Monkeypaw wishes

Donald Trump has a strange effect on others. I’m not the first to note that it seems like half his cabinet and strongest allies were virulently against him before they fell in line behind him. These kinds of flips have been known to happen in politics before, but never anything approaching the scale of the Trump phenomenon.

And it doesn’t just happen with officials serving under him and prominent allies in his administration. The effect extends to people in opposing political parties, or even in entirely different fields. Two examples I came across this week—superstar lawyer David Boies and professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb—reminded me of how, after years of seeing Donald Trump in action as president, so many people who should know better still see the president as a vehicle for their political goals.

My sense is that people see what they want to see in Trump in order to excuse their own desires that others might disapprove of. So today, I’ll write about how the current president has become a kind of sin-eater for the living—someone willing to take on himself the unpopular thing they want to see done. I’ll discuss how this plays out for those who bind themselves to Trump, and what it means for those who want to stop him.

Trump’s strange lure for others began, at least in his political career, with the idea that he should run for president in 2000. More than a decade later, as a candidate seeking major-party nomination, he saw any number of Republican contenders denounce him. JD Vance warned Trump might become “America’s Hitler.” Ted Cruz declared him “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.” Marco Rubio labeled his now-boss a “con artist.” Lindsey Graham said of the Republican Party, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”

They all caved eventually. Republican leaders didn’t necessarily seem to think they could control him, but appear to believe that they’re smarter than he is, therefore they might be able to use him to expand their own power and further their own agendas. Though hardly anyone seems to learn from others’ experience on this front, proximity to Trump disgraces everyone in the long run.

Genuinely cares

In an Isaac Chotiner interview published yesterday in the New Yorker, lawyer David Boies came out in favor of Trump’s war on Iran. He tried to make the argument that Americans should embrace the conflict, saying, “I support him because I think it’s the right thing to do.” (You might remember Boies as a high-profile part of the team that successfully fought for gay marriage before the Supreme Court.)

During the course of the Q&A, Boies acknowledges that Trump is a flawed leader. Yet he either thinks or has convinced himself that the president cares about civilian casualties.

“I do think he genuinely cares about human life,” Boies told Chotiner, in the face of a good deal of evidence to the contrary. It becomes clear over the course of the conversation that Boies is working hard to justify a deeply dangerous and ill-advised action by a deeply compromised political actor, an action that he’s long wished someone would take.

Yesterday on Bluesky, someone also reposted an old set of tweets from Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In two posts from before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Taleb describes the stakes of that vote: a “near-certainty of more wars” under Harris, in contrast to a “possibility of peace” under Trump and Vance.

“Say what you want about Trump, and it will be true,” he wrote. “But he GENUINELY does not like to see people killed.”

Months after the election, well into the nightmare that was 2025, Taleb maintained that “No matter what you say about Trump, no matter >>> Biden.” And just last October he hypothesized, “Is it me or Trump and the Iranians conniving to play the Israelis?”

I’m less interested in defending Biden or Harris on their Mideast policies than I am looking at how delusion functions here. Both Boies and Taleb have convinced themselves (or are trying to convince others) that Trump would be distressed over harm to civilians—something that flies in the face of his evident pleasure in describing and threatening violence against everyday people.

It’s also curious to me that in this case, Boies wants to support and protect Israel, but Taleb is very much against the Israeli actions in the region. Two men with directly opposing views on the Middle East see something intelligible in Trump and believe he is sympathetic in some way to their goals. More than a year apart, they end up saying almost the same phrase to indicate they think he cares about civilian deaths, both using the word “genuinely.” (It’s worth noting that since Trump launched the war on Iran, Taleb’s opinions have likely changed.)

Everyday people

I say all this to illustrate the knots that people, even very smart ones, tie themselves into when confronted with the president’s irrational and chaotic behavior. Because this kind of thinking isn’t limited to public figures. I also see it in people I know.

Some overseas friends who had grown up behind the Iron Curtain cheered the initial hours of the U.S. military operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela. They didn’t necessarily like the unilateral aspects of Trump’s actions, but it seemed a small price to pay to liberate the country from Maduro’s corruption. Predictably, Trump had no actual interest in liberating the country and instead seems to have reinforced it as a mafia-style authoritarian state.

Another friend has chided people online for coming out against the war on Iran, saying the American people should reserve judgement, as it’s too early to know whether Trump will succeed. Aside from there needing to be actual goals and a strategy to have any benchmark for “success” in the first place, there was no acknowledgment from my friend that waiting to push back might itself lead to harm, if ending this disastrous conflict as soon as possible is the best chance to keep the crisis from becoming exponentially worse.

Given how many people have championed Trump himself or particular policies from him, only to be betrayed, why do people continue to imagine that this time it will work? For many people, there seems to be a secret admiration for Trump. They like the way he just takes control and does a thing. They have their own frustrations that their pet thing hasn’t been done already, and they imagine that in this case, it’s justified to just impose it by force.

So they want him to do their pet thing, the thing in their blind spot that they somehow think he will do right. But Trump is more than an unaware, incurious, corrupt, vengeful, baby. Authoritarianism is his only guiding principle; he’s antithetical to democracy itself. Even if he were to enact your fondest policy wish, he would do it in a way that maximizes harm and creates a dangerous precedent. His gift is that he is capable of poisoning everything.

I think of these delusions as monkey-paw wishes, or “it might work for us” thinking. In each case, people seem to be aware that there’s danger inherent in what Trump’s doing, yet can’t see that Trump’s very involvement will spoil any possibility of a positive outcome, because his end goal and theirs are not actually the same. “Bomb Iran” might be a first stage for my friend who wished for an end to Khamenei’s rule. But for Trump, that’s the whole plan.

One interesting exception so far is Zohran Mamdani’s interactions with Trump. For now, it’s obvious Mamdani dog-walking Trump, getting Trump to agree with him and using that agreement to good policy ends. This is the opposite of the form we’ve usually seen in Trump’s public interactions, in which his peers typically acquiesce to humiliation from him. But in my opinion, Mamdani should still be cautious about bringing Trump too close, even when it’s done strategically. Trump ruins everything.

Leopards eating faces

By now, you might be asking yourself, isn’t this the same as the “I never thought leopards would eat MY face” meme? I would say that in theory they’re different. The leopards meme is about wanting to see other groups of people punished, and then being disappointed that Trump harms you along with them.

Monkey-paw wishes are slightly different, however, in that at first glance, they’re not about not about publicly embracing punishment of a scapegoated community. Instead, they’re aimed at a certain policy outcome—blocking nuclear weapons development in Iran, stricter immigration in the U.S., or an end to DEI—and thinking that Trump is someone who can carry out that goal coherently in ways that might lead to a good outcome.

I would argue, however, that at root, monkey-paw wishes are the same as the wishes of those who vote in favor of leopards eating faces. It’s just that highly educated people don’t want to acknowledge—perhaps even to themselves—their willingness to or desire to harm others, so they embrace policies that pretend to be more neutral and rational.

My hypothesis is that they succumb to a delusion that Trump will do this thing right even though he does all the other things wrong because on some level, they agree with the underlying prejudices in that policy but in no way think of themselves as sharing Trump’s defective moral compass. In the end, however, Taleb and Boies manage to delude themselves just as deeply (if not as broadly) as any MAGA voter.

Miller and Vought

The only people who seem to be getting everything they want out of their connection to Trump are deputy chief of staff and immigration policy advisor Stephen Miller and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. The latter is devoted to destroying the functioning parts of the federal government; the former is devoted to destroying the functioning parts of American society.

They’ve not paid a price for their association with Trump yet, because they’re just as committed to doing harm as Trump is, if for different reasons. But even in their cases, the association with Trump is likely not to lead where they dream it will.

Vought’s agenda of stripping jobs and funding from agencies is being restricted again and again in court. A majority of Americans polled in 2025 do not support the cuts to federal programs that he has spearheaded. Vought is doing serious harm to functioning government, but he’s also losing a number of battles while turning a majority of Americans against his goals.

Stephen Miller has done a similar thing even more dramatically, spurring violent tactics against noncitizens and citizens alike and expanding concentration camp detention, only to drive 50% of Americans to agree for the first time that ICE should be abolished. Trump is giving these men the policies they want, but I suspect in the end he will destroy them and the work to which they’re devoting their lives.

What can you do?

As always, I want to address actions that regular people can take to address the current crisis. Primary election campaigning is already underway for November. Find out which candidates running in your district are pushing back hard on federal cuts or the war in Iran. Who among them is willing to abolish ICE? Support those candidates and help them campaign.

Educate your community about the violence happening and ways to help. Talk about big human rights concerns and link them to specific policies, both national and local. That makes it harder for both the leopards-eating-faces people and the monkey paw wishes folks to convince themselves or anyone else that Trump’s actions are reasonable.

Demand local officials cut contracts with and support for ICE. Press them to investigate ICE and Border Patrol abuses taking place on the street or in facilities in your community. These actions are getting less attention because of the new war, but they’re still taking place. If you’re faced with a warehouse coming to your region, look at the many ways that locals are pushing back, from environment assessments to utility cutoffs.

Back immigration and immigrants as assets to the country. That position is where more of Americans as a whole are at right now than those who want to scapegoat anyone not born in the U.S. The more people who say it publicly, the more momentum we gain.

What everyone (and maybe already you!) have been doing is having an effect. Republicans are downplaying their mantra calling for mass deportations. There’s talk of putting warehouse conversions to concentration camps on hold because of how unpopular they are. Employees at an architectural firm organized opposition to their company’s involvement with these warehouses. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, a longtime hard-right supporter of both Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, came out yesterday calling for an end to mass deportations.

“We are on the ground floor with this day in and day out—looking in the eyes of these folks that, yes, came here inappropriately,” Judd said. “But some came here inappropriately only to do better for themselves and their family.” Judd’s statement is likely more a sign of political desperation than any moral conversion, but it represents progress.

And don’t forget that the next No Kings demonstration is coming up on March 28. Check out this map—there’s likely an event happening near you. Demonstrations can feel like nothing because they’re low-risk. But this gathering is likely to be the biggest single-day demonstration in American history. You will be with like-minded people and have a chance to connect with them. These events will get coverage.

And the more people who show up, the clearer the message will be that a majority of Americans find Trump’s violence against immigrants and the plans for expanding detention reprehensible. Make it so those who aren’t thinking about all this yet can’t help but see what’s happening.

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