President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump hand out candy to trick-or-treaters at the South Portico during Halloween celebrations at the White House, Thursday, October 30, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Cody Hendrix)
On the heels of Politico writer Jonathan Martin's scathing "exposé" of President Donald Trump as a "free-range" adolescent who has turned the presidency into an "adult fantasy camp," New York Magazine's Ed Kilgore offers five excuses MAGA makes to defend his behavior.
"Martin is just scratching the surface here, of course. He doesn’t even mention the president’s inability to admit or accept responsibility for mistakes, which is reminiscent of an excuse-making child, or his tendency to fabricate his own set of 'facts' like an incessant daydreamer bored by kindergarten," Kilgore notes.
"I find myself wondering regularly how Trump’s own followers process his rather blatant lack of seriousness about the most serious job on the planet," he muses.
The first way MAGA processes this, Kilgore writes, is by "trolling the liberals," a popular pasttime of Trump and his followers.
"The 'he’s just trolling the libs' defense is a useful bit of jiujitsu as it happens. It turns the self-righteousness of his critics into foolishness while neutering any fears that whatever nasty or malicious thing Trump has said reflects his true nature and inclinations," Kilgore says.
The second excuse, Kilgore says, involves "playing chess, not checkers," in that MAGA will "argue that he’s operating on multiple levels that include some higher strategies his critics simply don’t have the mental bandwidth to grasp."
"Trump himself set the template for the 'chess not checkers' theory by telling us his most incoherent speeches and statements reflect a novel rhetorical style he calls 'the weave.' You do have to admire his chutzpah in telling people they simply aren’t smart enough to follow him as he fails to complete thoughts and sentences," Kilgore writes.
Kilgore says MAGA's third excuse was that Trump "is a man of the people, and the people are as childish as he is," Kilgore notes.
Trump's "childishness and even his cruelty could be construed as efforts to meld minds with the sovereign public or, at least, key parts of it," Kilgore explains.
"This became most explicit in 2024 when Trump’s crudeness and fury about diversity were transformed into a shrewd pitch for the support of the 'manosphere' and the masses of politically volatile younger men who spend much of their lives there," he adds.
The fourth excuse is that "Trump is an insurgent leader with an insurgent style," Kilgore writes.
"When returned to power most recently, he hit Washington like a gale-force wind defying all precedents and expressing an exasperated public’s disgust with the status quo and the people who led it. So why would anyone expect this Robespierre to play by the rules of Versailles? That’s not who he is and not what he was elected to do," he writes.
MAGA's fifth excuse is that Trump is "saving America, so he should be able to do any damn thing he wants," Kilgore writes.
"From the MAGA point of view, the 47th president is bending history, reversing a long trend toward national decline, and raising the economic aspirations and moral values of America to heights thought to be long lost," he explains.
"It’s Trump, warts and all, or the abyss, to many Trump fans, today as in 2016," he concludes.
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