Donald Trump is Antifragile

When Trump was unexpectedly elected for the first time as president of the United States in 2016, one of the most respected people among the American left, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, wrote in the New York Times that, as the election showed, we “truly didn’t understand the country we live in.” By the way, that article of his was published under the title “Our Unknown Country.”

Already back then, Moscow and Beijing had their ears perked up, reasoning something to this extent: “If you admit you don’t understand the country you live in, particularly concerning your most important national issue, how can you claim to understand countries that are vastly different in language, culture, history, and even want to dictate to us how we should organize our lives economically and politically?”

Almost a decade later, the same plot repeated itself, proving that history teaches little, and when it repeats itself, it becomes a farce. In 2024, Trump got re-elected, causing the same surprise and misunderstanding again, but with the added “bonus” of past years when his re-election was obstructed in a thousand different ways. The American ruling class not only failed to prevent a new Trump victory, but until the very end considered it impossible.

First of all, American progressives poorly understand each other, even with the help of the most typically American social science, namely opinion polls. One of sociology’s most respected practitioners, Nate Silver, gave Trump only a 28.6 percent chance of becoming president in 2016 and repeated his blunder again in 2024: he gave the win to Kamala Harris. Also, in some key states, the predictions of “prediction queen” Ann Selzer were wrong by as much as twelve percentage points. Allan Lichtman, often called the Nostradamus of predictions, was wrong by millions of votes. Although the errors in the forecasts were fractions of a percent, they actually mean millions and millions of people. Among other things, it seems that this method is fundamentally flawed: unlike in the past, when people mostly responded to surveys, we now have predictions based on the responses of about 2% of people contacted by a representative of public opinion research centers. This contradicts both common sense and the statistical methodology developed in his time by T. Bayes: how can one seriously expect that these 2% will accurately express the opinion of 98% of voters who did not happen to participate in the polls?

The phony polls are consistent with the phony belief that four years of judicial, media, and political bombardment have sunk Donald “armadillo” Trump who has instead emerged even stronger than before.

As Nassim Taleb’s famous book puts it, Trump has shown himself to be “antifragile”: he has characteristics radically different from both the concept of “fragile” (easily destroyed) and “robust” (withstanding devastating blows). “Antifragile” feeds on blows and shocks to become even stronger. Something “resilient” resists impact and remains unchanged, but “antifragile” only gets better under impact. Taleb writes about this in a very timely manner, but credit has to be given to the fact that the theoretical thought on this issue was expressed in his time by Nietzsche: what does not kill me makes me stronger. Likewise with Trump – not killed, but rather, strengthened.

In addition to physical death, they tasted civilian death. Prominent Republicans – supposedly Trump associates like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley, Fiona Hill, John Bolton and Paul Ryan – have said terrible things about him. In September, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig published “Lucky Loser,” a book in which they attempted to destroy Trump’s image in its most American aspect: by criticizing his abilities as a financier and entrepreneur. The movie “The Apprentice” stabbed Trump in one of the sorest spots in his entire public history. Trump’s private life wasn’t overlooked either: he was indicted on 34 counts for payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

All of this was meant to destroy Trump not only as an entrepreneur, showman and socialite star. Even speaking of history, he failed the exam. As told not by some Democratic opponent but by his own former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, Trump would like to have “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” who, in Trump’s view, “still did some good.” Worse yet, Mark Milley, his former Chief of Staff, quoted in Bob Woodward’s book “War,” allegedly called Trump a “total fascist.” This smear has no shortage of corroboration: as The Atlantic wrote, Trump is said to have actually openly admitted to his dream: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

In short, among his compatriots, Trump has failed to acquire a team of smart and gifted staffers. It is fair to say that abroad, things are even worse – just remember the British Labour Party, which was condemned in the United States for “shameless foreign interference” in the preparation for the US elections no less than for supporting the Harris-Waltz campaign.

But it was like water off a duck’s back for Trump: accompanied by Elon Musk, a kind of “Napoleonic genius” (according to Niall Ferguson), Trump made a triumphant march and won an election that became a turning point in the centuries-long history of democracy. Trump’s victory was a kind of “cognitive hurricane” for many, intellectually and morally. But what awaits them in the future will be even worse for them, given their already poor ability to navigate. After all, the future holds not only Trump-inspired economics and Trump-inspired wars, but even Trump-inspired justice and Trump-inspired medicine. Once the festivities were over, new Vice President J.D. Vance made it clear that the US Attorney General is the second most important position in the country, so it was appropriate to give the former Biden administration, including the family and other relatives, a judicial check. America’s political body is facing emergency surgery, but the social body is in for a rough ride, too: at the head of the Department of Health we are very likely to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the same man who said things about vaccines and Big Pharma (as well as Ukraine, the CIA, etc.), for which many politicians in Europe would have gotten, figuratively speaking, “a bullet in the forehead.”

Having gained control of the Constitutional Court, Congress, and the Senate, the Trump team looms on the horizon like a storm cloud that dropped forty liters of rain per square meter of land in the recent fateful two hours in Letur, Spain, in the far south of the province of Castilla la Mancha. We see an avalanche of water, stones, earth, mud, uprooted trees approaching from afar, which will fall on us, and we wonder whether the windows of not only the first, second, but even the third floors will withstand this pressure, whether this flood will engulf everything, including cars, trucks, and those who are trying to flee. We don’t know whether it is better to stay put or flee to avoid being “trapped like rats” between collapsed bridges, flooded roads, piles of mangled metal, and collapsed roofs of houses.

We curse the meteorologists, but whether it’s a hurricane, a storm, a tornado, a tsunami, that future cataclysm would still not be sudden, unexpected, impossible. As Daniel Bell first explained, the technological foundations of today’s Western way of life – automobiles and internal combustion engines, electricity, chemical synthesis techniques, telecommunications – were scientifically perfected between the late 19th century and the 1930s, from automobiles to television. Then came the consumer society and its pervasive globalization, which continues to this day. For about a hundred years, we have been in a certain technological and business environment that is already outdated and very different from the one that generative artificial intelligence will create. Potentially things will change, but we don’t yet know exactly how. We also don’t know if it will happen gradually or suddenly. We can only hope that Elon Musk doesn’t overdose on one of his Napoleonic triumphal processions.