Ryan Evans asks in War on the Rocks why people keep getting Trump wrong. The clear answer is that a “polite” professional-class has squeamishness about being direct. The diplomatic types, like antelopes in a herd, are afraid to be “rude” and responsible for calling out the predator, America’s Hitler.

The reason “smart, seasoned analysts” keep getting Trump wrong isn’t that he’s uniquely unpredictable. Nope. It’s that they refuse to apply the historical framework that actually fits because it would require saying “this is some dumb fascist expansionism” out loud in respectable DC publications.

So instead we get elaborate taxonomies of “incoherence” that are really just refusing to name the obvious coherence that we find unthinkable.

“We will run Venezuela” is not some unprecedented puzzle requiring five-point analytical frameworks. It’s annexation language. The drug trafficking pretext is a casus belli as transparent as any in history.

Evans gets close when he says analysts should ask whether an action is “legible to [Trump] as fast, dominant, and containable.” But that’s just describing how expansionist leaders think about initial moves. Hitler thought Czechoslovakia was “containable.” So was Austria. The Sudetenland was framed as crisis response, not invasion.

The whole framework of “Trump doesn’t have a doctrine we can recognize” is itself the problem. Trump does have a doctrine. Same as Peter Thiel. It’s territorial expansionism justified by civilizational/racial hierarchy and manufactured threat narratives. We have a word for this. Several words, actually.

Just say lebensraum.