I have spent the better part of this morning staring at a headline so fundamentally stupid that it made me question why I ever bothered to learn to read. ‘Searching for a strategy behind Trump’s unpredictability.’ It is the kind of phrase that could only be birthed in the sterile, air-conditioned offices of people who have never actually interacted with reality. It is the intellectual equivalent of trying to map the flight path of a fly that has just consumed a gallon of high-octane energy drink and flown directly into a bug zapper. There is no strategy. There is only the void, and yet we—this collective of desperate, fearful primates—insist on painting a mustache on the void and calling it a plan.

One year into ‘Trump II,’ the professional punditry class is still performing an intellectual autopsy on a living specimen of pure, unadulterated randomness. I watch them on the cable news cycles, their faces tightened with the strain of trying to appear insightful while discussing a man who makes executive decisions with the same level of foresight I use to choose which sock to put on first. The media needs there to be a strategy. If there is a strategy, there is a narrative. If there is a narrative, there are clicks, ad revenue, and a reason for their miserable existence. But the truth—the one they are too terrified to admit—is that nobody has any idea what tomorrow holds because the man at the center of the storm doesn't know what he’s going to do in the next five minutes.

Let’s look at the players in this tragicomedy. On the Right, we have the ‘4D Chess’ cultists. These are the people who see a typo in a 3:00 AM social media post and interpret it as a coded signal to dismantle the deep state’s control over the price of milk. They are so desperate for a strongman with a master plan that they’ve convinced themselves that chaos is actually a sophisticated form of psychological warfare. It isn't. It’s just chaos. They are the Roman plebeians cheering while Nero plays the fiddle, convinced that the smoke rising from the city is just a bold new urban renewal project. Their moronic sycophancy is only matched by their greed; as long as the stock market stumbles upward on a diet of deregulation and false hope, they’ll pretend the pilot isn’t currently eating the flight manual.

Then we have the Left, whose performative outrage has become so predictable that I could set my watch by it. They treat every unpredictable whim as a calculated step toward a dystopian nightmare. They need a Machiavellian villain because it validates their sense of moral superiority. If the ‘strategy’ is fascism, then they are the heroic resistance. But what happens to the resistance when the ‘villain’ isn't an architect of evil, but just a bored septuagenarian with a penchant for grievances? They are tilting at windmills, screaming about the end of democracy while failing to realize that the system they’re trying to save was already a hollowed-out husk of corporate interests and bureaucratic incompetence long before the ‘unpredictability’ began.

I find myself disgusted by the historical parallels that these analysts love to trot out. They compare this era to the 1930s or the fall of the Republic, trying to find a pattern in the tea leaves of history. But history usually involves people who at least had a consistent ideology. What we have now is something far more pathetic: a post-truth, post-logic, post-shame environment where the only constant is the ego. To search for a ‘strategy’ here is to insult the very concept of human intelligence. It assumes that there is a goal beyond the immediate dopamine hit of a headline. It assumes there is a ‘tomorrow’ being planned for, when in reality, we are living in an eternal, screaming ‘now’ where the only thing that matters is who got insulted most recently.

I am tired of the searching. I am tired of the ‘unpredictability’ being treated as a mystery to be solved. It’s not a mystery; it’s a symptom. It’s the symptom of a culture that has finally given up on the idea of governance and replaced it with a permanent reality TV show. The analysts can keep their maps and their charts; I’ll be over here, watching the ship head for the rocks, fully aware that the person at the wheel isn't trying to navigate—he’s just trying to see how loud the crash will be. We are a year in, and the only ‘truth’ we’ve discovered is that we are a nation of idiots being led by a man who treats the leader of the free world role like a disgruntled customer at a fast-food drive-thru. There is no strategy. There is only the noise. And I, for one, would very much like some goddamn silence.