OCTOBER 21, 2025 – When it comes to “big news,” we live in a world that’s skewed more than ever toward the transactional as opposed to the strategic. This phenomenon is driven largely by the most prominent personality in our collective long-running (ironically) short-term attention span, the current president of the United States. Everything about this individual—his upbringing, his disposition (learned and inherited), his obsession with celebrity, his shallow intellect, and his modus vivendi and modus operandi—is, has been, and always will be . . . transactional. There’s not a cell in his body containing DNA bearing the marker, “strategic.”[1]
Since January 20, the Chief of Transactional Governance has showered us with a hail of birdshot—make that “machine gun fire”—of inelegant word bursts and disruptive actions on a scale beyond the imagination of any of his predecessors. From a 100,000-foot-high view, We the People—libs and righties and everyone in between—have been consigned to the Disunited States of Scurry. Just like the crowd in front of a crazed machine-gunner firing from the open back of a covered troop carrier, we don’t know where the erratic sweep of the gun barrel will mow down more victims. Libs are horrified; righties still believe the bullets are marshmallows; undecideds are . . . who can be undecided?
Under such circumstances, the opposition has turned to paradoxically transactional strategies: (a) litigation that despite initial success in the form of TROs, (temporary restraining orders) soon becomes mired in appellate procedure, and ultimately lands in the hands of SCOTUS, controlled by the righties; (b) regular sniper shots by a handful of Democratic elected officials, all on target but deflected by Teflon supplied by a complex of dark forces, ransomed institutions, and compromised media; (c) soap box memes echoing harmlessly across the social media landscape; and (d) 7 million people on the third Saturday afternoon in nine months waving birdshot signs against the torrent of machine gun fire.[2]
Playing out behind the machine-gunner are the long-in-the-works grand strategies of the Tech-Bros, the billionaire class, the Heritage Foundation (and ilk), and the Christian version of the Taliban. Collectively, these “special interest groups” are supplying the Gunner-in-Chief with the ammunition to carry on his pitiless campaign against Us the People. Their game is to fold Trump’s transactional chaos into their darkly transformative strategy: turning America into a theocracy of Christian Nationalism and exclusive playground of the über-rich. With Vance and Johnson already in place, those same “special interest groups” will remain in control when the Gunner-in-Chief succumbs to the inevitable ravages of age and time.
To alter our current course, the scurrying crowd needs a viable counter-strategy. But that imperative requires strategic thinking . . . which is a mighty tall order amidst our mad dash, clash and chaos in the random shower of transactional machine gun fire, backed by strategically managed ammunition.
As my favorite anti-Trump protest sign (appearing at a demonstration in downtown Minneapolis in October 2018) said, “WHERE DO I START?” The question is ever more critical today than it was then.
As I emerge from the Zen of my “Pergola-on-a-Platform” project in the high woods of northwest Wisconsin, I have some “strategic thoughts” about all this, which, for strategic reasons, I shall impart in strategic due course as opposed to now in the (transactional) moment. Stay tuned . . . and, as I am wont to add when using this musical metaphor . . . in tune.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] As a former diplomat-turned-pundit-on-cable-news (sorry; I didn’t catch his name) observed recently about Trump’s role in the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire, “All that Trump seeks is a glittering photo op and the Nobel Peace Prize. He has no interest in the hard work of what needs to follow. He’s strictly a transactional thinker.”
[2] Don’t get me wrong, until something better unfolds, and even if it does, I fully support these methods of opposition, especially “(d).” The world needs to see that many millions of Americans have not lost their voices or courage.
