Chris Abraham

I’m not saying this is what’s happening. I’m not claiming anything is staged. But I can’t help thinking about Wag the Dog.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the entire premise of the film is that a U.S. president is about to lose reelection because of a scandal involving inappropriate contact with an underage Girl Scout in the Oval Office. Two weeks before the election, a political fixer brings in a Hollywood producer to solve the problem the only way they know how: change the story dominating the news cycle.

Their solution is to invent a war.

They pick Albania because it’s obscure enough that the average American doesn’t know anything about it. The producer literally stages footage on sound stages—fake refugee scenes, patriotic music, heroic narratives—and feeds it to the media.

Suddenly the entire country is talking about the crisis overseas instead of the scandal at home. When the CIA tries to shut down the story by saying the war isn’t real, the PR team escalates the narrative by inventing a stranded American war hero and creating a massive patriotic spectacle around rescuing him.

The point of the movie isn’t that wars are fake. The point is that media attention is finite, and whoever controls the story controls what the public is thinking about.

So no, I’m not saying the 2026 bombing or confrontation with Iran is some Hollywood production with green screens and actors clutching kittens. Reality is usually messier than satire.

But I will say this: when a foreign crisis suddenly dominates the news cycle at exactly the moment domestic headlines are filling up with things like Epstein files, investigations, or politically dangerous stories, it does create a certain… cinematic déjà vu.

Not a claim.

Not an accusation.

Just a citizen remembering a very on-the-nose political satire from 1997 and raising an eyebrow at the timing.

When someone says “white Christian nationalism is an existential threat to democracy,” I can’t evaluate it without definitions, because two different accusations get blurred into one slogan.

First: what do they mean by white Christian nationalism? Do they mean a specific ideology asserting the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed that way, with laws and institutions reflecting Protestant values, often paired with the idea that white Christians should maintain cultural and political dominance? Or do they mean an identity bucket where anyone who is white, Christian, or patriotic/nationalist is treated as inherently suspect? Those are radically different claims. Conflating them turns debate into moral sorting.

Second: what do they mean by democracy? Democracy, as a mechanism, is descriptive. It doesn’t “correct” outcomes, it reports what the electorate chose. If it were prescriptive, we’d just install the “right” result and skip the election. The moral content people are usually defending is not “democracy” by itself, it’s the rights-and-limits framework that constrains what majorities can do.

Call that what it is: the American way of life. Constitutional rights, equal citizenship, due process, free exercise, free speech, and limits on state power. Voting is the mechanism operating inside that framework, not the framework itself. And the framework only holds when there’s cultural buy-in. The process is downstream of civic ethos, trust, restraint, and a shared willingness to keep playing the same game even when you lose.

So if the claim is “white Christian nationalism threatens the American way of life, equal citizenship, and constitutional limits,” say that and name the mechanisms: laws, institutional capture, rights restrictions, election rule changes, violence. If the claim is “a majority voting for illiberal policies is anti-democratic,” then democracy is being redefined as a moral outcome rather than a process. Either way, “democracy” is doing too much work here, and it starts functioning like a shibboleth: a prestige word that signals virtue while staying conveniently undefined.

My admittedly bombastic theory is that Trump’s policy pivots aren’t random. They look like a sequence of economic levers designed to keep the U.S. economy humming long enough to avoid being the president holding the bag when the global slowdown arrives.

Start with tariffs. Tariffs on China, EVs, steel, electronics, and industrial inputs are effectively forced industrial policy. They push supply chains out of China and into North America. Companies start reshoring factories, expanding ports, building warehouses, hiring compliance teams, and retooling production. Even the friction creates economic activity: logistics, lawyers, consultants, subsidies, and construction.

But tariffs run into legal and political obstacles. Courts intervene. Trade partners retaliate. Congress grumbles. The lever gets partially blocked.

So the next lever becomes deportation.

Large-scale deportation isn’t just immigration policy, it’s a gigantic federal spending machine. It requires detention centers, transportation contracts, surveillance systems, immigration courts, federal marshals, border infrastructure, and private contractors. At the same time it tightens the labor market by reducing the low-wage workforce, which pushes wages upward in construction, agriculture, and services. More enforcement spending plus wage pressure equals money circulating domestically.

But deportation also runs into courts, injunctions, and bureaucratic resistance. Judges slow it down. Agencies drag their feet. The lever gets stymied.

So the pivot becomes the one lever that historically moves the fastest and faces the fewest legal obstacles: defense spending.

Modern warfare consumes extraordinarily expensive hardware. Interceptor missiles, cruise missiles, drone systems, naval deployments, precision bombs. Every missile fired has to be replaced. Every depleted stockpile requires replenishment orders. That means immediate procurement contracts for companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and hundreds of subcontractors making electronics, metals, explosives, and guidance systems.

In economic terms, it is a rapid procurement cycle that pushes billions of dollars into manufacturing and supply chains.

Viewed through this lens, the pattern is simple. When one economic lever gets blocked, another appears.

Tariffs stimulate reshoring.

Deportation stimulates enforcement spending and wage pressure.

Defense spending stimulates procurement and industrial production.

Different policy arenas, same macro effect: factories running, contracts flowing, and money moving through the system.

The objective, in this theory, isn’t elegance. It’s survival.

Because politically the one thing Trump absolutely cannot be is the president standing at the podium the day the recession officially begins. If the downturn is inevitable, the strategy becomes stretching the American economic engine just long enough to ride out the global turbulence better than Europe or China.