On January 11, Donald Trump posted his official portrait on the Truth Social platform, with the caption: "Acting President of Venezuela." The message appeared in the format of a Wikipedia entry. The fake page said he had been in office since January 2026, which the US president shared one week after the abduction of his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolas Maduro, in blatant disregard for international law.
Nine days later, just hours before leaving Washington for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where European leaders awaited him in shock, Trump posted another meme in the middle of the night, this time about Greenland. The photo showed him planting an American flag on the ice sheet, accompanied by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A sign in the image read, "Greenland. US territory. Est. 2026," blatantly disregarding the sovereignty of an allied nation.
Trump has turned provocation, and the chaos it triggers, into a tool of governance. Over the past year, far from tempering the excesses of his second presidential campaign, he has doubled down on cultivating a cult of personality. The media saturation that followed was anything but accidental. According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), authoritarian shifts often begin with symbolic gestures, perceived as provocative or even grotesque, but which accustom the public to the idea of excess. When repeated endlessly, these gestures numb citizens to outrage.
"When you live under the rule of these strong, narcissistic men, you wake up every day wondering what will happen next," said Ben-Ghiat on January 17 during a discussion on the Substack platform. "They thrive on chaos. They use chaos to wear us down." The strategy has not been without effect, according to The Atlantic. Americans "can't seem to keep up," wrote journalist Ashley Parker in an article published January 20. They have fallen victim to a collective exhaustion: "Trump Exhaustion Syndrome."