The Putrid Presidency: How Trump is Beating the Expectations Game
Something is rotten in Washington, D.C.
On November 30, 1785, George Washington wrote a letter to James Madison in which he wrote, “We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a National character to support — If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.”
Donald Trump is the first President of the Divided States of America. This ‘division by design’ allows Trump to assume and delegate control of executive authority to the darkest corners of Washington. The result is a Constitutional crisis that his worshippers relish.
The process of beating the expectations game is what I call the “Trump Attention-Cycle of Kooky Yammering” or TACKY. This follows four steps and engages in moral panic governance of the policy process in order to gain attention, block out opposing views, and realign public expectations on an hourly, daily or weekly basis:
- ) Trump: Outrageous comments = Generate Initial Media Coverage;
2.) Attention-Cycle: Shock at the outrageous comments = Amplified Media Coverage;
3.) Kooky: Trump doubles down = One-on-One Interview for Soft Ball Media Coverage
4.) Yammering: Trump talks and talks — at events to command the stage = More Media Coverage Across All Markets
Trump seeks to intimidate U.S. citizens away from opposing him as a way to suppress criticism and maintain power. Attacking friends and allies may seem counter-intuitive, but it is not. Trump’s strategy is to poison the well by creating a hostile environment that disrupts the public’s underlying faith in the system, trust in each other, and the decency of those who dare not pledge allegiance to Donald Trump. This makes political operations easier because this bravado is meant as a deterrent — imagine what Trump would do to an enemy if he would declare war on a friend, like Canada?
This attempt to performatively bully people into not criticizing him seeks to establish a new and higher emotional threshold of consequences that must be crossed in order to oppose Trump. Indeed, this Toxic Trumpian standard also attempts to disqualify any emotions, thoughts, or actions that contemplate disagreements against Trump.
In the spirit of Trump University, Trump steaks, and the red MAGA hat, I offer this analysis of the Trump-Attention-Cycle of Kooky-Yammering or TACKY. This behavior is not as benign as ‘TACKY’ may sound. Indeed, social influencers like moral panic entrepreneurs (Pepin-Neff and Cohen, 2022) attempt to trigger emotional contagions through their discourse or behavior in ways that invalidate the emotional reactions of others related to perceived expectations. In this latest made-for-television presidency, Trump plays a moral entrepreneur who is the rule-maker and rule-enforcer whose support helps to police the social reactions of others in order to restrict the spread of opposing expressions.
Moral panics are political attacks by politicians that are engineered by the motivating principle that older people have insecurities about being old and losing influence with a society they helped to build. This underlying grievance is then leveraged by using acceptable prejudice to shift attention and amplify the social reaction against prejudiced groups or issues in order to advance a political agenda.
TACKY is a Game of Expectations
The curse of low expectations has artificially propped up Trump. Expectations have been misaligned in order to afford repeated opportunities for some to hurt the vulnerable. At stake is more than the idea of “Democracy,” but rather the emotional free will to exercise the right to change one’s opinion.
In 2016, Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” “It’s, like, incredible.” Here, we see that politics is a game of expectations, but it relies on (a) consistent control of attention and (b) predictability in the behavior of high-value constituency groups (Pepin-Neff, 2025). During the 1980 presidential campaign, “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) was first coined by President Reagan as an anthem of great expectations. However, Donald Trump is using five or six moral panics per week to disrupt the expectations of the public and play politics by a different set of rules. In this first month of the second Trump Presidency, we see the targeting of trans and gender-diverse people.
Expectations are the central variable in politics and public policy in the United States and most major democracies. This requires having the attention of enough of the public for long enough to set the expectation AND then also having their attention to declare a result.
Trump is using expectations in a way to trap voters into supporting his authoritarian tendencies. Media outlets cue the public about which social reactions to have, when, and for what purpose, and this builds expectations that are projected onto the policy process, actors, and institutions.
Expectations are contagious social reactions that establish the baseline for seemingly comparative narratives. Indeed, the same television, phone, or laptop that broadcasts fictional problems in under 30-minutes delivers the same news narrative about “real” problems. With limited emotional and cognitive resources, it makes sense that citizens would rely on fictional resources to solve real-life problems. Or that voters would prefer a reality-television personality over the tv-disaster that was President Biden.
There are four ways that former President Donald Trump is being TACKY in order to beat the expectations of the American public:
(1) The Gift of Exceeding Impossibly Low Expectations
Starting with President Obama’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner roast of Trump, the expectations were set low. At the 2011 event, President Obama stated, “Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House” (Schulman, 2011). The video then showed a ‘casino’ version of the White House with a hot tub and neon lighting.
In 2011, there was also a Comedy Central Roast of Donald Trump that was hosted by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. By 2016, Jimmy Fallon was asking Republican candidate Trump if he could do something “unpresidential” and mess up Trump’s hair on The Tonight Show. Fallon did so to harsh reviews. Stephens (2018: 312) conducted elite interviews on this topic and found, “a unifying theme from all the interviewees was that the backlash Fallon faced marked a watershed moment in the politicisation of late-night comedy.”
This cultural environment informed the political expectations when Donald Trump was elected President in 2016, and the Left’s consistent narrative of putting down Trump ultimately lifted him up and allowed Trump to exceed all expectations. Writing for Politico in 2016, Rob Hoffman notes, ‘as Vivek Chibber, a sociologist at New York University, tells me, “The media is responsible not just for hyping Clinton over Sanders, but also for bringing Trump up in a way that only hyped him even more — lampooning and dismissing him instead of taking seriously the way in which he was speaking to disaffected voters.”’
Indeed, the Democratic messaging and media narrative set the bar so low that it provided daily opportunities for Trump, who received saturation coverage, to seem super-human in achieving even the most basic of tasks. The Brookings Institution noted, “Mr. Trump seems to have added an amendment to the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are those with low expectations, for they shall not be disappointed” (Galston, 2018). This continues in 2015.
(2) Creating the Expectation of a Violent Transfer of Power
In March 2024, Trump stated, “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole … that’s gonna be the least of it, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it.”
Today, the Trump-Republican party has set the (successful) precedent of renominating a twice-impeached former president who sought to violently overthrow a duly elected president and who has been indicted on criminal racketeering and conspiracy charges by a grand jury. The stench of this partisan act speaks to the expectations that the Constitution of the United States is not the law of the land, and sits below the Presidency as well as wealthy media moguls.
The public expectation of accountability for free and fair elections is now gone. Without this public expectation, there can be no accountability mechanism, and the use of force and violence are now policy options for the White House around the 2028 election. Indeed, many conspiracy theorists believe that elections are an act of God and that Trump is a divine leader. In January 2024 in Iowa, the Washington Post reported:
Standing outside a commit-to-caucus rally in Clinton, Iowa, recently, Paul Figie, a pastor and a Trump caucus captain, said Trump is “ordained by God.” He pointed to how he has seen Trump as being mistreated by the justice system and Democrats, equating the former president to a martyr. He dismissed the viability of other candidates, saying he was convinced that a higher power would put Trump back in office (Kornfield, 2024).
The New York Times has also reported on comments by Christian Ethics professor David Gunshee, who told the Times that Trump “is sometimes also viewed as an anointed leader sent by God. “Anointed” here means set apart and especially equipped by God for a holy task. Sometimes the most unlikely people got anointed by God in the Bible. So Trump’s unlikeliness for this role is actually evidence in favor” (Edsall, 2024).
By close comparison, “Divine right is the notion that royalty is given divine sanction to rule. In the words of England’s King James I (r. 1603–1625): “The State of MONARCHIE is the supremest thing upon earth: For Kings are not only GOD’S Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon GOD’S throne, but even by GOD himself they are called GODS” (Wills, 2020). Thus, the Right-Wing idea that presidential elections are a function of divine providence takes voting out of the hands of citizens or the Constitution and places the Presidency into the hands of prophets and angels. That is, apparently, unless the election is rigged, and God, therefore, plays no part in manifesting the final resolution.
There is a tactic where if Trump can get in the news every day by being TACKY and attending high-profile events, then he can swamp the public’s attention capacity and close off the amount of time and oxygen they can give to Democrats. And if the perceptions of Democrats are negative, this inhibits their ability to rehabilitate themselves before the mid-term elections on November 3, 2026. Or as Vuori and Huy (2016: 12), note, “By directing attention to the particular target that triggers the emotion, emotion facilitates actions that address that particular target, while also temporarily reducing attention to other matters.”
Trump has claimed that wind-turbines cause cancer and kill whales as part of the TACKY tactic to gain media attention and block the news landscape from Democrats. In 2019, President Trump declared war on windmills. He stated, “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer” (Burke, 2019). In 2023, President Trump followed up, stating “There has only been, listen to this, one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years. But on the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up onshore” (Simpson, 2023).
Indeed, Issakson and Gren (2024: 6) note that this might be a war that Trump can win, because “the findings suggest that the construction of wind turbines has a significant impact on the electoral support for the Social Democrats, leading to a decrease in support, while the effects on the Moderates are less pronounced and vary depending on the specific election year.”
(3) Changing the Expected Delivery of the Presidency
The mode of delivery of the presidency is different for President Trump. Social media such as X or Truth Social falls within a system of attention where statements, photographs, and videos are curated and communicated to the public and political institutions in a simultaneous manner of attention. For instance, Bach (2017) highlights confusion regarding former President Trump's tweet banning transgender military service. Bach (2017) notes, “President Donald Trump used Twitter to announce a major policy change yesterday. But before he completed a series of his tweets that would support banning transgender people from the U.S. military, several individuals in the Pentagon reportedly feared that Trump had a different target in mind: Pyongyang.” This changes the tempo that the public has come to expect from Presidents and the policy process.
These deviations in expectations and the performance of the presidency on the part of the President offer a seemingly euphoric authenticity and “straight talk” when the public is actually receiving a more deceitful version of the presidency. This builds a relationship between individuals and the president that is more attuned to the pace of social media relationships, laissez faire strategy that offers conspiracy wrapped in immediate gratification. This could also be seen in the attention to expectations that were clearly outlined in the Steve Bannon whiteboard incident in 2017 — and repeated in the publication of Project 2025.
Biden’s 2021 return to the traditional presidential velocity and deliberative decision-making was perceived as older, slower, and more out of touch with the feelings of the public. The Biden White House’s slow pace and more predictable communications strategy allowed broader pictures of Biden’s age to seem more political and less authentic in contrast to the previous simultaneous delivery of information. This, in conjunction with higher expectations for Biden, allowed Trump to seemingly surpass much lower expectations, which were reinforced in the 2024 campaign even after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee.
In public policy, it is important to ask if the norm still satisfies the public or if the violation of the norm provides the actual satisfaction. Democrats will not regain a political footing if they do not accept that Trump is violating some norms that the public may not have been satisfied with.
Politics as a form of entertainment (see Trump 2015–present) is a dilemma where systems of information, education, entertainment, and attention collide to broadcast social reactions that have been orchestrated in order to attract clicks and spread the hysterical contagion. The way social media has shifted attention to expectations and led to social reactions that innoculate Trump and his operatives from political penalties is a process that has been mastered.
(4) Forcing Supporters to Betray the Expectations of Themselves
Expectations are judgments that include the way we judge ourselves. Traditionally, people update their expectations in the face of new information. However, this is not always the case because there are times when there is an advantage to the individual to deny counter-affirming information. In this way, avoiding disconfirming truths for realities that fail to meet our expectations is not simply about denying reality but about preserving perceptions about ourselves. For voters to admit that Trump is a bad person or a bad President requires them to acknowledge and admit that they themselves have made a mistake or misjudgement and call into question their identity. The distress that is created by embracing information that invalidates their previous opinions, perceptions, and votes sets up a high threshold before they will cancel themselves — which gives the Trump Presidency (2.0) more time than Democrats have calculated. The Trump White House is using this grace period to overwhelm the political process and deny opponents the opportunity to gain traction.
This expectation architecture is at the heart of President Trump’s MAGA movement. In his 2016 speech outlining the “American First” foreign policy, he stated, “America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy. One day, we’re bombing Libya and getting rid of a dictator to foster democracy for civilians. The next day, we’re watching the same civilians suffer while that country falls and absolutely falls apart. Lives lost, massive monies lost. The world is a different place” (Trump 2016).
In all, TACKY works.
In the first Trump presidency, the public was not explicitly supportive of the Trump policies — rather they were (and many continue to be) enthusiastic regarding the performative repertoire and process with which he delivers politics more broadly and the American Presidency more specifically. The embrace of a behavioralist interpretation of politics necessarily relies on links to populism, which my colleague Ben Moffitt notes consists of dividing people “between people and the elite,” displaying bad manners “that act in ways we would not expect,” and they scare monger (Moffitt, 2019). Much of the analysis of Trump’s second 100 days has focused on the importance of stealing back media attention, but this risks missing the need to dramatically adjust the public’s weak expectations for Trump. Much like being sold rotten meat or fish and being told it is still edible, MAGA is rotten to the core and has produced America’s first putrid presidency.
Chris Pepin-Neff, PhD (they/them) is a former lobbyist, senate aide, and university academic. The views and opinions expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of my employer.
