In the current exercise, political watchers declare that Trump’s genius was there for all to see, provided they were not blinded by a good education, concern for policy or affection for decency. Every outrageous comment, every ridiculous assertion, every erratic debate performance, you see, was part of a grand design to confuse the media and maximize Trump’s advantages. Perhaps.

Trump’s followers surely cannot imagine that his victory was attributable to anything other than his brilliance (and certainly not to Russian interference, James Comey or dumb luck). But the thinness of the margin of his electoral victory, his rather substantial popular-vote loss and his opponent’s errors suggest that victory was less the result of brilliant design and more a function of irrational, unpredictable behavior than his followers would ever let on.

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Evidence that Trump succeeded tells us little about Trump’s mental processes and intentions. That he expected to lose on Election Day (and never set out believing he could win) should give us pause before we create a retroactive explanation that rests on the proposition that Trump possesses near-mystical powers of analysis. Attributing intentionality and inevitability to past events is a common human foible (the technical term being “hindsight bias”). We would like to imagine events are less random, less predictable than they are — even at the price of indicting ourselves for “missing” obvious clues.

Going forward the tendency is the same: Create elaborate explanations for Trump’s actions, inferring design where there is actually chaos and ignorance. The flawed analysis is aided and abetted by the Trump team’s insistence on doubling down, declaring gaffes and missteps to be not gaffes and missteps but, once again, Trump’s brilliance in action. That’s how we have come to conclude that his calls with foreign leaders are reflection of grand policy shifts (e.g. dumping or refining the “one China” position), not jaw-dropping ignorance and lack of preparation. Reasoning backward from Trump’s actions becomes a faulty exercise because retroactive explanations for one set of events clash with explanations for others. In point of fact, we don’t know whether Trump is “adopting” Richard Nixon’s madman theory (wherein a cunning strategist masquerades as a lunatic) or is confirming once more that he is wholly ignorant about the world and lacks impulse control. (When he says he doesn’t want to reveal his plans — for defeating the Islamic State as an example — it is just as likely that he has no plan at all.)

In sum, Trump’s behavior may be rational, his outbursts may be planned and his penchant for telling different staffers and different congressional emissaries different things may be part of a grand psychological operation to disable opponents. But we cannot rule out the possibility that this is mostly vamping, followed by ex post facto justifications for his behavior. Anyone who takes his words “literally” (Whatever you say, Paul [Ryan]. Sounds great!) may be in for a shock when he later turns around to do something else entirely. Trump is “transactional” to the point where each conversation may be a free-standing event, meant to ingratiate oneself with — or intimidate — rivals but having no substantive meaning.

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