Trump: the stochastic president?

A first look at Michael Wolff’s account of Trump’s actions on 6 January

The historian Timothy Mason once described the Nazi regime as “politics without administration”. For Hitler’s inner circle, he wrote, the traits of systemisation, regularity, and calculability in government were seen as limiting their ability to wield power.

The regime “characteristically produced both non-policies or evasions… or sudden and drastic decisions in the government machine”. By the end, the Third Reich disintegrated into an aggregation of unco-ordinated task forces and political responsibility became “increasingly blurred”. (1)

Reading Michael Wolff’s account of Trump’s role in the insurrection of 6 January 2021, published yesterday by New York Magazine, we are immediately plunged back into the historians’ war over “function versus intention”, only now with an incontinent man-baby as the Führer, and a gaggle of incels and Shamanists as the stormtroopers.

Wolff specialises in a curious form of insider journalism. He spills the beans about detail but more significant beans seem to be with-held. Given a ringside seat…