How and why Republicans may “oversell” Trump’s personal agency in public while relying on institutional option-menus behind the scenes
Image: Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock.com
American politics has always had a “great man” temptation: the idea that history moves because one figure is uniquely brilliant, uniquely decisive, uniquely feared, uniquely loved—so uniquely responsible that the rest of the system becomes background scenery.
With Donald Trump, that temptation becomes a communications superpower. He is a singularly marketable political product: an instantly recognizable persona whose supporters experience politics as loyalty to a person rather than agreement with a platform. That makes it rational—sometimes even necessary—for Republican messaging to present him as the central author of events.
But there’s a second reality that never goes away: the U.S. presidency is embedded in a dense governing machine. For major decisions, especially national security, the president rarely “invents policy from scratch.” What arrives at the Oval Office is typically a curated menu: options, risks, legal constraints, resource estimates, second-order effects, and recommended choices, assembled by professional institutions and political staff. This is not a conspiracy; it’s the normal architecture of modern executive power.
So you get a dual narrative:
- Public story: Trump is the mastermind, the decider, the uniquely emotional or uniquely strategic actor who “calls the shots.”
- Operational reality: Trump is the final selector in a system designed to generate selectable choices—often pre-shaped by ideational networks (think tanks, donors, party coalitions) and by institutional processes (interagency committees, OMB scoring, NSC options papers).
This essay is an attempt to explain how that duality works, why it’s strategically useful to the party, and how institutional option-menus—from the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprints to NSC strike options on Iran—fit into the pattern.
1) The presidency as an option-selection role, not a solitary brain
1.1 The interagency process exists to manufacture “menus”
In U.S. national security policy, it’s not just common to provide options—it’s written into the organizational purpose of the NSC system.
The Council on Foreign Relations’ explainer on the interagency process describes a committee hierarchy in which the National Security Advisor typically chairs a Principals Committee, supported by a Deputies Committee. This structure exists because modern national security problems touch multiple agencies and require coordinated, vetted alternatives.
Congressional Research Service summaries likewise emphasize that administrations build hierarchical committee systems to discuss and coordinate national security decisions.
In fact, a National Security Presidential Memorandum on NSC organization (Jan 20, 2025) explicitly says the NSC staff should develop and refine interagency policy options and provide a “sufficiently broad menu of operationally feasible options” for consideration and decision.
That’s unusually blunt language—almost a mission statement for “option menus.”
1.2 The “action memo” is a real thing
A detailed (older) overview of NSC process describes a pattern familiar to anyone who has worked near government decision cycles: after staff work and briefing, the president may literally “check off” which options are approved, which need more consideration, and which committees will implement tasks.
This doesn’t mean presidents are passive. It means modern executive decisions are usually:
- pre-structured,
- pre-argued,
- pre-bounded by constraints (law, resources, alliance politics),
- and delivered as a set of feasible choices.
The president is often less “inventor” than arbiter—choosing among packages shaped by others.
2) Why it can be strategically useful for Republicans to oversell Trump as the singular author
2.1 Mobilization: personality is easier than policy
Policy is complicated, conditional, and boring. Personality is simple and emotionally legible. If your coalition is held together by affect—anger at elites, pride, resentment, triumph, grievance—then the “leader story” is the most efficient glue.
A party can keep a heterogeneous coalition aligned by framing politics as:
- us vs them, and
- our champion vs their enemies.
This is especially true when different factions want different policy outcomes. A leader-centered narrative lets them disagree in detail while rallying around the same symbol.
2.2 Deterrence theater: the “unpredictable leader” as a tool
A long-standing trope in international politics is that “madman/unpredictable” reputations can be used to deter adversaries or intimidate opponents. Even if the governing machine is producing careful menus, publicly performing Trump as impulsive and unconstrained can create uncertainty in rivals—an advantage in brinkmanship.
Whether it actually works is debatable; but the incentive to signal it is obvious.
2.3 Credit capture and blame shifting
Overselling Trump’s centrality allows the party to:
- claim wins as proof of Trump’s genius (“he did that”), and
- distance itself from costs (“that was Trump” or “that was the deep state,” depending on convenience).
It becomes a two-way accountability valve. Trump can be presented as:
- the heroic cause of every success, and/or
- the scapegoat shield protecting other actors and agendas.
2.4 Disciplining the coalition: loyalty enforcement
If the party’s public brand is “Trump = the movement,” then opposing his preferences becomes not a normal policy dispute but a betrayal. This helps leadership manage internal fragmentation: it’s easier to police loyalty to a person than to referee complex debates across policy domains.
2.5 Media incentives: a person is the perfect product
Modern media—especially social and partisan media—rewards:
- drama,
- conflict,
- recognizable characters.
A system of committees and memos is not clickable. A leader who “decides everything” is.
So even if internal governance remains institutional, the external story drifts toward personal rule because that’s what the information economy sells.
3) The other half of the truth: the Republican policy ecosystem does pre-build governing menus
If you want a clean mental model: many presidents inherit a bureaucracy; conservative presidents also inherit a parallel bureaucracy—a world of think tanks, legal networks, donor institutions, and staffing pipelines that can pre-assemble:
- policy blueprints,
- draft executive orders and regulatory moves,
- personnel lists and vetting criteria,
- litigation strategies and legal theories.
This is where the Heritage Foundation becomes a central example.
4) Heritage as a “menu factory”: Mandate for Leadership and Project 2025
4.1 Mandate for Leadership as a governing template
Heritage has produced “Mandate for Leadership” volumes for decades, designed explicitly to guide conservative administrations. For Trump’s first term, Heritage itself claimed the administration embraced nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s “Mandate” recommendations.
You should treat this claim as partly promotional (it’s Heritage marketing its influence), but it still signals something real: the existence of a ready-made policy menu that can be adopted quickly when the administration wants speed and ideological coherence.
Heritage also states that as a candidate Trump drew from Heritage recommendations, and that after the election Heritage provided guidance on policy and personnel, with “several dozen staff” working directly with the transition team (again: self-described, but important as a public claim of role).
4.2 Project 2025 as the explicit “governing on Day One” logic
Heritage’s Project 2025 is essentially a transition blueprint. The Project 2025 Mandate document frames itself as a unified effort to be ready to govern immediately, and it explicitly describes a movement project aimed at Day One execution.
Heritage also openly described building a personnel database—sometimes even branded like a “Conservative LinkedIn”—to identify and place “rock-solid conservatives” in the next administration.
This is the key point for your question: a staffing and policy pipeline is a menu. It reduces the president’s real discretion by making some options easy and others hard:
- If a blueprint exists, it’s selectable.
- If staffing lists exist, those are the people you’ll see in meetings.
- If draft orders exist, those are the levers you can pull quickly.
- If legal theories are prebuilt, those are the actions counsel will tell you are possible.
So even if the public sees Trump as the sole author, the operational reality can be: ideological institutions pre-assemble the catalog.
4.3 The distancing dance: why Trump-world sometimes disavows Heritage publicly
A revealing modern twist is that Trump-aligned figures have, at times, publicly distanced themselves from Project 2025 as politically “radioactive,” even while overlap in personnel and ideas remains a public point of debate. For example, the Financial Times reported transition rhetoric emphasizing loyalty and dismissing Project 2025 as “radioactive.”
Meanwhile, press coverage has described internal tensions around Project 2025 leadership and how Trump’s orbit tried to create distance.
This is consistent with the overselling thesis: publicly, the party wants Trump to look like the singular author; privately, it still benefits from institutional menus—so you get a performative denial alongside practical reuse.
5) The national-security version of the same phenomenon: Iran “menus” and military options
Foreign policy is where the “Trump as emotional improviser” story is most dramatic—and where institutional menus are most obvious.
5.1 “Options for Iran” are routine bureaucracy, not an exceptional Trump dynamic
A key misconception in the popular imagination is that “asking the Pentagon for options” is inherently a sign that a president is about to do something reckless. In reality, contingency planning and option development are normal.
Still, multiple public reports show the process functioning exactly as “menu governance”:
- Reuters reported in May 2019 that updated military plans were presented envisioning up to 120,000 troops to the region under certain escalation conditions (as reported via the NYT).
- Separate reporting summarized that a deployment plan was presented in the context of escalating tensions and was contingent on triggers like attacks on U.S. forces or accelerated nuclear work.
- TIME reported that while broad proposals existed, the “plan” was not necessarily a fully executable operational deployment plan in the strict military sense—illustrating another key reality: option menus can be sketches, placeholders, or signal artifacts, not always fully-realized war plans.
These examples show the governing machine at work: staff generate options; the president chooses a direction (or refuses); the bureaucracy adjusts.
5.2 The June 2019 drone-downing crisis shows the menu structure plainly
When Iran shot down a U.S. drone in June 2019, Reuters reported Trump said he aborted a retaliatory strike because it could have killed around 150 people—an explicit example of a president selecting among operationally prepared options, weighing proportionality and consequences.
CBS similarly described that Trump ordered a limited strike and then called it off.
That is “menu governance” in its simplest form:
- military and NSC staff prepare target packages,
- the president approves or cancels,
- the narrative afterward gets packaged politically.
5.3 Strike-option preparation persists as standard practice into later moments
Even beyond the 2019 cycle, the broader pattern is stable: congressional testimony and public reporting repeatedly show the Pentagon preparing and presenting options as tensions rise. For example, AP reported in June 2025 that the Defense Secretary said the Pentagon was preparing military options for President Trump in the context of Israel-Iran escalation.
Reuters also reported CENTCOM had prepared a range of options to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.
Again: you can dislike the policy, but the process is institutional.
6) How “overselling Trump” can coexist with real institutional control
You can reconcile the two realities (the show and the machine) by thinking in layers:
Layer A: Agenda setting and narrative ownership (public)
Trump’s persona is used to:
- define enemies and priorities,
- brand the coalition,
- simplify complex policy into identity slogans,
- create a “leader-centric” frame that crowds out rivals inside the party.
This is where the Republican Party can benefit by exaggerating Trump’s authorship and initiative: it keeps the base emotionally aligned and makes politics feel like personal combat rather than policy bargaining.
Layer B: Option manufacturing and feasibility shaping (institutional)
Meanwhile, the machinery defines what is actually doable:
- agencies filter what is legal, resourced, and operationally feasible,
- committees coordinate tradeoffs,
- think tanks and aligned institutions prewrite policy and staffing menus.
A president’s power is enormous, but it is still bounded by:
- time,
- attention,
- legal constraints,
- bureaucratic capacity,
- alliance relations,
- and the need for implementers.
Menus are how a complex system turns chaos into action.
Layer C: Selection and veto (presidential)
Trump’s real authority often appears most strongly as:
- a yes/no veto,
- a preference among a small set of presented options,
- or a demand to “find an option that does X” (which then becomes an institutional engineering problem).
That can look like personal genius from the outside, because the public sees the decision, not the months of staff work that made the decision executable.
7) Why the “Trump-as-solo-author” myth persists even when insiders know it’s false
7.1 It satisfies two audiences at once
The GOP coalition often includes:
- voters who want a charismatic fighter, and
- elites who want predictable ideological implementation.
The solution is a division of labor:
- the base gets a hero narrative,
- the institutional network gets policy throughput.
Heritage-style blueprints (and similar structures) allow elites to pursue a long-term agenda while packaging it under Trump’s brand.
7.2 It masks the real power centers
If policy is controversial, it can be politically useful to obscure the network behind it:
- donors,
- legal strategists,
- think tanks,
- lobbying coalitions,
- bureaucratic entrepreneurs.
Overselling Trump personalizes responsibility and keeps attention away from the infrastructure.
7.3 It reduces complexity in a way that feels emotionally true
People experience Trump emotionally: he is vivid, performative, narratively central. “A system of committees generated an options memo” feels emotionally false—even if it’s factually true.
Politics is not only about truth; it’s about narrative plausibility.
8) A sober counterpoint: Trump’s personal style still matters
Nothing above implies presidents are interchangeable. Trump’s style can still shape outcomes in at least five ways:
- What he demands to see (which data he trusts; which advisors he listens to).
- Which options are politically attractive to him (public spectacle vs. quiet bargaining).
- Which implementers survive (loyalty screens and staffing churn change institutional behavior).
- How risk is perceived (some leaders are more willing to test boundaries).
- What the public narrative becomes (which affects bargaining power abroad and legitimacy at home).
But even these “personal” effects usually operate through institutions: staffing choices, memo requests, meeting structures, and the incentives created for subordinates.
The paradox is that a strong personality can increase institutional influence—because staff learn to pre-shape menus to match what the principal will accept.
9) So what does “strategically overselling Trump” achieve?
If the hypothesis is correct, the GOP gains:
- mobilization (a single charismatic focal point),
- discipline (loyalty as identity),
- deterrence signaling (unpredictability theater),
- accountability control (credit capture and blame shifting), and
- agenda throughput (policy menus from professional institutions implemented under a personal brand).
And the cost is that the public becomes worse at identifying where power actually sits. The more politics becomes a personality drama, the more invisible the governing pipeline becomes.
Closing thought
The simplest way to say it is:
Trump may be the face, the brand, and the veto—while a professional ecosystem builds the feasible menu.
That’s not uniquely Republican, and it’s not uniquely Trump. But Trump’s media persona makes the gap between image and process unusually large—and unusually useful.
