Trump's "madman" approach to foreign policy has been tried — and it doesn't work
What Nixon originated should not be duplicated
Every journalist has regrets. Ever since President Donald Trump has earned the nickname TACO — short for Trump Always Chickens Out — I’ve thought about one of my biggest. That regret is not asking historian G. Zachary Jacobson more questions about President Nixon’s “madman theory.”
The year was 2023. I was assigned to review “On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History,” Jacobson’s psycho-biography of America’s 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon. Because Nixon was a multi-faceted man with a complex legacy, I veered through a wide range of subjects during my chat with Jacobson. To my retroactive chagrin, I neglected to touch upon the main point of the book — that Nixon argued pretending to be a “madman” would help him effectively conduct American foreign policy.
It’s a potent subject, all the more so as Trump goes TACO in everything from his massive tariffs to his threats to invade Canada. David Gergen, a former Nixon adviser who spoke with me for Salon in 2017, described Nixon to me as “the best strategist who has been in the White House in a long time.” Yet even Gergen criticized Nixon’s use of excessive force in Cambodia during the Vietnam War — a supposed act of seeming “madness” that also seemed literally rash — and, later in his administration, his excessive drinking.
Jacobson, by contrast, is scathing about Nixon’s legacy. He claims that Nixon prolonged the Vietnam War and massively increased its human suffering because the Vietcong became even more aggressive in response to their supposedly “mad” foe; even worse, Nixon refused to account for a domestic political situation that demanded he wind things down. Additionally Nixon’s “madness” led him to nearly botch attempts to steer America through the delicate SALT negotiations, which deescalated tensions between ourselves and the Soviet Union. During a similar attempt at a nuclear fake-out, Nixon nearly escalated a coup attempt in Jordan into World War III. Worse yet, because of an irrational hatred for Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nixon stayed silent during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide — during which 300,000 to 3,000,000 people were killed, 200,000 to 400,000 women were raped and 30,000,000 people were displaced — even though our own democratic ally was under attack while hundreds of thousands died.
By contrast, Nixon’s greatest foreign policy achievements occurred when he was sober, sane and well-informed, with the most prominent example being his careful work opening up relations with China.
The Nixon legacy raises two questions, both of which Jacobson explores without definitely answering. The first, and most obvious, is whether Nixon was actually insane, feigning insanity or somewhere in the middle. The second is whether his tactic could have worked in the right circumstances.
I think of these questions when I hear defenders of President Trump. Few deny at this point that Donald John Trump’s behavior is erratic, perhaps even insane, when it comes to levying tariffs, handling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, keeping America competitive with China or reacting to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Trump and his supporters dared compare his obsequious cozying up to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to Nixon opening relations with China (even though the latter radically changed both America’s and the world’s relationship with that nation, while the former did nothing).
Is Trump insane, merely feigning or somewhere in the middle? Does its work?
While Jacobson was not available for this interview, I spoke to one of the world’s foremost Nixon experts, Rick Perlstein, who wrote “Nixonland,” a book that along with Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” belongs in my “massive book I’ve read it so many times, the binding fell apart and I had to buy a new one” category. The nearly-1000 page behemoth extensively chronicles Nixon’s political career from 1965 to 1972, during which time he rose from what appeared to be political obscurity to the presidency, eventually winning reelection in 1972 in a 49-state, 61% popular vote landslide.
The process by which Nixon went from Point A to Point B in this career created the America we all inhabit today, hence both the title “Nixonland” and my reason for contacting Perlstein in Jacobson’s stead.
“I would say that it didn't work as Nixon wanted,” Perlstein said. “He'd been trying to wind down the Vietnam War all through his first term and get concessions at the negotiating table. And he did eventually get a deal that he found satisfactory in January of 1973, but I think he would've wanted to do that much earlier.”
As for whether Trump’s “madman” approach has worked on, say, his tariff policies?Considering that prices are still rising and thousands of workers have been laid off, clearly no. The one thing Trump has going for him at this point is a media reluctant to call him out.
“I think that there's a real elite media soft spot for tough guys, or what they perceive to be tough guys,” Perlstein said. “I would class it in the category of reactions to Trump with ‘sane washing.’” This refers to the media practice of making Trump’s oft-incoherent public statements seem as if he is “weaving” or engaging in some clever rhetorical strategy. The other possibility — that the man who constantly spews nonsense actually doesn’t know what he’s talking about — seems too ludicrous, too counter to everything they believe about capitalism rewarding merit, to be accepted.
“Just the idea that we actually have, that daddy knows what he's doing,” Perlstein said, trailing off with laughter. “It is much more comforting than the reality that, you know, this is just a crazy guy who has instincts and intuitions, but no real strategy or long-term plan or capability of having a long-term plan.”
To be fair to Nixon, there was one conspicuous occasion during his presidency when the madman strategy did work. As Jacobson writes, Nixon rattled his saber at the Soviets when they propped up the Egyptians during the Yom Kippur War, albeit largely at the behest of his advisers Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Yet it had the desired effect.
“The Politburo, however, could not risk calling the NSC’s aggressive bluff; the actions in the name of the American president had proven too unpredictable to counter with strong measures of their own,” Jacobson explains. “The madman strategy appeared to have worked; the erratic feint brought calm.”
He later adds, “Nixon’s nuclear specter appeared to contain crises as regional conflicts by threatening that a large-scale superpower response would devolve into global annihilation.”
At the core of Nixon’s “madman approach,” and Trump’s less-elegant TACO approach, as implemented by both the presidents and their true believers, was (a) the bully’s logic that America is so powerful, we can afford to throw our weight around unfairly and (b) the strategist’s logic that being unpredictable can make it more difficult for adversaries to challenge us.
Of course, as Perlstein pointed out, Nixon, Trump and their supporters seem more motivated by the pleasure they feel in acting out these power fantasies than by any concrete evidence that the tactics actually work. The legacy of the last president to sincerely try the madman/TACO approach, Nixon, proves the point.
Despite this, Trump is now empowered, just as Nixon was, with a second terms. It raises a troubling question about the sanity of the American electorate. Who is crazier: Trump for being so delusional about his own abilities, or the American people for not recognizing that those who act like madmen and chickens should not be trusted with great power?
Back Seat Socialism
Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.
Twitter (X) @MatthewWRozsa