Populist Simplicity in a Hyper-Complex World: Will Trump Overplay His Hand?

Faultlines

As an exercise in politics as spectacle; a projection of humiliation as strength, Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office served its likely objectives. 

Played out before the world’s media in real time, the Ukrainian President was rounded on by both men, accusing him of not being grateful for America’s support during Russia’s ongoing invasion and of not showing them enough “respect”. 

It had all the Trumpian trimmings: psychological punches thrown in the throes of hypermasculinity; the performative cruelty that fuels the fire of the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement. 

“This is going to be great television,” Trump said as it ended. The President promised his voters – his victims of a broken system – that there would be no ‘business as usual’ when he returned. But many still found the confrontation with Zelensky shocking. 

It was the end of the United States as a global defender of democracy and freedom. ‘America First’ was aggression made explicit, not passive retreat.

And yet, the final 10 minutes of heated exchanges – which made headlines around the world – were inevitable, given the preceding 39 minutes of what had unfolded. 

The meeting in the Oval Office that day exposed the clash of two opposing and incompatible political mindsets, philosophies, psychologies, and aims.

The collision of these faultlines – Zelensky’s war-torn realities and his warnings of complexity; Trump’s business-like brutishness and populist simplicities – led to the eruption that the world should have been waiting for.

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The Art of the Deal

Long before Donald Trump became President, he was in the homes of millions of Americans as the host of the business reality TV show The Apprentice. 

A 2024 film of the same name, starring Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, ends with Trump attributing to himself three ‘rules’ of business – told to him by his mentor Roy Cohn – in his autobiography, The Art of the Deal. 

The “deal” is what Trump was looking for in the Oval Office with Zelensky – a proportion of Ukraine’s mineral deposits in exchange for long-term US financial investment in the country’s reconstruction. 

Trump had been a “businessman” his whole life, he kept telling the assembled reporters. This transactional approach also drove his “hope I’ll be known and recognised as a peacemaker”.

For Zelensky, there can be no peace without security guarantees.

Having led his country in a brave and much commended defence since Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the man carries around within him direct, personal, first-hand, experience of the blood being shed. 

While agreeing with Trump that this had to stop, he repeatedly questioned how the President’s “deal” alone would be able to enforce a ceasefire with the “terrorist and killer” Vladimir Putin, who he said had already broken previous obligations of the same kind 25 times.

Putin respects me, I don’t think he’ll break an agreement I broker, Trump replied, the Godfather. Then again, anything could happen, he acknowledged – including a bomb falling on the heads of those in the Oval Office that moment.

Zelensky appeared aghast and baffled at just how to navigate the circus around him. When the former comedian who played a president-turned-President was asked 19 minutes into the meeting by a reporter why he wasn’t wearing a suit, he couldn’t mask his underlying contempt.

For many of Trump’s supporters, his approach to the Ukraine war will be another example of his transactional pragmatism as a type of pseudo-realism.

A year before he was re-elected, nearly every taxi driver I met in New York said they would be voting for him – not because they approved of his style, but because he was a businessman who knew how to ‘get things done’.

Trump’s voters don’t see why American money should be funding a war in Europe when they are struggling with their lives at home. 

Zelensky is not unaware of this. He agreed throughout the meeting on 28 February that hopefully the war could now end with Trump involved. But, for him, the “deal” was not so simple.

When Trump told him “you don’t have the cards”, Zelensky quietly replied: “I am not playing cards.”

Later, when he told the Ukrainian President that he was “gambling with world war three and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country”, Zelensky responded that he had always thanked the American people for their support but that he could not engage in “diplomacy” with a man who had invaded his country.

Zelensky injected doses of reality where he could.

When Trump said he didn’t want to talk about Odesa but wanted to focus on the minerals deal (which Zelensky didn’t end up signing), the President said that “a lot of cities have been destroyed” in Ukraine and that there are “a lot of cities that are not recognisable, there’s not a building standing”. 

Zelensky corrected him: “Mr President, you have to come and to look. No, no, no. We have very good cities. Yes, a lot of things have been destroyed, but mostly our cities are alive, and people work, and children go to school. Sometimes it’s very difficult. Closer to the frontline, children have to go to underground schools. But we live. Ukraine is fighting and Ukraine lives. This is very important. And maybe Putin is sharing disinformation, that he has destroyed us.”

Trump either didn’t know or understand this; had bought into Putin’s disinformation as Zelensky suggested; or simply said what would work for the narrative he was trying to present.

The American President then said he’d known Putin for “a long time” and that the Russian leader “had to suffer through the Russia hoax” – a reference to claims of Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 election.  

“You want me to say really horrible things about Putin and then say ‘hi Vladimir, how’re we doing on the deal?’ Trump asked the press. “It doesn’t work that way.”

By the time Vice President Vance bluntly intervened, Zelensky was done.

In a Fox News interview shortly after being told to leave the White House, the Ukrainian leader said he didn’t believe he had anything to apologise for. He reiterated that any talk of “diplomacy”, as Vance had suggested, was difficult because, for Ukraine, Putin was a “killer” who had invaded a sovereign country unprovoked.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t want peace,” Zelensky said. “We just want to recognise the reality.”

But recognising reality isn’t something that Trump does. And, beyond the reality TV-style showdown, that was the story of what happened in the Oval Office that day. Provoked he might have been, but Volodymyr Zelensky’s response was unsurprising. 

Where does a man leading a country being invaded by a hostile enemy as he sits there being shouted down by a convicted criminal who creates ‘enemies within’ even start?

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Complexity Becomes Simplicity

The right’s ability to close the space in which factuality and nuance can even exist in today’s political culture has been the underlying story of the populist wave that has swept through Western democracies.

For Brian Klaas, Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, and author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, this is a huge part of the Trump phenomenon.

“There is a turn towards simplistic politics in the current moment even though we live in the most complex social environment that humans have ever inhabited,” he says. “Some aspects of this are hard-wired into human brains. Simple stories are the ways humans navigate risk because, for most of human history, simple stories were sufficient. There was a very linear relationship between cause and effect. 

“But that same cognitive strategy is very, very dangerous in our super complex modern world because people are trying to come up with a simple story for something that’s not simple, and they are susceptible to being seduced by simplistic lies. There’s a huge mismatch between narratives we are told and the fact that causality in the modern world doesn’t exist in the way it used to.”

In the weeks before Zelensky’s Oval Office visit, Trump’s second administration got to work on its domestic project: stripping back the work of government departments and agencies in the name of efficiency, removing DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, firing key individuals in the military and intelligence services, and drafting executive orders on issues such as “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” and “realigning the United States refugee admissions programme”.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), at the core of this work, is problematic, according to Klaas, because of the short-term view it takes of the functions of government.

“It’s much easier for Elon Musk to say everything the US Government does is bad and it’s spending people’s tax dollars on every possible woke ideology imaginable, and actually, there’s not a good reason for any of these things to exist and he’s going to come in and fix it with an algorithm, and that will be that,” he says. “It’s meme-based ideology.”

The increase in tariffs on imports from Canada is another example. “It’s unclear what Canada is supposed to do,” Klaas observes. “What is it guilty of? What is it that it could stop doing to relieve the tariffs?

“Authoritarian populism is more willing to engage in lie-based politics that essentially condenses complexity down to simplicity.”

While some still care about policy, many in movements such as ‘MAGA’ don’t – “they care about winning. They care about optics. They care about the ‘WWE’ [World Wrestling Entertainment] quality to politics: the spectacle and beating the right people”.

It’s a change from the old politics.

“Grandstanding” may have been an element of it, but it was “never a purely performative game” – formulating legislation and policy details mattered too. “That is now just falling by the wayside,” Klaas adds.

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The Real World of Risk

The remark by Volodymyr Zelensky that appeared to fully ‘trigger’ Trump and Vance in the Oval Office that day was telling.

When he told them that America might “have a nice ocean” between it and Europe and that they “don’t feel [it] now, but you will feel it in the future”, if Putin was to feel emboldened, Zelensky was warning of the reality that actions can have unpredictable consequences.

“Don’t tell us how we’re going to feel,” Trump replied, enraged. 

The simplistic frameworks of modern authoritarian populism are so dangerous, according to Brian Klaas, because they are “coinciding with a period of unprecedented complexity”.

“There were things that were a lot easier to understand in even the early 20th Century,” he observes. “For example, the global economy did not have nearly as many moving parts and it did not have nearly as much opaque capital. There has been rapid change, whereby if you now mess up in one part of the world economically, it can instantly impact politics and economics in another part of the world.

“The same is true of geopolitical and security risk. There is a more catastrophic level of risk than ever before because of interconnected systems. That matters.” 

On a domestic level, Musk and DOGE’s view that too much of what the US Government does amounts to waste, fraud, and abuse is worrying for this same reason.

“There probably is some wasteful spending – no government is perfectly lean – but a significant chunk of what Musk is highlighting are things that, in the current moment, may not look like they are necessary but are what governments do to avoid catastrophic risk,” Klaas says.

“There is catastrophic risk from small mistakes, and that’s why government is necessary – because the private sector isn’t going to insulate the risk. It’s not going to build a tsunami prevention system that may or may not be necessary once in 20 years. That’s what governments do.” 

He notes that, in late 2019, the first Trump administration ended a £200 million early-warning pandemic programme, aimed at training scientists in China and around the world to detect and respond to such a crisis. A few months later, the Covid pandemic began. “That’s what I fear is happening with everything that’s being cut right now,” Klaas adds.

“There is a rise in simple solutions that basically assume nothing will ever go wrong at the moment, when the most likely thing that will happen is that things will go really wrong in unprecedented ways.

“It’s really difficult to explain this to voters because they respond to things that are happening right now and to convince them to spend money on something that might happen… It’s the same problem with climate change. How will we know if it was worth spending the money now? We won’t, because proving the absence of a risk is impossible. 

“And then the authoritarian populists come in and say that the use of that money is a waste.”

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Primed for Viscerality

A few days before Zelensky arrived, Donald Trump reiterated that he isn’t in the business of ‘reality’.

He took to his Truth Social platform to share an AI-created video – showing him lying on a beach with Benjamin Netanyahu sipping cocktails, and depicting a golden hotel called Trump Gaza. 

The much-criticised film was created as a piece of satire after the President claimed that America should remove Gaza’s Palestinian population and take it over as a “riviera of the Middle East”. His trolling-as-politics is designed to shock as well as entertain.

His appearance on numerous cult podcasts during the election campaign, alongside his embrace of the Big Tech ‘broligarchs’, show Trump’s instinctive understanding of the online ‘bro culture’ that is increasingly dominant – not just in replacing ‘news’, but in doing politics.

And these alternatives to mainstream narratives work because we are being primed to become – and are becoming – more simplified beings. 

Tech algorithms can get inside our heads like no political campaign poster ever could. The binary positions; the ‘likes’; the identity labels: politics has become an arena into which we project our own individualised psychological realities. 

“The 21st Century problem for democracy is the internet and social media,” Klaas observes. “Information production has been democratised and that has created havoc for democracies – because in addition to the obvious fact that anyone can now spread ‘news’ that they make up, there is the problem that traditional media outlets can no longer focus public attention. Newspapers like The New York Times don’t set agendas anymore, and even when a scandal is exposed, it only gets through to the people who read trust-based news.

“Political science studies have shown that many Republicans don’t even know about some of the things Trump has been accused of because these have not been covered in Republican-friendly media… [podcaster] Joe Rogan is one of the most influential people in America now… There’s this massive asymmetry whereby the right has just detached voters from reality with outlets like Fox News and Newsmax and there are fact-based news sites, like The New York Times, that are deemed ‘left-wing’ because they’re fact-based.

“The average American in the 1950s or 60s would sit down to dinner and watch the evening news for 30 minutes and it would be from one of three TV stations that all said the same thing. It had its own corporate biases, and it sometimes lied to people, but it was broadly correct and based in truth. There was a shared sense of reality. 

“A lot of people are now consuming the information that’s swaying their political opinions in tiny chunks of headlines, not even reading articles, and often headlines from people who are not journalists, for example, through TikTok videos that often are trying to just grab people’s attention.

“All of these things are dumbing down discourse in a huge way. They tap into our worst impulses and involve no nuance.” 

Part of the issue for progressives is that no left-leaning equivalent to the right’s alternative media ecosystem has been created, as well as a continued lack of understanding about what politics really represents to people, Klaas says.

It is a “catch-22” for the Democrats: “They’re not willing to govern and campaign by meme – they are still operating in a world where truth and nuance matter – and they’re losing because voters are not still in that world.” 

“They think the response to Trump is just to find the right policy proposal, and this is just a complete detachment from the political realities – this notion that if we just talk about the price of eggs enough and how they’re still high people will sour on Trump,” Klaas adds. 

“Politics is a visceral, identity-based expression. For most people, it’s about ‘what kind of country do I want?’ and ‘what kind of person do I think I am?’ and ‘how do I express that politically?’ They’re not looking for a 10-point plan. It’s a structural problem.”

He believes “all the Democrats need right now is people who are really good communicators” to “articulate the argument against Trump and be a parallel source of information that is credible”. 

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Collisions and Reality

A little more than a week after Trump’s inauguration at the US Capitol in January, an American Airlines flight and a US Army helicopter collided mid-air over the Potomac River in Washington DC. All 67 people aboard both aircrafts were killed.

In its aftermath, Trump claimed that the crash could be explained by a “diversity push” at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), during the Biden and Obama presidencies, which had focused “on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” who he said “can be air traffic controllers”.

JD Vance later added that Trump “was being very explicit about the fact that DEI policies have led our air traffic controllers to be short-staffed”.

Could authoritarian populism come undone by “going too far, too fast”, as Klaas believes the Trump administration will do?

It is true that Trump did not win a second term in the wake of his handling of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Some also point across the Atlantic to the consequences of Brexit, both economic and political, which has resulted in the British public seemingly changing its mind about the UK’s departure from the European Union (the latest YouGov polling in January 2025 suggested that 55% of Brits now say Brexit was the wrong move).

But if politicians such as Trump, and social media platforms like Musk’s X, can shape and create millions of new realities – can ‘reality’ really catch up with them?

Brian Klaas believes it will when people viscerally feel it.

“The FAA is being gutted and there’s going to be a plane crash at some point – and when that happens, there’s going to be no one to blame it on,” he says. “It’s going to be so obvious. These are the things that are super foreseeable. On top of that, there is catastrophic risk that is usually completely unforeseeable, the black swans that we can’t anticipate. One of them is going to hit. 

“The tariffs are also going to bite and the forecast for the US economy is bad, with recession looking likely. Trump doesn’t have the magic to make that reality go away. He has the ability to reshape narratives around things people do not viscerally experience – and that’s why, for example, January 6 didn’t matter to a lot of his supporters. But rising prices and the economy tanking are harder for populists to spin.”

He says “if you are worrying about foreseeable risk, you’re in very dangerous territory – because unforeseeable risk is what hit us in the past”. When those black swans have happened, though, “the Government has had sufficient resources and infrastructure to deal with them. I think we’re going to find out the hard way why the Government exists”.

This is underpinned by an “over-confidence” in Big Tech, which appears to be offering efficiencies and innovations to government while being fed by an appetite for risk.

“The FAA issue is an interesting one because I think it scares even the tech elite as they fly a lot,” Klaas adds. “But many of the ways in which the US is set up is that catastrophic risk is something that tends to lead to increases in wealth among venture capitalists and oligarchs – disaster capitalism is a way of operating that means, even when things go really badly, a lot of people can make money.

“There appears to be an over-confidence in the tech sector – a notion of ‘if only the US Government had understood a bit of coding, it would have solved all these problems before’. The reason they think that is because they don’t understand catastrophic risk. 

“If you break Twitter, it’s okay. If you break the US Government, people die.”

Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ might be psychologically appealing enough to enough people with contempt for a system they believe no longer serves them. But, when it comes to the practicalities of their lives, whether reality can ultimately trump a politics built on a lack of shared reality remains to be seen. 

And, one way or another, it will be.

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times