On Tuesday, a longtime GOP insider revealed the right-wing feedback loop that amplifies President Donald Trump’s lies and sustains his grip over Republican minds. This “Quadrangle of Doom,” asserts former GOP campaign strategist and White House official Bill Kristol, will drive the administration’s increasingly radical behavior during the final two years of its term.
In the wake of Trump’s defeat in 2020, conservative commentator Sarah Longwell coined the term “Republican Triangle of Doom” to describe the media and messaging bubble shared by Donald Trump, the right-wing infotainment complex, and Republican voters. As Kristol explains, the pattern worked like this: “Trump lies, Fox amplifies the lies, and his voters believe the lies. Then GOP politicians echo the lies because that’s what their voters believe. It’s a closed cycle, and it helped bring Trump to power and sustain him in power. It’s shaped our politics to a remarkable degree for a decade.” But “the Triangle of Doom is now fraying, perhaps even coming apart, because reality has (finally) pierced the cycle.” At the same time, Kristol cautions, “The bad news is that we may now be seeing it supplemented, even supplanted, by an equally dangerous Quadrangle of Doom,” which “consists of a megalomaniacal president, powerful fanatics occupying key positions in his administration, increasingly radicalized MAGA true believers, and reliably cowardly and collaborating elites.”
As Kristol explains of the “unhinged president” factor, “It’s pretty obvious that Trump’s psychological disorders — narcissism and solipsism, the unconstrained lying, the unchecked grandiosity — are increasingly out of control. From the AI posts on Truth Social depicting him as a world savior to his desperate desire to put his name on the Kennedy Center and build his arch, from kicking media organizations out of the White House to using taxpayer resources to invent Trump TV — we’re at a new level of egomania. One could say we’ve gone from egomania to megalomania, from authoritarianism to a kind of messianism.” According to Kristol, “Trump seems even more detached from reality than he was a year ago, let alone five or ten years ago. Whether it’s advancing age and intimations of mortality, or simply the familiar spectacle of authoritarians believing their own propaganda and becoming ever more detached from reality (likely some of both), Trump is clearly more unhinged, more reckless, more unconstrained than ever.”
The second quadrangle corner is “an administration filled with — and led by — fanatics and sycophants." As Kristol writes, "Trump’s first term had cabinet secretaries and some White House aides who knew better and would sometimes push back. Trump’s second term has Stephen Miller running immigration policy unchecked, Russell Vought seeking to destroy the civil service, Pete Hegseth firing general officers of the military, and Todd Blanche obeying orders. And so it’s not just Trump’s personal megalomania and narcissism that are increasingly out of control. It’s his administration’s machismo and militarism, its bigotry and nativism and extremism, that are all increasingly out of control.”
Then there is MAGA. According to Kristol, “It’s always been a movement of true believers. But we’ve seen the familiar pattern of increased self-radicalization of authoritarian movements once they taste power. And so over the last several years we’ve gone from more guarded expressions of traditional American bigotry to overt white supremacism, from occasional claims of religious blessing for the movement to outright Christian nationalism, from post-liberalism to neo-fascism. Years of stewing in the poisoned waters of conspiracism and the fetid swamp of victimization has led to increased levels of derangement. And in the face of disappointment, many of the true believers have become not chastened but more extreme.”
Despite this growing radicalization, warns Kristol, “The elites remain on board. Business and conservative elites, and many social and civic elites, continue to accommodate Trump and his administration. The rise of Trumpist tech oligarchs has made Trump’s dominance of the business world easier, but the more normal business elites have deeply internalized the lesson that they can do well by going along and getting along. And so the calculation and cowardice and capitulation of the elites remains strong even as support from the public drifts away.”
With all this in mind, concludes Kristol, “Trump’s megalomania and narcissism are increasingly out of control. His deputies’ fanaticism and sycophancy are increasingly out of control. The radicalization of the MAGA movement is increasingly out of control. And the elites’ accommodation is as widespread and their acquiescence as entrenched as ever. This Quadrangle of Doom means that we face a truly perilous next two years.”
