It was inevitable that the word would eventually creep outward from Silicon Valley. Recently, it has found a home in online media, where pivoting is now seriously in vogue. Following the cue of Mashable, Vocativ and other digital outlets, Cory Haik, the publisher of Mic, announced her company’s pivot in August. Haik acknowledged that Mic was acting out ‘‘the much-lamented and much-snarked-about . . . ‘pivot to video.’ ’’ For the uninitiated, this entails essentially dumping your editorial staff in favor of cheaply produced, shareable videos favored by advertisers and newsfeed algorithms. This is precisely what Mic did — the company laid off 25 editors and writers — but Haik claimed that this time was different, that this move was part of a greater transformation, namely ‘‘the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism.’’ Mic wasn’t just pivoting to survive, according to its publisher; it was doing so because it saw great opportunity — and ad dollars — in another medium. Or at least, these are the promises peddled to worried shareholders and disaffected media critics.

The pivot may be a tech-age phenomenon, but it has an antecedent in another rhetorical maneuver favored by Beltway types: ‘‘evolving’’ on an issue. Once poli­ticians would emptily pretend to have thought about an issue and ‘‘evolved’’ toward a new position, even as it was obvious to all observers that the move was strategic. (Barack Obama’s evolution on gay marriage is the ne plus ultra here.) Now politicians are freer to be openly cynical; like the business pivot, the political pivot is a product of expediency and pragmatism, rather than of some shift in deeply held ideals. The political pivot is more obviously compromised, focus-grouped, more of a performance about changing ‘‘optics’’ or a media narrative.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, a man who many commentators believe to be constitutionally incapable of pivoting. Indeed, it does now seem very unlikely that some urgent event could foment a shift to a more mature, presidential attitude on the part of our splenetic, unpredictable commander in chief. At age 71, Trump has proved himself incapable of change, at least in the eyes of most credible observers. ‘‘He didn’t pivot; he merely pirouetted, and then he dug into the same political ground he has already claimed,’’ John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker after Trump’s relatively sober Feb. 28 speech to Congress — a description that could be applied to all of Trump’s flirtations with polite behavior. Members of the never-Trump right also gave up on the pivot idea long ago: ‘‘We are in the last days of the ‘He can pivot!’ fantasy,’’ Jonah Goldberg wrote last year in National Review.

But the truth is that Trump is pivoting constantly. Or perhaps more accurately, the man is so erratic that he has no baseline of behavior against which to pivot. For instance, Trump seemed to change his mind last month on the war in Afghanistan, adopting a very Obama-like policy of deploying more troops into the country. While he once presented himself as against nation-building, Trump as commander in chief has proved amenable to any number of military adventures placed in front of him. That he now approves of the extension of the 16-year war in Afghanistan can be explained by his taste for violence and his deep attention to how he is treated by the media, who have mostly lauded the move. If pivoting is a media phenomenon as much as any kind of grand strategy, then Trump owes credit to a credulous press that tends to grant the mantle of maturity to any president who decides to bomb another nation.

A cynical gesture for a cynical age, pivoting is designed for a public sphere where bad faith is a given and attention, of any kind, is the ultimate commodity. Trump knows how to profit from the attention economy, but he is not playing the multidimensional chess with which his enemies (and allies) occasionally credit him. Instead, he seems to be a creature of pure id, making impulsive, superficial decisions based on what he sees around himself. Trump sometimes changes his mind, but he rarely manages to act in any strategic sense. The mistake the media sometimes make is crediting Trump with strategic brilliance when he’s capable of nothing of the sort. But it can seem as if Trump’s behavior is so venal, so beyond pale and precedent, that it must reflect some kind of plan. Who would act this way otherwise?