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The Derp Loop: How Trump Keeps Failing Upwards (and Bringing America Down with Him) [1]
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Date: 2025-03-27
The Unteachable Man
There are two kinds of failure in this world: the kind you learn from and the kind you make your brand.
Donald J. Trump is failure-as-identity. He doesn’t just trip over the same rake twice. He sets up a whole rake garden and charges admission.
Forget the bankruptcies, the fake university, the gold-plated casinos that somehow lost money in a business rigged for the house. Forget Truth Social, the only tech startup outperformed by a guy hawking Kid Rock T-shirts in a strip mall. Trump’s true genius lies not in the scale of his losses but in his inability to learn anything from any of them.
He is the unteachable man, surrounded by sycophants, insulated by grievance, and allergic to expertise. And for someone who talks endlessly about "winning," he sure has a habit of losing in the exact same way every single time.
How to Fail Up Like a Pro
They say insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Trump turned that motto into a political strategy.
Tariffs? Crashed the economy once, so now he’s threatening even higher tariffs with even dumber logic.
Immigration? The first zero-tolerance debacle brought global condemnation. His second-round plan involves more cruelty, fewer facts, and not even a fig leaf of legality.
Foreign policy? In his first term, he offended allies, embraced autocrats, and hollowed out NATO. His reboot: offend harder, embrace tighter, and maybe sell Alaska to Putin if the vibes feel right.
The economy? Inherited a boom, left a crater. Now he’s back, blaming others while pushing the same fiscal clown car off the same cliff.
Personnel? He surrounds himself with crooks, fanboys, and failed pundits. Competence is a disqualifier. Loyalty — or better yet, indicted loyalty — is the key credential.
You might think that after losing the popular vote twice, being impeached twice, and inciting a coup that got his fans jailed, he’d pause for a moment of self-reflection.
You’d be wrong. Self-awareness is kryptonite to the Derp Loop. Trump doesn’t evolve. He replays.
The Musk Doctrine — When Stupid Becomes Strategy
The Derp Loop isn’t just about Trump’s failures. It’s about a culture that now worships failure as long as it’s loud, shameless, and smug.
Enter Elon Musk: the patron saint of tech bros turned fascist fanboys. Musk once launched rockets. Now, he launches tantrums. He complains about government overreach while living on subsidies, touts free speech while banning reporters, and manages to run Twitter/X with all the grace of a guy live-streaming a midlife crisis.
Together, Musk and Trump form a new American archetype: the Billionaire Victim. Rich beyond measure, powerful beyond reason, and still crying about how unfair the world is.
Their fans don’t want governance. They want grievance. They don’t want policy. They want permission — to be cruel, loud, and wrong without consequence. And if that means burning the country down, well, it was never their country to begin with. Not the diverse one. Not the inclusive one.
This isn’t just the rise of the dumb. It’s the weaponization of derp.
The Closing Loop
In any sane timeline, Trump would’ve been laughed out of public life by 2016.
In a just one, January 6 would’ve ended his political career.
But in this one?
He won. Again.
And he’s already stocking the executive branch with the worst of his first-term misfits — Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, the usual parade of loyal saboteurs. He’s exacting loyalty oaths, bureaucratic purges, and the return of government by blunt instrument.
The man who never learns is once again being handed the wheel.
He’s openly mocking NATO, praising Putin, and pushing economic policies designed by a goldfish with a head wound. He doesn’t need to plan, govern, or think. All he must do is keep failing in the same spectacular ways.
Only this time, the guardrails are gone.
That’s the Derp Loop: a spiral of recycled disaster powered by applause and insulated from consequences. And it’s dragging the country down with him.
~ Dunneagin ~
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