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The Way of the Doofus Warrior (Trump)

By Josh Marshall PublishedAugust 28, 2015, 11:33 AM EDT


Yesterday we looked at how a doofus and blowhard, awash in derp, can nonetheless have a tactical genius that allows him to defeat all enemies again and again. I focused on an analogy I'm familiar with: increased mobility as a key to victory for Northern Civil War generals. But something funny happened in response to this post. Over almost 15 years of doing this, all of my best ideas and insights and certainly most of our best news tips have come from email exchanges with readers. But in all that time I'm not sure a post has struck the same chord - and a quite specific and technical one at that - with so many readers at once. A number of readers wrote in and said they agreed with the Sherman analogy but that a much tighter conceptual framework comes from a highly influential American military theorist who died almost 20 years ago, Colonel John Richard Boyd.

Boyd is known for something called OODA loops. We'll get to the specifics in a second. But he argued that all military action is defined by patterns of getting information, deciding how to act on it and then acting. Whoever completes those loops faster dominates and wins. The same also applies if you can get inside the other player's decision loop and disrupt them.....


....I do think you’ve hit on something. No idea if Trump is familiar with the work of Col. John Boyd on the OODA (orient, observe, decide act) Loop, but I have no doubt that you are. Trump does seem to have realized that, paradoxically, the 24 hour news cycle and the “Internet Time” phenomena that demands instant responses to other candidate’s statements and acts, has paradoxically led to the accretion of ever greater layers of buffering and vetting to prevent a candidate from losing a news cycle, or several news cycles, to a gaffe that have both created an absolute minimum response time that can be exploited by dispensing with those protections and attenuated the effectiveness of the response when it comes because the fear of the gaffe exceeds the desire to exploit the opportunity. The result is exactly the kind of Luntzified keyword marble-mouthed double talking zinger durp that people (on both sides) have come to loathe. What Trump has realized is that he can get inside the other candidates' OODA loops by just working without a net and firing off one tweet and one unfiltered message after another so that the other guys are responding to what he said three tweet cycles ago. But perhaps more importantly, he’s realized he can get away with what the other campaigns would deem disasterous “gaffes” by getting inside the press corps’ OODA loop, which he does by firing gaffe after gaffe after gaffe in n such machine-gun like rapid succession that the MSM never has a chance to focus on one and turn it into something like, say Romney’s “49%” or Obama’s “bitter clingers” gaffes (square quote omitted) because by the time they report it, he’s already belted out a half dozen more on that topic and fired off three other salvos on three other topics.

My gut still tells me that at some point, he blows up. At some point, he says something so far beyond the pale that the MSM focuses on it no matter how much more crap he keep spewing out, and that there is a strategy for making this happen to be had by the other campaigns if they work on it. But it only happens if another campaign does, in fact, develop that strategy. But I also have to tell my gut that Rush Limbaugh, who basically ran the exact same scam in slow motion for three decades, took that long to finally hit the Sandra Fluke hatespew that has cost him so many advertisers and resulted in ClearChannel putting him on stations no one listens to, at least for the duration of his current contract.....

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-way-of-the-doofus-warrior