This bad boy could cause severe weather if he wants to./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, mtl89.
After a week in which his most trusted aide resigned, the Republican establishment expressed anger at him for expressing a willingness to compromise on gun reform, and his son-in-law’s position in the White House looked tenuous, President Donald J. Trump fingered an unusual culprit for the mayhem: “that butterfly in New Mexico.”
“I totally blame that chaos-causing insect in the Southwest. It once caused a hurricane in China, after all. A lot of people are talking about how its wings-flapping is the reason my White House is about as orderly and efficacious as a severe weather event,” Trump said in a news conference. His face could be seen reddening with rage even beneath his carefully-maintained orange skin hue.
“Chaos theory, in mechanics and mathematics, is the study of apparently random or unpredictable behavior in systems governed by deterministic laws.,” according to Brittanica. A commonly-cited example of real-world implications of the chaos theory, though it’s primarily a mathematical one, is that the motion of a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico could eventually have an effect on a seemingly unrelated and far-away phenomenon, like the weather in China. Clearly, what we should all take from this fact is that Trump isn’t to blame for anything negative at the White House or in the country. Unless it’s good–then it’s all him. See this page administered by Fractal Foundation for more on this.
The past week saw more than the usual amount of chaos at good, ol’ 1600 Penn. Hope Hicks resigned from her post as one of Trump’s most-trusted, highest-level aides. This was after she admitted to telling “white lies” for Trump in an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who’s investigating whether Trump’s presidential campaign or administration colluded with Russia to help get him elected.
Then White House Chief of Staff General John F. Kelly downgraded Jared Kushner’s security clearance, making many of the myriad jobs he’d been tasked with–from brokering Middle East peace to overhauling the federal bureaucracy. Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.
Trump also caused shockwaves in the right-wing political community when he expressed an openness to gun reform last week. After that, he imposed export tariffs on aluminum and steel. This last moved caused White House watchers to speculate that his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, might hit the bricks, as well.
And finally, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Attorney General, whose relationship with His Orangeness could be described as being about as devoid of ups and downs as a loop-de-loop rollercoaster, was the target of more of Trump’s frustrations in his ongoing lashing out at the man he selected to be his Attorney General but has since soured on For an even more extensive list of all wacky ups and downs of only this past week, see this article by Andrew Prokop of Vox.
“Chaos Theory is a mathematical sub-discipline that studies complex systems. Examples of these complex systems that Chaos Theory helped fathom are earth’s weather system, the behavior of water boiling on a stove, migratory patterns of birds, or the spread of vegetation across a continent,” according to Abarim Publications.
Well, that sounds about right! Except that the beauty and sublimity of those phenomena are easy to see. Trump’s White House, on the other hand, is dark, ugly, morally bankrupt, and pretty much hideous in every way,
Perhaps another apt metaphor for understanding the Trump White House would be the behavior of dominoes, one tipping under the weight of the one that fell before it, as the above-referenced Vox article points out. Of course, you need to imagine Niccolo Machiavelli, Freidrich Nietzsche, and Lao Tzu sitting alongside the dominoes, rubbing their palms together, laughing maniacally while tossing their heads back, and raising one eyebrow evilly.
The Butterfly Effect, by Ray Bradbury, illustrates the effects of failing to heed the power of minuscule changes, as they could unforeseen and deleterious effects down the line. In it, time travelers from the year 2055, when a fascist candidate has just lost an election in their home country, go on a safari 2 million years ago and are warned by their guide to have as negligible an effect as possible on the environment. One of them gets spooked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex and runs of the levitating path they are required to stay on. When they get back to 2055, they notice “subtle changes,” at first, according to Stories By Williams. And then, they see the fascist candidate has won the election. Later, one of the characters notices a squashed butterfly on the bottom of his boot.
Hmmm….so maybe a bunch of future safari hunters stepped on a dragonfly causing, Hillary Clinton to lose the 2016 American presidential election and Donald Trump to win.
Another important concept in Chaos Theory is fractals. “Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales,” again according to Fractal Foundation. So basically, inside the White House is the exact same White House, but smaller, down to the tiniest detail and all the same cast of characters, and inside that one is the exact same White House, but smaller, down to the tiniest detail and all the same cast of characters, and so on and so forth.
“My suggestion to Trump would be to consult with people who know who to run a government and those who know how to enact policy, rather than looking for New Mexican Lepidoptera to blame his wreck of a presidency on,” said Needa Tondeen, Director of the Organization for United States Forward Motion, a liberal think tank. “Blaming the Butterfly Effect is inherently disempowering and shuns his personal responsibility in the ongoing disasters that mark his first year or so in the highest office in the nation.”
“The President, as is well-known, hates the natural environment and has no use for it. He’s, therefore, considering a Constitutional amendment banning all insects in New Mexico. He feels this is the best way to see that he is free to be the highly effectual policymaker he is. I think we can all agree that New Mexico butterfly, still flapping away, no doubt is a Democrat,” said Sanders. She also said that the reason he retweeted a far-right conspiracy website’s claim that all insects are paid “crisis actors” because he firmly believes that to be true.
Also: See what Jared Kushner’s reading in the wake of his tumultuous week at the White House.
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
