Trump’s Bottomless Nihilism Is Eating Our Future

With the breakdown of negotiations in Islamabad, last week’s “TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) Tuesday” left less of an impression than the smell of a gas station toilet.

I envy the confidence of those who publicly broadcast their faith in the TACO maxim before Donald Trump gave in to threats of war crimes against Iran. The ability to have no doubt that Trump will always, inevitably, back down from his most unbalanced threats probably leads to a more peaceful sleep than mine. Trump follows through on his horrible ultimatums. It doesn’t always deflate. Look at the customs duties, imposed imperfectly but still crushing. Ask people in the Twin Cities. Or, for that matter, Iran.

Whether the predictions that Trump will inevitably fold are sincere or not, confidence is always more effective than nuance. What I have to tell you is this: The one constant in Trump’s decision-making, whether he follows through on his latest crazy idea or backs down — either as a result of real-world blowback or because of a sudden loss of interest — is his enormous capacity for illusion. Whoever predicts his action correctly is the one who spoke to him the earliest before the decision was announced.

Trump’s real line of decision is unfortunately not essential cowardice. This is transactional nihilism. The transactional nature is well documented, almost hilarious and obvious. He views every interaction as a means to an end. The changing nature of these endings is now apparent. They are gaseous, consistent with the container of his last conversation.

Observe Polymarket’s Recent Trades: The Most Successful Bets on Iran’s Trump Overthrow Last Week just a few hours before he announced that he had returned from the abyss.

One user, who created his account seven hours before Trump’s post on Truth Social about the ceasefire, won $200,000. Suspicious well-timed bets aren’t limited to predicting if and when Trump will chicken out, either. Last month, The New York Times reported that hundreds of “eleventh hour” bettors placed hundreds of thousands of bets Friday that Trump would bomb Iran on Saturday. (Last week, White House staffers received an email warning them not to participate in prediction markets related to domestic politics since, as one official said said The Wall Street Journal“Congress and other government officials should be prohibited from using nonpublic information for financial gain. » Presumably this does not apply to the Trump children, who are investors in Polymarket itself.)

Trump doesn’t necessarily want to control the flow of oil or strategic shipping straits, achieve peace, or get credit for forcing regime change. He wants all of these things, or none! Maybe he wants something else secret: a Big Mac, a blowjob, his father’s love.

Above all, because his own desires are unanchored, he cannot conceive of others having wants and needs that cannot be processed, negotiated, shifted entirely. All offers and threats are conditional. It’s all just an opening offer. This is how he can promise the destruction of civilization and believe that going back should still result in good faith negotiations.

I suspect he views the bombings themselves as no more consequential than a rejected settlement in a lawsuit – as long as he dangles the promise of helping rebuild (that’s the second, more generous offer), how can the victims blame him? He expected to discuss the presence of ICE goons (while holding government funds hostage) with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. He promises to “redevelop” devastated Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” as if the problem lay in the lack of topless beaches and casinos, not food and clean water.

This is not the art of negotiation. Transactional nihilism is existentially unstable. Some opening moves cannot be undone. He seems to sincerely believe that his total destruction of the economy is only a temporary downturn and that Americans will be cured once all the numbers come back up. He clearly has a fantasy about tariffs leading to the magical reinvention of American manufacturing and the dissolution of the income tax. But there is no quick fix to the way he has casually reshaped both the household economy and large-scale institutions.

It will take generations to rebuild America’s academic and research infrastructure, if it returns. A recent investigation by the academic journal Nature found that 75 percent of U.S.-based career scientists are considering leaving the country, most commonly for Europe or Canada. Among postdoctoral students, it’s almost 80 percent. Then there are the researchers who don’t even arrive on these shores to begin building our future: New international student registrations in the The United States fell by 17% in 2025the largest annual decline in history. (An analysis by the National Association of International Educators suggests that this drop resulted in a loss of $1.1 billion in contributions to the U.S. economy and the elimination of 23,000 related jobs.)

The fears it has sparked about the future among ordinary Americans, the real-time physical terror it has instilled in immigrants and gays: these insecurities will undermine what most Americans think about the strength of their democracy. And to function, democracy needs the conviction that it has a chance of lasting.

Voter disengagement and distrust of domestic institutions propelled Trump to the White House; now he continues to sabotage them from the inside. Ironically, the left’s best chance of ousting him is to present this distrust of government as a reaction to his abandonment.

All of Trump’s deals and offers have meaning and impact. His blindness on this subject explains why he was not a successful real estate developer. His transactionalism is not the great tactic of which he believes he has exclusive ownership. I was once involved in a real estate transaction where the opening offer was so low that it derailed the entire relationship. This led to more use of lawyers, delays, a longer process and a lose-lose agreement for all parties when an honest and fair starting point could have been a win-win. The insult resonated so much that everyone wanted revenge. My counterpart’s transactional nihilism didn’t even serve his own purposes. For my international relations fans, does this sound familiar?

This complete inability to imagine that threats and promises have any meaning beyond themselves is probably what gives the appearance of cruelty – but cruelty implies a goal; The “madman theory” always requires a rational goal to be worth maniacally pursuing. Trump’s free identity is monstrous, chaotic, morally empty, inherently independent of any purpose beyond the ego boost he receives from using power. A handful of elites have found a way to use Trump’s vile outbursts to get rich or die trying. Sadly, most of us won’t have this first option. He may not be crazy, but he is beyond reason.