Too fail to bigly. Trump threatens SCOTUS with a suicide pact no different than his defense of narcissistic supply with the 2026 election ushering in the Third Impeachment.
Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski This is the same playbook Trump used with banks & other investors for decades. Get them so deep into your mess that they end up even worse if they allow you to fail. So he argues they have to stick with him or everything will fall apart and be a disaster. Too leveraged to fail.
Trump wants to take the economy with him, because “his” Fed Chair humiliated him when Trump used imagined malfeasance in Fed Building renovations to pressure him to change interest rates to bail Trump out of screwing the economy. It failed, but Trump continues with nuisance prosecution.
Another misdirection will happen with a useless act of fealty/submission.
Can this Axios chart of 2025 news cycles be used to map Trump's 2026 recycled gaslighting choices
Searches are just that, whether as aggregates they form news cycles remains to be seen, especially with fragmenting news audiences and their ideologies.
For example Trump’s yammering about Fed Chair Jerome Powell, while meaningless in terms of the end of his tenure, is coincident with a rise in searches related to the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga as well as the cycles of tariff nonsense. Like mentioning autopen and Greenland are not about policy.
However, one could chart from past performance, how Trump seizes on topics to “flood the zone” of disinformation gaslight to offset an unwanted reaction to his incompetence. Similarly the attacks on Jimmy Kimmel offset the pseudo-beatification of Charlie Kirk.
While correlation is not causality, the hybridity of Trump’s banal messaging is less cyclic than reactionary when one starts looking at weekly cycles of Trump’s short-attention-span theater. OTOH 6-7 and an AI Bubble have little in common compared to using tariffs to offset Gaza information seeking, so predicting Trump messaging does have an element of recycling memes and tropes, however arbitrary.
Axios' annual analysis of Google Trends data.
Why it matters: Political violence, economic nerves and mass tragedies gripped the country in a dizzying year for both domestic and international news.
Zoom in: The assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA co-founder, garnered the most search interest in Axios' analysis of the biggest stories of the year.
- His murder — which followed a string of political violence both this year and in 2024 — sparked calls for softened political rhetoric for some and prompted finger-pointing from the president and others.
- It also opened a new chapter — and exposed new fractures — in the MAGA media landscape.
The big picture: Trump has tested the bounds of executive power in unprecedented ways throughout the year.
- Americans were particularly interested in his sweeping tariff agenda, with searches soaring through the winter and spring and smaller spikes throughout the year.
Even though the president has the world's loudest microphone, anti-Trump protests repeatedly broke through the news cycle.
- Search interest for "No Kings," a network of anti-Trump rallies that drew massive crowds, peaked in April and October.
Between the lines: Many of the year's most gripping and high-profile tragedies triggered immediate search interest.
- A trio of tragic events — shootings at Brown University and Sydney's Bondi Beach, and the killing of Rob Reiner — struck in December. Only the Brown shooting was captured in the Google Trends data, which ended Dec. 14.
What we're watching: Searches for inflation were a steady drumbeat throughout the year — a likely indication of interest ahead of next year's midterms.
- A message emphasizing affordability — driven by New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — boosted Democratic comebacks across the country this year, even in GOP strongholds.
www.axios.com/...
Used after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia in 1942 to justify mass killings and destruction in Lidice
