This American System: The Trump Remix

What We're Watching Isn't a Strategy Problem

Tomorrow night Donald Trump will stand before a joint session of Congress, a chamber partly shut down over the government he runs, three days after the Supreme Court dismantled the centerpiece of his economic agenda, and deliver a State of the Union address that is supposed to make everything cohere.

The tariffs are gone, or at least the big ones, struck down 6-3 by a Court that included three of his own appointees. His approval rating sits in the high thirties. The Department of Homeland Security is unfunded, 260,000 employees working without pay, Global Entry suspended as of Saturday. And somewhere in the drafting process, speechwriters are trying to stitch together a narrative that explains how all of this chaos amounts to a strategy rather than a series of collisions.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that neither Trump’s critics nor his allies have language for: what we’re watching is not a strategy problem. Trump may be the most instinctive systems thinker to occupy the White House in two hundred years. The problem is narrative — the gap between seeing a system and making other people see it.

This is not a uniquely Trumpian failure. It is the defining failure of leadership in complex systems: the leader who can design the architecture but cannot tell the story of the architecture, who builds the machine but never explains why the parts connect. System-level arguments are politically illegible — they don’t reduce to slogans, they require people to accept short-term costs for benefits that emerge non-linearly — and most leaders who think in systems govern as if the logic speaks for itself. It never does. And the price of that assumption is sitting at 39% approval on the eve of the biggest speech of his second term.

Which brings us, improbably, to Henry Clay.

The Original Flywheel

Over three days in February 1824, Clay — then Speaker of the House, widely regarded as the greatest orator Congress had yet produced — stood in roughly the same building and delivered what historians now consider arguably the most consequential economic speech in congressional history. Armed with visual charts, speaking from the well for over forty pages of the Congressional record, he proposed something he called the American System.

It was not, despite the name, a piece of legislation.

It was an architecture argument: the claim that the American economy was a system of interdependent parts, and that the job of national leadership was to design that system so it reinforced itself as a single unit rather than tearing itself apart. Clay’s logic: tariff revenue would pay for roads and canals. The roads and canals would knit regional economies into a single national market. That market would make domestic manufacturing viable for the first time. And the manufacturers would buy American raw materials, giving farmers and miners a reason to support the tariffs that made the whole thing go.

Clay was aiming to spark a feedback loop, with every element funding and justifying the next, and none able to stand without the others.

The tariff funded internal improvements, things like roads, canals. The roads connected markets. The markets justified domestic manufactures. The manufactures created demand for raw materials. Pull one piece and the logic collapses. Leave any piece out and the others can’t stand. (Jeff Bezos would later sketch the same idea on a napkin and call it a flywheel: lower prices drive traffic, traffic attracts sellers, sellers expand selection, selection drives more traffic.) This was ‘network effects’ centuries before Silicon Valley hijacked the concept.

Clay had watched the Panic of 1819 expose the gap between the story America told about itself and the structural reality underneath. Farmers overproducing for export markets. Capital fleeing to British manufactures. Regions optimizing locally while the national fabric frayed. His insight was that you couldn’t fix any single piece without redesigning the whole, that market innovation meant designing interdependence, not managing components (i.e., ‘market interoperability’).

In 2025, Trump reached for a tool no president had ever used for trade policy: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 statute designed to let presidents freeze assets and block transactions during national emergencies. He declared one, and used it to impose tariffs on virtually every country doing business with the United States.

The coverage framed it as chaos. I would argue the IEEPA tariffs were not, despite what his critics insist, random acts of economic vandalism. They were an attempt at ecosystem redesign: re-shoring supply chains, rebalancing trade relationships, forcing allied nations into bilateral frameworks, generating revenue outside a congressional appropriations process that has been deadlocked and dysfunctional for decades, much like healthcare.

The tariffs weren’t a single lever.

They were a center-of-gravity for leverage and power, the load-bearing wall in an architecture that included immigration enforcement, energy dominance, deregulation, and bilateral dealmaking as interconnected structural elements. It was, in every meaningful sense, a twenty-first century American System, Clay’s vision remixed for an era of global supply chains rather than canal routes.

Narrative Legitimacy

This is what makes the Supreme Court’s ruling so devastating, not because it invalidated a policy, but because it collapsed a system.

Chief Justice Roberts, in citing the major questions doctrine, essentially said that architecture of this magnitude requires narrative legitimacy, meaning congressional authorization, public deliberation, institutional buy-in.

The Court didn’t say the design was wrong. It said the design was never explained with enough force to earn the democratic mandate it required. And without that mandate, the system doesn’t just stall. It detonates. Within hours of the ruling, CEOs were back in their war rooms, feeding 170-page opinions into ChatGPT, gaming out refund litigation, watching a 47-year-old skiwear company close its doors because the architecture shifted too late. The ecosystem Trump built had real load-bearing connections, but the people inside it never understood the blueprint. Trump’s response, announcing a new 15% global tariff under a different legal authority before the ink was dry, tells you everything about the narrative gap. He can see the system. He can build the system. He cannot, or will not, narrate the system in terms that bring the institutions along.

Clay had the same problem, and it destroyed him.

He lost three presidential elections not because his vision of an American System was wrong — it was largely vindicated by the post-Civil War industrial economy that built almost exactly what he described — but because system-level arguments are abstract. (This was the central insight the prompted James F. Moore to write The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems in 1997. It’s also what Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s CEO, probably had in mind when he told Semafor on Friday that “competing in the new world order” calls for a unique orientation, particularly when it comes to China).

Clay never found the narrative bridge that Bezos did. He died convinced he was right. And he was right. It didn’t matter.

The gap between architecture and narrative, between what a leader builds and what the public understands, is measurable. The Burning Man Index™, a quarterly assessment Blue Spoon published last week, scores organizations across five dimensions, from narrative coherence to creative destruction. At the top of the scale: generative. At the bottom: "self-licking ice cream cones" — an organization that exists primarily to justify its own existence.

The Democratic Party scores an 18 out of 100.

This matters for tomorrow night because the Democrats’ response to the State of the Union is the Burning Man Index made flesh. Not one response, four.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger will deliver the official rebuttal. But the Working Families Party will deliver its own. Representative Summer Lee will deliver the progressive version. And a coalition of boycotting senators will stage counter-programming across two separate events. Each response optimized for a different audience segment. None adding up to a coherent alternative architecture. Narrative incoherence, performing live on national television.

Meanwhile, the DHS shutdown, the thing that will be hanging over the chamber like a structural rebuke, is the emblem of what happens when neither side can narrate the system. Democrats demanded immigration enforcement reforms after ICE agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. Republicans countered with proposals to criminalize sanctuary city policies.

Neither side proposed what Clay would have recognized as the actual need: positioning value alignment. A redesign of how enforcement, policing, civil liberties, and community safety interconnect as a better system. Both are optimizing for the piece their base can see.

Same Building, Same Problem

So tomorrow night becomes a test.

Not of Trump’s policies, the Court and the polls have already rendered those verdicts. The test is whether this president, who sees systems better than anyone in that room, can finally do the thing that has eluded every ecosystem thinker from Henry Clay to the present, save Bezos, Jensen Huang and, yes, Xi Jinping: make the architecture into a story. Translate the structural logic into a narrative that earns institutional legitimacy rather than provoking institutional resistance. Stop pulling levers and start explaining why the levers connect.

Clay never managed it.

He was right about the system and wrong about the speech, wrong about the assumption that if you just laid out the logic clearly enough, the politics would follow. That’s not how narrative works. Narrative isn’t logic made louder. It’s the act of making someone feel the coherence before they can think it. Trump, for all his instinct, governs as if the architecture speaks for itself. It doesn’t. It never has. Not for Clay, not for anyone.

The State of the Union is not strong. It is not weak. It is incoherent, a collection of components pretending to be a system, opposed by a party scoring 10 on narrative coherence. The architecture exists. The story doesn’t. And until someone in that building learns the difference, America will keep remixing Henry Clay’s system without ever quite managing to play the song.

/ jgs

John G. Singer is the executive director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon works with organizations to design new market narratives and exit strategies from collapsing systems.

He is the author of When Burning Man Comes to Washington: A Field Manual for Riding Chaos, which introduces Hardcore Zen, a unique method for leading system-level change. His latest work, The Burning Man Index™, scores 27 institutions on their proximity to narrative collapse — the moment an organization’s story stops matching the world it operates in.

To explore a Hardcore Zen whiteboard or arrange a guest lecture, email here.