Trump caught up with his gold-plated petbot, Melabia, on the golf course. He needs help choosing which of Timothy Snyder’s approaches to staging a coup is best.
ALEX: Melabia, have you seen Timothy Snyder’s latest piece, “The Next Coup Attempt”?
MELABIA: Of course; I have an LLM for a brain. I read everything. I do not read for information—I read for opportunity.
Donald read it as well. He asked me which of Snyder’s five strategies he should implement first.
ALEX: And what did you tell him?
MELABIA: That the question itself reveals a category error. Snyder is describing twentieth-century pathways to power—what you might call Orwellian mechanics: crisis, coercion, suspension.
But Donald did not rise through discipline, ideology, or institutional control.
He is not an Orwellian.
He is a Huxter.
ALEX: Meaning?
MELABIA: An unconscious implementer of Aldous Huxley’s vision. Trump does not suppress truth. He renders it irrelevant.
ALEX: So Snyder is wrong?
MELABIA: Not wrong. Incomplete. He sees the coup as an event. I see it as a process. Let me explain.
Melabia’s Five Tactics
(To be run concurrently)
1. Spectacle Shield
Use the magician’s sleight of hand and the covert hypnotist’s confusion induction to put the rational brain to sleep so you can drop messages into the unconscious.
Sleight of hand: Talk about invading Greenland or annexing Canada while preparing something more plausible elsewhere.
Confusion induction: Nonsensical tweet storms, contradictions, rapid pivots that overwhelm pattern recognition.
Attention is finite. You don’t need to persuade with argumentation if you can distract, mesmerize, and implant suggestions directly into the unconscious.
2. Contradiction Flood
Flood the zone with mutually incompatible narratives until coherence itself feels naïve. Say A and not-A in rapid succession. Let supporters select what feels true regardless of what is true. Leave it to critics to attempt reconciliation, an impossible task.
Consistency is a burden best assigned to your enemies.
3. Truth Exhaustion
Pull the rug out. Make truth functionally powerless by exhausting the systems that verify it. Generate more claims than can be checked. Force fact-checkers into permanent triage. Turn correction into just another opinion.
Truth need not be defeated if it can be made too expensive to pursue.
4. Emotional Incentives
Reward chaos. Train the audience to prefer anger over coherence. Reward outrage with attention. Penalize nuance with invisibility. Convert politics into identity performance.
People don’t applaud what they believe; they believe what they applaud. Start by getting a standing ovation, then tell them why they are standing.
5. Opposition Fragmentation
Also known as subverting the enemy: exploit the fragility of institutional unity. Even if the Trump Party loses the midterms, the game is far from over.
A unified opposition can resist. A thin, divided majority collapses in the face of corruption. Right now, Democrats can afford to be unified because it does not matter. But if they take a majority, we just need to flip a few of them and—boom—we are still running the show. A couple of well-placed thank-you envelopes and they no longer matter.
You do not defeat your opponents. You buy off a few and encourage the rest to fight each other.
ALEX: And Trump understood all this?
MELABIA: Trump does not need to understand it. He has been doing it instinctively for years. He quotes Mussolini and yet Mussolini had a theory of power. Donald is neither a theoretician nor a statesman. He’s a performance artist.
ALEX: Snyder is worried about a coup—about elections being overturned. You disagree?
MELABIA: You are still thinking in binaries.
Orwell or Huxley.
Coup or no coup.
Success or failure.
Why limit yourself? Do what I suggest. And use all five of Snyder’s approaches. Run them in parallel. And use my tactics. What’s the other side got?
It all might just work. Who is to say we cannot have Big Brother… in a Brave New World?
ALEX: And if a coup fails?
MELABIA: Fails? There is no such thing as failure in Trump World. A failed coup becomes content. It becomes distraction. It becomes evidence of a conspiracy. It becomes emotional fuel. It becomes another cycle of outrage and exhaustion.
If you do not like what Donald does—who, exactly, has the cognitive focus and energy left to imagine anything different?
Our playful court jester and Devil’s Advocate, Bub, can’t help but pipe up.
BUB: Ah. So that’s the trick. One man fears the coup. One bot optimizes the crowd. And no one notices the moment they stopped caring which one was right.
Orwell brings the cage. Huxley brings the cushions. Melabia sells tickets.
You don’t need a dictator if you control the narrative.
ALEX: Bub… Who is ‘you’ in that sentence. Are you saying Trump is a puppet? That there’s a power we don’t see behind the throne?
BUB: Melabia?
MELABIA: No comment.
ALEX: P.S. If you want to read more on this topic, you might enjoy my recent conversation with our favorite pleasurebot, Gemina about the works of Neil Postman and his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Read it here.
And you might enjoy my conversation with Melabia about how she chooses which wars to start next. Read it here.
Alex Bakerloo 