And why the real trick is making you think he means what he says.

Donald Trump doesn’t just lie, distract, or gaslight. He does not genuinely think he is the victim of hoaxes. He knows that he is the author of hoaxes because Donald Trump is a real estate developer who builds hoaxes for a living. When he labels an investigation or accusation a “hoax,” he’s not just denying its existence. He’s doing something smarter, more manipulative, and far more dangerous: he’s rebranding a real pursuit as fake while keeping it alive, looping the public into an endless wild goose chase he designed himself. The result? Everyone’s exhausted. No one knows what’s real. And Trump remains, always, at the center of the storm.

The Art of the Trumpian Goose Chase

Donald Trump is often accused of misleading the public, lying outright, or distracting from the truth. But that analysis only scratches the surface. What Trump excels at is not merely distraction but construction of narrative detours. Intentional, orchestrated wild goose chases. These are not organic political spirals but carefully seeded loops, where every pursuit of truth ultimately leads nowhere, by design.

Take the Russia investigation. While the media and political class chased connections, Trump continually labeled the entire thing a “hoax.” On its face, this sounds like denial. But consider: a “hoax” implies something never existed. Yet Trump wouldn’t stop talking about it. He referenced it at rallies, in interviews, even helped boost books framing it as a political setup. Rather than letting the story die, he kept it alive just long enough to control its terms. The same is true of his impeachments, COVID, and the 2020 election.

In each case, he doesn’t just reject the inquiry; he redefines it. He mislabels legitimate questions as hoaxes, casting himself not just as innocent but as persecuted. This recasting transforms investigations into mazes, where the public and press chase after justice while Trump keeps moving the exits. And the more time people spend chasing geese, the less time they spend looking behind the curtain.

What appears as chaos is often narrative engineering.

The hoax label doesn’t end a scandal, though. It elongates it. Because the goal isn’t resolution. The goal is dominance of attention.

The Fool’s Errand Presidency

What distinguishes a wild goose chase from a hoax is purpose. A wild goose chase assumes a target exists, but is elusive. A hoax is different: the target never existed in the first place, and the pursuit is itself the trap. When Trump stages a wild goose chase, it’s not to reveal truth – but to test loyalty, drain energy, and reroute scrutiny.

This is the logic behind Trump’s rhetorical use of terms like “hoax” and “witch hunt.”

They don’t just deny accusations. They imply futility in even asking. He knows that by casting the process as illegitimate, he doesn’t need to rebut the claims themselves.

So he can lie. Make promises and change them. Lead you on a merry adventure and then never finish. The public discourse collapses into emotional confusion. It results in conspiracy theories, on both sides of the political aisle. His real opponents look desperate and obsessed; his supporters feel righteous in ignoring all evidence.

This is why Trump’s scandals rarely resolve.

Two impeachments, multiple investigations, lawsuits, and raids…and yet, nothing ever truly lands. Not because he disproves the charges, but because the structure of pursuit is constantly undermined. He turns every process into a fool’s errand, not by avoiding the chase, but by staging it, embracing it, flooding it with noise, and stripping it of any finality.

Even his behavior around the Fifth Amendment plays into this.

He knows he has the right to remain silent, but he often chooses not to. This isn’t carelessness; it’s a strategy only very fortunate people can employ. He overwhelms the system with conflicting signals.

Silence can be strategic in court. But outside the courtroom, speech (even nonsensical, contradictory speech) can have more power when you hold as much leverage as Donald Trump does.

In this presidency, the fool’s errand is Trump’s posture.

Exhaustion replaces resolution. Chaos becomes control.

How to Lose on Purpose and Still Control Everything

Most people assume Donald Trump cannot stand to lose, or be made fun of. In some way that is because of the misconception of how similar Trump is to figures in history like Hitler or other dictators. Hitler, Stalin, and others in their era would never have put up with people mocking them. Or making memes about them. But Trump does.

It is untrue that his narcissism would never allow it. He only refuses to be begrudged about certain things in his own orbit like business relationships or wealthy and important “friends” who turn on him. Too many people misunderstand his game.

Trump doesn’t care about losing in the traditional sense. Not in business, not in politics, not even in elections. What he cares about is narrative power as it pertains to creating cover for his criminal exploits or personal peccadilloes. 

Loss itself is not a problem. It’s the meaning of the loss that matters. If the loss can be spun as theft, betrayal, or martyrdom, it becomes fuel. In the case of court cases that Trump may lose, if he can set the legal terms of his efforts in such a way that it distracts from other crimes – he may calculate it’s worthwhile. This gives him a new storyline to dominate, a new villain to fight, and a new reason for followers to stay loyal. In fact, Trump gains more from being wronged – than from being right. He becomes more powerful as the underdog.

That’s why the 2020 election, far from being a humiliating defeat, was a jackpot. By branding it the “Rigged Election Hoax,” he transformed a loss into a mission. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He purged the Republican Party of dissenters.

He radicalized local election officials and built a mythology that powered his 2024 campaign and launched him back into office.

For Trump, losing isn’t defeat. It’s stagecraft. The spotlight stays on him either way.

And as long as he’s the main character, he can keep winning.

Staged Enemies, Real Power: The Trump Hoax Doctrine

No Trump scandal functions without a foil. He will routinely blame “radical left lunatics” or “crooked” politicians like Adam Schiff. But these foils are suspiciously ineffective. Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and then she was supposed to get locked up. But she didn’t get locked up. Trump claimed he thought it would be a bad look for a former President’s wife to get locked up. It was never legitimate. When Joe Biden became President he and the Clintons could have attacked Trump for these things. They did not. Dr. Fauci has been branded an enemy of the “MAGA” movement, but Trump hired him.  What ties them together is not their ideology or competence – it’s their utility in Trump’s drama.

They are villains crafted not to destroy him, but to complete his story.

Consider the 2016 race against Hillary Clinton. Trump branded her “Crooked Hillary” and vowed to “lock her up.” He never did. Why? Because jailing your villain ends the show. Letting her linger as a threat makes her eternal. Biden, similarly, is cast as both a senile weakling and the criminal mastermind who supposedly rigged the 2020 election. This contradiction doesn’t matter. It fuels the paranoia.

That’s the doctrine: never win decisively. Victory ends the episode.

Conflict keeps the series going.

This is why Trump needs hoaxes.

Because hoaxes imply actors.

They suggest a plot against him. Whether it’s Clinton, Biden, or the “deep state,” Trump’s enemies are often as essential to him as his followers. He’s not fighting them. He’s casting them.

Producing them.

Paying them in many cases, even if that happens through the veil of adversity like settling lawsuits.

Semantic Sabotage: Trump’s Mastery of the Wild Goose Chase

Language is Trump’s battlefield. Not because he wields it precisely, but because he wields it relentlessly. His genius isn’t eloquence. It’s semantic sabotage. It’s the deliberate collapse of meaning through repetition, contradiction, and redefinition.

Take the word “hoax.” Traditionally, a hoax was a staged deception—a trick revealed at the end. Think War of the Worlds, or viral video stunts. But Trump doesn’t use “hoax” to clarify; he uses it to obscure. When he calls the Russia investigation or COVID criticism a “hoax,” he doesn’t end the story. He deepens it.

In other words, he doesn’t mean hoax when he says hoax.

The public assumes “hoax” means hoax. They can’t imagine that to Trump, his usage of it means “wild goose chase.” He rebrands every chase as illegitimate while keeping it in motion. It’s a bait-and-switch that relies on emotional logic, not rational parsing.

It is one of the strangest things about Trump’s control over the public, that his biggest rhetorical opponents routinely accept the narrative that he believes what it sounds like what he’s saying. That’s how he can transform language around people without them noticing, and leave them confused, angry, and totally ineffective.

Similarly, “witch hunt” has become another tool of Donald Trump. Even more than a wild goose chase or a hoax, a witch hunt does not just imply that you’re going after an innocent person by considering them unnecessarily evil. It suggests that those who are upset about it, are parochial prudes with a lack of understanding of some modern genius only he possesses. A witch hunt implies not just injustice, but mass hysteria. It paints Trump as both the target and the calm observer. It short-circuits the audience’s trust in institutions and makes every inquiry suspect. It doesn’t disprove the claims. It makes proving claims socially impossible. But it does not make it legally impossible to stop him or catch him.

In Trump’s world, meaning isn’t fixed. It’s a fluid, chaotic swamp, and he alone knows how to swim through it.

The Long Con: Why Trump’s Hoaxes Never End

Most politicians try to end scandals. Trump never does. His hoaxes are never resolved because resolution isn’t profitable. Closure kills momentum.

But, ambiguity? That feeds the media machine that surrounds his bad behavior.

This is why every major Trump-related scandal is a loop, not a line. Russia Russia Russia – he still talks about it. Ukraine “never would have” had a war if he were President. COVID…he has gone quiet about. The elections? Nearly every press conference even in 2025, he mentions it. None of these have a final act. They all trail off into mystery, accusation, and reinterpretation. That ambiguity lets Trump reframe them perpetually, and never allows for any other perspective to get air time.

He doesn’t want one definitive fight. He wants a series of fights that never end.

Because each one gives him what he craves most: the role of protagonist. As long as people are chasing Trump’s truth, Trump stays at the center.

The chase itself is the product. And people that love Trump love his cycle. But sadly, the people who hate Trump love this more. It gives them content to make. It gives the media stories to write. The public, the legal system, and the opposition get tricked into a game they can’t win. Because they’re not chasing facts, nor are they taking actionable steps with real accountability or consequence.

People keep chasing a moving target, built to disappear just before it lands.

Behind every scandal is usually a real story. A deal. A payoff. A cover-up.

But Trump’s greatest trick is making sure you never find it. Because while you’re chasing one scandal, he’s already staging the next one.

Trump doesn’t just lie. He builds labyrinths. And as long as we’re in them, he doesn’t need to escape.

Trump Is Getting Tired, Though

Today, Trump’s press secretary released a statement that he has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which explains the bloating that has been noted in his legs and hands. He has been trailing off in speeches. He recently appeared to forget that he was the person who hired/appointed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The man is old, and has been leading a very confusing life for a long time.

It makes sense that eventually he would not be able to keep his lies straight, knowing how many different subsets of people he has been telling different things to about what he knows or cares about with respect to these “hoaxes” which are really wild goose chases.

For those people who are upset with Trump and his administration over their handling of the Epstein case in particular, Trump has attempted to brand this “forever” as the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”

If my theory is correct, that does not prove Trump is *in the files* but it would suggest that Trump is responsible for Jeffrey Epstein becoming a wild goose chase.