Triage 2025: Winning the Wrong War
How Trump Became the Perfect Weapon for the Wrong Victory
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
There is a mistake we are being conditioned to make.
It is the mistake of preparing for the wrong battle, celebrating the wrong victory, and fearing the wrong defeat. It is the error of naming a symptom as the disease, of mistaking the visible menace for the architect behind it. And it is not merely a tactical error—it is the kind of mistake that has ended republics before.
If you believe that Trump and MAGA are your enemy, then when you defeat them, you will run—gratefully and blindly—into the arms of the enemy who created them. And you will surrender without even knowing it.
This is a triage report. A new one. A refinement drawn from what we now know, what we failed to see in time, and what has become undeniable. Not all that is broken can be repaired, but strategic clarity remains possible. And necessary.
The Club and the Hand That Swings It
Trump is not the threat. He never was.
He is a club—not a blade, not a bomb, not a mind. A crude, bludgeoning instrument. He was chosen not for genius but for spectacle, not for discipline but for disruption. He is loud, aimless, and entirely disposable.
The fascination with Trump, the endless parsing of his statements, the performative horror at his conduct—these are distractions. A club does not swing itself. It is wielded.
That is what matters. And that is what most Americans, left and right alike, are still not prepared to face.
When this club breaks—as it inevitably will—another will be lifted. Perhaps sleeker. Perhaps more charming. Perhaps one that calls for healing and unity, even as the same architects quietly draft the next phase of control.
What makes Trump indispensable to the architects behind him is not just his destructiveness—but the precision with which he draws people into his orbit. His marketing instincts are unmatched: he identifies insecurities, packages them as personal grievances, and sells them back as loyalty. For those engineering this crisis, he is a perfect decoy—someone who can mobilize millions, destabilize institutions, and yet reliably fail at consolidating power in ways that would threaten the long-term dominance of the ultra-wealthy. In effect, Trump is safe: too chaotic to succeed, too valuable to discard. Though the oligarchy must always beware—the same populist fires they stoke for control can consume them if he ever slips their leash.
Who Built the Club
Trump was not summoned from a void. He was constructed—assembled from grievance, ignorance, and design.
The architects were not the angry base. The architects are those who needed that base mobilized. Those who benefited most from chaos. Those who wanted to break the safeguards of the system, but lacked the plausible crisis to do so.
These are the donors, the policy shops, the legal engineers:
Heritage Foundation and ALEC, scripting policy decades in advance
Federalist Society, manufacturing a judicial supermajority
Tech barons, who tolerate Trump as long as he disrupts the old constraints
Oil interests and libertarian billionaires, quietly laundering fascism as populism
This class has no allegiance to Trump. He is useful, nothing more. When he falls, they will mourn in public and pivot in private. Because they have already built the next tool.
The mistake will be thinking they’ve been defeated.
The Two Lefts: Rage and Faith
The American left is fractured—not ideologically, but psychologically.
One faction is caught in the rage machine. The firehose of crisis has become a stimulant, mirroring what we watched evolve on the right over the last decade. That machine was designed not only to enrage but to disable. It reduced cognitive capacity, narrowed attention, and conditioned millions to react rather than reflect. Fear and anger were not incidental—they were the operating system. Now, on the left, a similar mechanism has taken root. Headlines replace strategy. Emotional reflex substitutes for long-view planning. The goal is no longer to understand, but to respond—immediately, loudly, and endlessly. It is a system calibrated to overstimulate, to keep the mind from organizing, and to prevent rational thought at any cost.
The other faction remains devout. They believe elected Democrats will act. That norms will hold. That the Constitution, as written, is still binding on those who seek to destroy it.
For the last 50 years, the influence of We the People has been slowly and systematically undermined. At this point, it effectively no longer exists. What remains is the illusion of democracy, the illusion of order, and the comforting belief that on a long enough timeline, rationality will prevail. But this belief is not benign—it is dependency. It conditions citizens to look to leaders as saviors, not servants. It convinces them that the system is still responsive, even as that system installs those who serve not the people, but the architects of wealth and control. We no longer elect representatives—we elect facilitators of oligarchic will, hired by us to help the rich.
Both are wrong in different ways.
Rage without strategy burns out with emotional and intellectual exhaustion. It mimics the very mechanism used to condition the right—overstimulation, constant crisis, and manufactured fear designed to paralyze strategic thinking. What we see now is the deployment of that same tactic on a different audience. It corrodes clarity and replaces deliberate action with compulsive reaction.
And faith without scrutiny invites betrayal. It invites trust in institutions that have already abdicated their duty, and in leaders who answer to donors, not to the public. That betrayal is not theoretical—we see it plainly, if we bother to look.
Neither is equipped for a war that has already begun—a war declared not with weapons but with courts, media, and law.
The Cold War We Pretend Isn’t Real
The opposition has declared war. Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. Systematically, the opposition has declared its objectives and projected its intent onto the left. They have named their tactics and justified them preemptively. So we will use their own words:
Lawfare is being used to disqualify, disrupt, and disable opponents
Voter suppression is being normalized as electoral reform
State-level coups are being trialed in plain sight
Propaganda flows through social media like groundwater—invisible, pervasive, toxic
And yet, the broader public response remains confused. There is no clear recognition of the state of siege. No coordinated resistance. Only scattered litigation and reactive messaging.
This is not how republics survive. It is how they dissolve.
“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
The architects of this cold civil war do not want violence. They want submission. Despair. Confusion. They want you to believe that removing Trump from the stage means the play is over.
Much of the liberal media has already begun flying the banner—“Mission Accomplished.” Not in those words, but in tone, in framing, in the sudden shift from alarm to assurance. They say the system is working. They say accountability is coming. They offer closure not through victory, but through sedation. But this is not a new tactic. It is narrative tranquilization. A soft-return protocol. Their job is to ease the newly awakened back into sleep, to frame every prosecution or policy delay as part of a grand, steady plan. But the plan is not ours. It is the soft oligarchy’s—and their media is working not for us, but for the ones waiting in the shadows for our faithful return.
The Desperation Trap
As the crisis deepens, some on the left have begun to entertain darker ideas.
That perhaps the only solution is force. That perhaps democracy must be defended with tactics that mirror those used to undermine it.
This is understandable. But it is also a trap.
The enemy wants the left to become what they already claim it is. They want the optics of chaos. They want justification for escalation. And they want to fracture what remains of civil society in the name of restoring order.
The moment the left begins to adopt authoritarian logic—even in self-defense—the war is already lost.
Relief Is the Next Weapon
When Trump finally falls—whether by indictment, election, or implosion—there will be a wave of national relief. It will feel like exhalation after years of tension.
And that moment is the true danger.
When the scales finally fall from the eyes of those who believed the system would hold, there will be a political stampede. It will not be orderly. It will not be strategic. It will be chaotic, emotional, and dangerous. A mass reversion to instinct, not principle. And unless an alternate path has been prepared, the crowd will rush—not to justice, not to reform—but back into the arms of those who quietly built the crisis from the start. The soft oligarchy is not frightened by this chaos. They are waiting to absorb it. Their goal is not to stop the stampede—it is to direct it into a holding pen of obedience. This moment will be brief. And decisive.
Because in that moment, Americans will embrace the next leader who promises stability. And if that leader is backed by the same donors, the same oligarchs, the same machinery—then nothing has changed. Except the mask.
The victory will be hollow. The surrender will be invisible.
This is the Soft Oligarchy – the architects of both collapse and recovery. They were never threatened by MAGA; they built the conditions that made MAGA possible. And now, they offer themselves as the antidote to the poison they allowed to spread.
"If you believe Trump is the enemy, then when you defeat him, you will surrender to the ones who built him."
Strategic Doctrine: Know the Architect
To reclaim America, we must adopt a new doctrine:
Trump is not the architect. He is the club.
MAGA is not the origin. It is the outcome.
Victory over Trump is not victory over the system that made him possible.
The real battlefield is structural: courts, media, wealth, belief.
The real enemy is the designer of the environment in which Trump thrives.
The Soft Oligarchy is not a fallback to normalcy—it is the machine that normalized decline.
The Fascist Oligarchy is the visible takeover, but it was midwifed by the soft one.
If we forget this, we will celebrate as we are conquered.
If we remember it, we may still have time.
“To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
— Sun Tzu
Let us not win loudly and lose quietly.
Let us see the enemy clearly—not the weapon, but the wielder.
Let that be the first act of real resistance.
📚 Books
"Democracy in Chains" by Nancy MacLean (Wiki)
– Exposes the long-term strategy behind right-wing economic and legal manipulation, including the ideological roots behind the Federalist Society and ALEC."Dark Money" by Jane Mayer (Wiki)
– A foundational exposé of how billionaire donors like the Kochs quietly reshaped American politics through think tanks, media, and policy."The Road to Unfreedom" by Timothy Snyder (Wiki)
– Explores how post-Soviet authoritarian strategies were adopted by oligarchs globally, including in the U.S., and how disinformation reshapes political realities."How Democracies Die" by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Wiki)
– A comparative analysis of how democratic systems falter from within, with many parallels to U.S. decline."The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein (Wiki)
– Details how crises are exploited by economic and political elites to consolidate power, relevant to both Trump and the oligarchy behind him.
📄 Academic Papers / Reports
"Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" by Gilens & Page (2014)
– Concludes that economic elites and organized business interests have substantial influence on U.S. policy, while average citizens have little to none. [Link to PDF]"The Rise of Illiberal Democracy" by Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs, 1997)
– An early warning about countries maintaining democratic appearances while dismantling their core principles.
[Link to PDF]
📰 Longform Articles / Journalism
“The Trump‑Trumpist Divide” by Adam Serwer – The Atlantic
Explores how Trump’s success hinges on emotional resonance rather than coherent governance—and how that division influences his hold over supporters.“We are Nobel laureates, scientists, writers and artists. The threat of fascism is back” – The Guardian
A compelling open letter warning of the resurgence of fascist tendencies in the U.S., and the urgent need for moral clarity.“Is Trump actually a fascist – and why does the answer matter?” by Ben Makuch – The Guardian
An analysis situating Trump within a historical process of authoritarian creep, with input from Yale’s Jason Stanley.