Trump Turns Hanlon’s Razor on its Head
When it comes to MAGA, the stupidity serves the malice.
By Ryan McGreal.
558 words. Approximately a 1 to 3 minute read.
Posted March 07, 2025 in Blog.
It’s time to flip Hanlon’s Razor on its head.
Hanlon’s Razor states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” But in the case of Trump, we need to assume the opposite: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.”
When Trump ranted in his recent address to Congress about the NIH funding research to make mice transgender, I figured it was BS because almost everything he says is BS.
And that was an easy call, because, as those quaint fact-checkers in the legacy news media quickly observed, the research was actually about making mice transgenic, ie. genetically modifying them to do things like test cancer treatments.
I am seeing lots of takes mocking the stupidity of the goons behind this ridiculous error. And far be it from me to get in the way of someone calling out the stupidity of horrible people doing stupid things.
But I do think focusing on how stupid it is misses a larger point: it may indeed be stupid, but more importantly, it’s malicious.
I’m not at all convinced that it is stupidity leading them to the kind of error that mistakes transgenic with transgender.
In fact I think it’s at least as likely that their conflation was deliberate - or at the very least indifferent.
The DOGE bags and MAGA hacks are looking for anything that they can sell as a “corrupt” or “woke” line item they have found in the budget, regardless of whether it’s real or even particularly credible.
They know they control the media narrative and that in the minds of their followers, an assertion becomes true by the act of asserting it. It’s an exercise of the power to shape reality.
Trump and his enablers know their base will never question them or go looking for independent verification. They will accept it happily, because it reinforces what they already want to believe.
But the obvious stupidity also plays another malicious role: The people in Trump’s orbit who know it’s BS are forced into a choice. They can go along with the BS to show their loyalty, give up another slice of their dignity and further shut the door on ever breaking free.
Or they can say something about it and incur the wrath of MAGA.
The Trump sycophants who know it’s BS have allowed themselves to become prisoners of their own willingness to sacrifice their principles to advance their ambition.
And they know, deep in their hearts, that it still isn’t enough to secure their place: that they are one misstep, one careless eye roll, one capricious turn of the king’s mood, away from being thrown out the window anyway.
They live in terror and are desperate to show their loyalty so they can hang on a little longer. (And no, I’m not asking you to feel sympathy for them.)
So the more absurd a claim is, the more effectively it serves as a loyalty test that locks in the fealty of people who absolutely know better.
It’s why there are formerly normal people today insisting with a straight face that Canada is a rogue nation run by Mexican drug cartels that needs to be disciplined and then annexed.
That’s stupid. But more to the point, it’s deeply, fundamentally malicious.
And so Hanlon’s Razor needs to be flipped upside-down when it comes to anything Trump. The stupidity must be understood as being in service to the malice.