards impeachment or assassination, he bypasses them entirely, using the deep state’s predictable, anti-war reactions as a reverse-leverage mechanism to maneuver right through them. The only way out, is in.
Thus we saw a very large difference between how he staffed the two administrations, placing a gravity-driven loyalty front and center in the 47th administration. And so we arrived at the likes of Rubio and Hegseth.
Trump: Ride the Tiger
If Trump is riding the tiger, why would he confront things head-on in a way that would just unite the Democrats with the neocons? They are very familiar with each other anyway and worked hand-in-hand all through the Obama administration. Why would he think to do something like that when he can work by reversal and pack this into the first two years, knowing full well that you’re going to take losses?
In places like Texas, we have some very questionable results which look to many like voter fraud. Yet, at the same time, Trump doesn’t need to make those types of statements himself. He can let various social media influencers and pundits make the case for him and market that towards a whole demographic of likely Trump voters and historical supporters who are, with some justice, concerned with election integrity.
Thus, it’s better to get your agenda done through a series of reversals while working at the same time to make sure that Netanyahu in Israel winds up removed and voted out, which just happened. Netanyahu was using the IDF and an ongoing conflict with Iran as a means of pushing back against Trump’s 20 Point Plan, which in fact lays the foundation for a Palestinian state explicitly, and became a UN Security Council resolution. Netanyahu’s aim was staying in power, and avoiding his own legal woes, pushing court dates back indefinitely. As we write, Gadi Eisenkot has been given the mandate from Israeli President Isaac Herzog to form a government with the Arab List, which is amazing and historic. And while critics say this could be unstable, and it may well be, it is the beginning of the end of the Likud stranglehold on politics.
So we can see that what happened in the US is like chemotherapy: it killed a lot of healthy cells and bad cells at the same time. But the cells that the body, a healthier body, will regenerate will be free, or at least freer, of that AIPAC cancer. Once we think along these lines and study Trump’s long term modus operandi, we have a better grasp of what just went down. Every time Trump got in front of cameras and talked crazy about Iran, he could see the negative downstream effect in real time on Senate Republicans’ poll numbers, the same ones so controlled by Netanyahu that he could not even defeat impeachment efforts in his first term without the Israeli leader visiting and effectively being the real Senate majority leader.
A stolen election?
Combining the sentiment of being wronged, that the Democrats took something they didn’t legitimately earn, especially given questionable results in places like Texas, lays another layer of foundation for Trump’s next two years. Having someone like James Talarico come in, who makes clear pedophile-adjacent gestures, will absolutely trigger the culture warrior MAGA base into action. This period provides the optimal machine-building window to bridge toward Vance’s consistent, long-standing message. Because Vance has carried the core MAGA banner the last several years, it protects him from any negative recency effects in mass psychology, ensuring a seamless ideological continuation rather than a forced distance from the second-term administration. This way, whether or not Trump returns to core MAGA policies, Vance can run on them.
On the geopolitical front, Russia has no interest in a ceasefire that merely freezes the conflict to allow Ukraine to rearm, nor will they accept NATO or European army personnel stationed inside Ukraine. This dynamic actually serves Trump’s domestic leverage: any congressional push to fund Ukraine allows Trump to trade that consent for vital domestic concessions. It will outwardly appear that the Democrats are driving the war funding, which is true, but in exchange, Trump extracts high-value assets in other arenas. Furthermore, open U.S. funding reduces Russia’s amicability toward peace talks and lifts their messaging burden regarding negotiations. Yet, because the Ukraine funds will originate from the Democrats, it maintains the window over the next two years for fruitful dialogue and direct channels between the Trump administration, the Putin administration, and their respective foreign ministries.
This is how Trump rides the tiger. He doesn’t fight against the deep state or electoral inevitabilities head on; he makes fool proof strategies that take these as givens in ways that ultimately subvert them.
Trump employs a strategy of reverse leverage and political judo, intentionally absorbing mid-term losses and media attacks to trap the neoconservative and AIPAC-aligned establishment into self-sabotage. By outsourcing domestic politics and weaponizing predictable opposition reactions, he advances crucial geopolitical realignments, including the fracturing of Likud hegemony in Israel and the management of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This calculated multi-year maneuvering ultimately lays the groundwork for a cleaner state apparatus and a seamless ideological continuation under Vance.
Follow Joaquin on Telegram @NewResistance or on X/Twitter @XoaquinFlores
