23.11.2025
The Walking Chaos III
The Resistance
Klaudia Grote

When a destructive leadership style converges with economic hubris, the result is not a coherent future vision but a sequence of escalating risks to the internal stability of a state. Political psychology describes such trajectories in stages: economic miscalculations, erosion of trust, mass protests, police repression, radicalization, proto–civil conflict dynamics, and finally a dangerous tension between civilian authority and the military.

In the US, these developments are not any more hypothetical. Trumps economic ventures – the rushed introduction of a new reserve currency, experimental debt schemes, and aggressive tariff politics – begin to generate real, measurable costs. Uncertainty spreads across financial markets, capital withdraws, investment stalls. These effects can be disguised through spectacle and propaganda for a time, but not indefinitely. As in Parts I and II, the same principle applies: reality eventually overwhelms narrative.

When the consequences reach ordinary households, public trust can collapse with surprising speed. In such moments, mass protests are less the expression of ideological conviction and more the symptom of collective loss of control. They convey a silent expectation that the political and institutional adults in the room must intervene, restore boundaries, and reestablish the norms that the leader has eroded.

But as we have seen, the greatest danger does not lie in the will of the autocratic leader himself. Following the insights of political psychology, it lies in the erosion of state competence that surrounds him. Autocratic systems do not implode because the leader is too powerful. They implode because the system becomes too weak to restrain him. Instability begins long before it becomes visible. The system is unstable before it understands that it is unstable.

In such a vacuum, the security apparatus becomes decisive. Modern democratic militaries are trained not only to follow lawful orders, but to reject unlawful ones. This distinction becomes existential when a leader seeks to use the military to reinforce unconstitutional acts. The result is a dangerous conflict between legality and loyalty. For the Walking Trump Chaos, this tension cannot be resolved. He demands unconditional obedience and interprets any institutional limit as a personal insult. For the armed forces, the stakes are institutional identity and survival. To abandon him accelerates his fall; to obey him risks their own delegitimization.

Meanwhile, external actors do not remain passive. Other states quickly understand that the internal destabilization of a major power will produce global shockwaves. In response, Europe, China, the BRICS states, and parts of the Global South begin constructing alternative monetary and trade architectures, not primarily out of rivalry but out of systemic self-protection against the chaos of an overextended hegemony. As in the previous chapters, international behavior shifts from moral to functional logic once clarity sets in.

Resistance, in this sense, is not the heroic uprising of isolated individuals. It is the accumulation of systemic counterreactions: institutions returning to their core functions, societies recovering their capacity for reality testing, and international partners building autonomous structures of stability. The aim is not the removal of one person, but the containment of his destructive impact on a political system that has lost its own orientation.

Real resistance begins at the moment when people see with full clarity what is happening and relinquish the comforting fiction that the problem will resolve itself.