You don’t need to understand President Trump to understand his strategy. You only need to understand Roy Cohn, the legal architect of McCarthyism and later the personal attorney and mentor to Trump.
He wasn’t a statesman. He wasn’t even a policy thinker. He was a political street-fighter who distilled power into three principles: attack relentlessly, never admit fault and always claim victory — especially when you lose.
This isn’t just a style. It’s a system. And Trump has followed it for decades, treating politics as performance, power as theater, and truth as optional. Now, in his second term, the Cohn doctrine is running the show.
But once you recognize the playbook, the mystique evaporates. Beneath the fury, there is no machinery. Beneath the threats, there is no architecture. Trump is louder than ever, but no more effective. The country, bruised as it is, is still intact. And once we see the strategy for what it is, we also see something else: we’re going to get through this.
Take a step back. What has actually happened?
Yes, Trump returned to the White House with more fury. He’s issued proclamations about mass deportations, implemented sweeping tariffs, and imperiled funding for elite institutions he wants to punish, such as Harvard. His administration floats executive orders, threatens agencies and rattles markets. But the substance of governance remains thin.
As of this writing, he has signed only five bills into law, the most significant being the Laken Riley Act. His much-hyped “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed the House but faces an uphill climb in the Senate. Compared to former Presidents Biden, Obama and even George W. Bush, who passed more bills and major economic and relief packages within their first 100 days, Trump’s second term record is among the weakest in modern presidential history.
His executive orders, meanwhile, have produced more headlines than outcomes. Despite issuing a record number in his first months, many are either symbolic, redundant or immediately challenged in court. Few, if any, have altered the policy landscape in meaningful or measurable ways. They serve more as performative declarations than governing tools.
Even on immigration, one of his core promises, the numbers tell a different story.
Trump deported, via removals and returns, approximately 1.8 million people during his first term. By comparison, Biden oversaw approximately 2 million deportations, excluding Title 42 order expulsions. Obama, once labeled as “deporter in chief,” removed about 5.2 million over his eight years. In his current term, Trump has struggled to meet internal ICE targets. A federal judge in Texas recently blocked his effort to fast-track mass removals, citing due process concerns.
So the rhetoric is aggressive, but the machinery hasn’t delivered.
The judiciary, too, has served as a firewall. The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2020, calling the move “arbitrary and capricious.” More recently, it halted the administration’s plan to deport Venezuelan nationals under the Alien Enemies Act.
These decisions underscore a pattern: Trump pushes, but institutions push back.
What has persisted is perception. The southern border feels more secure, in part because Trump projects strength, whether or not the policies are working. His unpredictability on the global stage has unsettled adversaries. There is some deterrent value in erratic leadership, but this isn’t strategy. It’s volatility. And volatility doesn’t build trust — it frays it.
Meanwhile, Congress still debates. States resist federal overreach. Journalists investigate. Independent agencies function. Foreign governments still call Washington first. They may grit their teeth, but they haven’t walked away. What Trump has broken is not the government. It’s the illusion that leadership must be stable to be legitimate.
This isn’t to excuse the harm. Trump has degraded public discourse, eroded civic trust, and placed millions of Americans in a state of political anxiety. He’s made cruelty a feature of policy, not a flaw. But the deeper damage — the irreversible kind — has not occurred. And that matters.
There has been no constitutional breakdown, no military purges, no Supreme Court packing, and no canceled elections. Trump’s critics feared democracy would die in darkness. What’s happened instead is that democracy has dimmed and flickered but remained alive.
MAGA, for all its fury, is not a governing ideology. It is a personal brand. Without Trump, it collapses. No other Republican has replicated his media dominance or party control. And even he is losing his grip. The longer this term drags on, the less fearsome he appears.
In that sense, this is not a fascist consolidation. It’s a slow-motion unraveling. And that’s the paradox: The more Trump lashes out, the more it becomes clear he cannot control the system he claims to command. The real threat is not his power. It is the illusion of power, and our tendency to confuse chaos with transformation.
Roy Cohn taught him to dominate the room, never back down, and frame every loss as a win. But governance isn’t a courtroom fight. It’s not a brand campaign. It’s the slow, difficult work of building coalitions, writing laws and executing policy. And it cannot be faked forever.
America has survived presidents who tested the boundaries of power — Nixon, Wilson, even Jackson. Each time, it bent. Each time, it corrected. Each time, it stood again. Trump is not the end of the American experiment. He is a stress test — one we are passing, barely, but undeniably. Yes, we’ve been wounded. But we’re still standing.
Winston Churchill, a man familiar with democratic dysfunction, once said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”
We’re trying everything else. The right thing is coming.
Corey Kvasnick is an entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, and a contributor to Common Ground Thinking.