One of the things that Donald Trump is really good at is chaos. Sometimes it’s intentional, like his efforts to sow doubts about his loss in the 2020 election. Sometimes, it’s spontaneous, like when he decided last month that he wanted Congress to repeal the debt ceiling limit, throwing weeks of Congressional negotiations into doubt.

And then there are the trademark Trump brain burps and hare-brained schemes. Sometimes these are fleeting flashes from Trump’s train of thought, such as the idea that mainlining bleach could kill the COVID virus. Other times, these are hare-brained schemes that Trump fixes on.

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There are “very treacherous times we’re going into, and having the protections of the law.”

The latest example of the latter is Trump’s obsession with buying Greenland and invading Panama. (For good measure, Trump said Canada should be part of the U.S., that seemed to just be trolling on Trump’s part.) This set off a flurry of media coverage about Trump as a 21st century William McKinley, culminating in a spectacularly silly story in The New York Times about just how much Greenland would cost to buy, the Times‘ equivalent of a Zillow estimate.

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As with all things Trump, the incoming president views these issues through a tiny lens of his own, which is real estate and a 1950s fifth-grader’s sense of history. Trump doesn’t see countries so much as he sees property to be acquired. Instead of acknowledging that Greenland is not for sale and that Trump is just fantasizing, the media spent endless time chasing down the bright shiny object that Trump threw before them.

The same is true of the Panama invasion. Trump was asked by a reporter if he would rule out military or economic coercion to acquire either Panama or Greenland, so the idea didn’t originate with Trump. In typical Trump fashion, Trump gave a non-answer, along the lines of his “many people are saying” shtick. “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two. But I can say this, we need them for economic security,” Trump said.

Immediately, the headlines blared that Trump wouldn’t rule out invading Panama. But Trump probably never had that idea before a reporter raised it. When faced with a direct question, Trump will always be noncommital, which is what happened here.

The problem that all the invasion talk highlights is that the media still treat Trump as if he were a normal politician. If a normal politician said what Trump said, it would be a clear signal about policy. For Trump, it’s just a shoot-from-the-hip response, with no regard to the implications. But you’d never know that from the breathless coverage that follows. Instead, there are follow-ups from Trump supporters plastering Trump’s comments with fig leaves to make him sound like a policy guru.

In fact, Trump probably does think he can buy Greenland just like Jefferson secured the Louisiana Purchase (assuming he knows Jefferson did). That’s because Trump thinks the U.S. can act as it did when it was a much younger nation, by acquiring land. And acquiring land is what the real estate mogul loves, so of course he’s going to apply his previous career to his current one.

What happens while the media run around talking about Greenland’s strategic importance (which for Trump is probably the excuse, not the reason, to acquire more land), is that really important ssues got lost. When was the last time you heard about Project 2025? Or Pete Hegseth? Or Robert Kennedy Jr.? What about mass deportations or tariffs or anti-trans measures?

You know, the actual stuff that will happen and change (indeed ruin) people’s lives.

This is the brilliance behind Trump’s randomness. He knows that he can send the media off on a wild goose chase at a moment’s notice, changing the narrative. The media think that everything Trump says is news, even when it’s hogwash, and have to treat it seriously. Under the guidelines that they’ve imposed on themselves, they can’t acknowledge that a lot of what Trump says is just made up in the moment. Instead, they have to analyze it as if it was a thoughtful statement. The result is that truly serious things that are happening get buried.

Trump is a creature of the media. He had a symbiotic relationship with the tabloids, and he learned just what the media need: distractions. Trump’s thought processes are just a flood of distractions, creating chaos. Unfortunately, he’s found a willing partner in the media.

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