The Establishment’s Trump Problem: When Results Don’t Match Expectations

Peggy Noonan’s recent Wall Street Journal piece on Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy offers a revealing window into the intellectual contortions that define the establishment’s relationship with Donald Trump.

Her analysis, riddled with contradictions and hedged bets, perfectly captures the cognitive dissonance of a foreign policy elite that finds itself repeatedly wrong-footed by a president whose methods they cannot fathom but whose results they cannot entirely dismiss.

The Hedging Strategy

Noonan’s approach exemplifies what might be called “analytical insurance”—positioning oneself to claim vindication regardless of outcome. She advocates for “tentative hopefulness” about Trump’s peace efforts while simultaneously suggesting he might be “a naïf, a fool propelled by his own vanity.” This allows her to later claim prescience whether the Ukraine initiative succeeds or fails spectacularly.

This hedging reflects a deeper problem within establishment circles: an inability to seriously grapple with the possibility that Trump’s unconventional methods might be deliberate and effective rather than accidental and lucky.

The foreign policy community has invested so heavily in the narrative of Trump as incompetent that acknowledging strategic thinking becomes intellectually threatening.

The Motivation Puzzle

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in Noonan’s treatment of Trump’s stated motivations. She dismisses criticism of his Nobel Prize aspirations with “so what? It’s a prize for peace, not war,” and even finds his comment about wanting “to go to heaven” refreshingly honest. Yet she cannot resist characterizing these statements as potentially “gassy formulations” designed to appeal to Sean Hannity’s audience.

This reveals the establishment’s core interpretive framework:

Trump cannot be credited with genuine conviction or strategic thinking. Any seemingly principled position must be reframed as either political calculation or accidental wisdom. The possibility that Trump might actually want peace for its own sake or even for reasons of legacy and moral conviction remains intellectually inadmissible.

The Competence Question

Noonan credits Trump with “lighting a fire under the diplomatic dimension” and describes the European leaders’ White House meeting as a “historic ten-strike.” She notes Putin’s displeasure at seeing European unity and acknowledges the significance of leaders coming to Washington to court Trump’s involvement. Yet she frames Trump’s non-linear approach as inherently problematic, making the story “hard to follow.”

This misses a crucial point: Trump’s unpredictability might be a feature, not a bug, of his diplomatic strategy. What Noonan sees as incoherence, adversaries like Putin might experience as genuine uncertainty about American intentions which is after all, a significant negotiating advantage that conventional diplomacy often lacks.

The Results Problem

The establishment’s Trump problem is fundamentally about results. Noonan seems genuinely surprised that Trump isn’t simply abandoning Ukraine, noting that “much of his base would have liked it just fine. He isn’t playing to it.”

This surprise reveals how deeply the establishment has invested in a caricature of Trump as purely transactional and politically motivated.

When Trump produces outcomes that align with establishment preferences such as European unity, sustained pressure on Russia, serious diplomatic engagement, the cognitive dissonance becomes acute. These results must be explained away as accidents, lucky breaks, or the work of his advisors rather than acknowledged as products of Trump’s own strategic thinking.

The Horse Thief’s Wisdom

Noonan concludes with an old folk tale about a condemned horse thief who buys time by promising to teach the king’s horse to laugh, reasoning that “in a month the king may die, or I may die, or the horse may laugh.” She applies this to Trump: “Take a chance, try something, you never know.”

This framing is telling. It reduces Trump’s diplomatic efforts to a desperate gamble rather than a calculated strategy.

The possibility that Trump might actually understand something about negotiation, leverage, or international relations that the experts have missed remains unthinkable.

Beyond the Caricature

The establishment’s inability to move beyond their Trump caricature has real costs. It prevents serious analysis of what works and what doesn’t in his approach, making it harder to learn from both successes and failures. It also undermines their own credibility when Trump achieves outcomes they insisted were impossible.

More fundamentally, it reveals an intellectual rigidity that ill-serves American foreign policy. The world is changing rapidly, and traditional diplomatic approaches face new challenges from adversaries who understand conventional Western thinking all too well. Dismissing unconventional approaches simply because they don’t fit established frameworks may be a luxury America can no longer afford.

Noonan’s piece, for all its hedging and contradiction, at least acknowledges that Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy deserves to be taken seriously. That represents progress of sorts.

But until the establishment can move beyond viewing Trump as either a lucky fool or an accidental genius, they will continue to misunderstand both his methods and their effectiveness.

The horse thief’s wisdom cuts both ways: sometimes the unexpected happens not because of luck, but because someone was smart enough to create conditions where it could.

Maybe it’s time to consider that possibility seriously.