Alan Zendell, April 5, 2026

In the transactional universe of Donald Trump, everything has a price, and every action generates a quid pro quo. Friendship, collegiality, and courtesy are simply bargaining chips, tools of manipulation, domination, and intimidation. All that matters in Trump’s world are blind loyalty, wealth, and power. Truth has no meaning except as a reference to lies and misrepresentations. It’s pure gangsterism. In that kind of universe it’s reasonable to ask, “Does anyone really like Donald Trump?”

Among two-thirds of our country there’s little chance of finding anyone who does, but what about his supporters? When I asked my extremely conservative cousin who supported Trump in all of his elections, and who devoted his entire life to military service and national security, he said “Trump’s just a blowhard, but we’re safer with him as president.” How many people have you heard say something comparable?

When I ask people in my purple community who voted for Trump what they think of him personally, the typical response is disgust over his behavior, dismay over his lack of moral center, and horror over his mobster-like persona. Without exception, my statistically invalid sample of interviewees dislike him, some intensely. Then why did they vote for him? The most common answer is that they have no faith in Democrats. I don’t either, and I hate the notion that “anything would be better,” but we can only choose from what is available. I’m utterly convinced that Trump will destroy this country if right-thinking Americans don’t find the means to stop him.

Years ago, I studied game theory, the science of intelligent decision making. We’re familiar with things like cost-benefit analyses and evaluating the odds of the success of different outcomes, but the most  important thing I learned from game theory is that all the analyses we use when we make decisions omit a critical element: how to assure avoiding catastrophic failure.

The solution is to first identify outcomes so awful, they’re unacceptable under any circumstances. Any option that might result in such an outcome is nonnegotiably off the table before our search for the best option ever begins. What if, given Trump’s history of questionable business dealings, bankruptcy filings, court defeats, and accusations of fraud leveled against him, the leaders of Atlantic City, NJ had thought that way before approving plans for Trump’s hotel/casino empire? They might have realized that the possibility of the total failure of Trump’s vision wouldn’t only hurt Trump, but devastate the city’s economy for decades. The lesson from game theory is that for such an outcome, even a tiny probability of occurrence is unacceptable, so we eliminate it before looking at anything else.

We can apply the same idea to most of Trump’s policies. Before passing the Big Beautiful Bill, many people asked if the near certainty that more than twenty million people would lose access to health care was a nonnegotiable outcome. Before turning ICE loose, unfettered to constitutional requirements like court orders and warrants, we might have asked if the death, injury, and general intimidation of innocent Americans that resulted from ICE’s tactics was a nonegotiable outcome.

We might have asked similar questions about Trump’s war against Iran, had we been given an opportunity to weigh in before the bombs starting falling, and by we, I mean every American including Congress who isn’t part of Trump’s inner circle. We might have asked if starting a major conflict with uncertain outcomes without the support of allies or the legitimacy of Congressional approval might yield an unacceptable outcome. We might have asked if the possibility that Iran could disrupt the entire world economy while enriching Russia’s war against Ukraine, the depletion of our stockpile of strategic and precision weaponry all over the world, or the horrific likelihood that the war might spiral out of control and become nuclear were acceptable risks.

Even people who, now that we’re inextricably committed to seeing the war through, recognizing that Trump’s notion that he can end it whenever he wants is pure fantasy, support continuing the fight until Iran’s threat to the world is eliminated, mostly regret the way the conflict was handled. They fear that even total victory over Iran will leave us in a far weaker position with respect to Russia and China. It didn’t have to be that way, except that for Trump, satisfying the desperate needs of his narcissistic disorder had as much to do with attacking Iran as any argument about Iran being a danger to the world.

A president who uses governing as therapy for his own mental illness and sociopathy is by definition an existential threat to us and the world. If Trump carries out his threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure over the objections of the rest of the world, he will draw the United States into a future that looks like a tea party compared to our forever war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vice President Vance and Trump’s Cabinet need to keep their powder dry just in case. I hope they remember where they put the 25th Amendment. It’s that serious.