Trump rollercoaster still going: It's going to be a bumpy eight years

A year ago, I noticed Trump's campaign going through a fairly regular cycle, roughly one month going up, then another month going down. Each peak or valley was in the first half of a calendar month. That continued throughout the electoral season and beyond, so it wasn't just something about campaigning.

The last update I wrote was in December (with links to earlier posts), providing a basic model of what was going on. Read that post for more detail, but the gist is that the collective emotional energy level is like a neuron being stimulated and firing. It goes through its excited stage, then a refractory phase, then a resting yet excitable phase, before firing again.

From that model, I predicted that this rollercoaster would continue if the level of energy being injected by the stimulating source -- namely, Trump himself -- remained high. A low level of stimulation only excites the neuron a little bit, and it goes quickly back to the resting state, without sending it through a soaring high and crashing low trajectory.

Trump has kept the energy level high, and sure enough the rollercoaster has continued.

Since the last report, there was a relative peak in January, when people were looking forward to Inauguration and ready to "give him a chance". After Inauguration Day, late January and into the first half of February, there were constant negative leaks, the failure of the travel ban (plus the protests against it), and the Deep State kicking out NSC Advisor Flynn.

Late February and the first part of March saw his Joint Address to Congress, the bombshell revelation that Obama had Trump surveiled, the start toward repealing-and-replacing Obamacare, and the ultimate punking of Rachel Maddow with "Trump's tax returns".

Late March and the first part of April saw the collapse of the Obamacare repeal effort, the interventionist take-over of foreign policy beginning with the airstrike on Syria, and the evaporation of the investigations into Trump being surveiled by the government.

Late April and so far into May, the hawkish foreign policy stuff has cooled for the moment, Trump managed to cajole the House into passing a healthcare bill, and now FBI Director Comey has finally been axed, clearing the way for long-overdue swamp draining.

Notice that since the cycle is an even number length, it's the same up months and down months as last year. First half of March were all his victories, early April was the Wisconsin primary and abortion punishment controversy, early May was winning Indiana and effectively sealing up the nomination, etc.

That means prepare for the rollercoaster ride to continue. Like last year, there will be a nadir coming up sometime in the first half of June (last time: the La Raza judge controversy, rioters mobbing Trump rally attendees in San Jose). Maybe it will be the Senate delivering a fail on the healthcare bill, or another thwarted attempt at the Muslim travel ban, or the Pentagon dragging us into more pointless interventions.

Going forward, we should take into account where we are in the rollercoaster cycle, to write off some of the blackpilling if it's during an expected depressive phase, but also to temper ambitions during an expected manic phase.

For example, we've moved into an excited phase, and with Comey unceremoniously fired, both Trump supporters and Trump fearers alike are thinking that Crooked Hillary, Bill, Huma, Pizza Podesta, and the rest of the gang are going to be led away in chains. Something will happen to some of them, but the last time around should give us pause.

In early March, during a manic phase, we heard that Obama had Trump's "wires tapped," and the investigations turned up more and more, then they hit a plateau, and although Susan Rice herself was outed as a participant, that whole storyline went up in a puff of smoke after the airstrike on Syria and subsequent Cold War revival.

It's going to take a little bit for a replacement to be found at FBI, let alone to draw up formal indictments. By the time things actually get going, we could already be in the next depressive phase, and it's going to either go nowhere or get put on the back burner, leaving us feeling cheated and defeated.

So rather than the short-term cycles up and down, we should focus on where the longer-term trends are pointing. The foreign policy area has been heading the wrong way ever since Flynn was kicked out. The economic re-development and trade area has been trending the right way ever since the TPP was killed. "Draining the swamp" is a lot more mixed, with the Pentagon and military side of Deep State being much harder to clear out, whereas domestic domains have been easier (DoJ, FBI, etc.).

Buckle up, folks: it's going to be a very bumpy eight years -- that's nearly 50 total months of depressive blackpilling, intercut with 50 months of manic invincibility. If only Trump weren't injecting so much energy into the excitable system after the election had been won... but given how much radical change needs to happen, he's without much of a choice. The fake media will raise the volume so loud anyway and make him respond with his own intense response. Nobody said Making America Great Again was going to feel soothing and peaceful.