Those who benefit are the people who create the absurdity—and the institutions and networks that profit when everyone else adapts to it.
1) The power-holder who wants “reality” to be negotiable
If the public can be trained to accept contradictions, rule-breaking, and obvious lies as just “how it is,” then accountability stops functioning. In that environment, the leader doesn’t have to persuade; they only have to exhaust. Baker & Glasser describe Trump’s presidency as a sustained attack on institutional constraints—testing boundaries, rewarding loyalty, and turning governance into something closer to a personalized power system than a rules-based one.
2) The propagandist ecosystem that turns confusion into loyalty
Treating absurdity as normal is a conversion strategy: it replaces shared facts with tribal belonging. Sherman’s account of Fox News under Ailes shows how a closed-loop media universe can normalize conspiratorial or adversarial framings so the audience experiences outrage and identity, not verification.
3) The “chaos operators” who win when institutions can’t coordinate
When the system feels incoherent, citizens disengage (“nothing matters”) or cling to the loudest storyteller. Wolff depicts a White House where reality is repeatedly bent around the leader’s needs—where disorder isn’t just incidental, it’s functional for dominance because it keeps everyone reacting.
4) The ideologues selling cruelty as common sense
Absurdity-as-normal is how you launder brutality. Guerrero details how demonization (“invasion,” “animals,” etc.) lets extreme policies feel like “necessary” responses to an invented emergency—so the moral shock wears off and the machine keeps moving. 
5) The grifters and patrons who monetize the fog
Once norms collapse, “who can do what” becomes a function of access and loyalty—prime conditions for patronage, self-dealing, and pay-to-play systems. The point of normalization is that scandal stops being a stopping mechanism; it becomes background noise.
A simple test: when something ridiculous happens, ask: Does it make oversight harder? Does it polarize people into teams? Does it exhaust attention? Does it shift the baseline of what we’ll tolerate next?
If yes, the beneficiaries are the people whose power grows when the public’s sense of the real gets worn down.
What follows is an explication (how the mechanism works) and an implication (who it indicts / enables) that stays inside the corpus and leans hard on the corpus’s own language.
1) Explication: “absurdity as normal” is a governance technology
A. Flood the zone: outrage as an attention weapon
Baker & Glasser describe a deliberate outrage-cycling machine that trains the audience to treat “wild” as ordinary. The key move is not persuasion; it’s replacement—one sensation overwrites the last:
- “He often said that he was creating a new language.”
- “When Washington erupted in outrage… he took it as a victory—‘owning the libs’…”
- “If something… proved problematic, he simply changed the subject by posting something even more explosive.”
- “Stories… quickly vanished with the next sensation.”
- “Fact-checking was never part of the process.”
What “normalizing absurdity” does here: it breaks the feedback loop where scandal → investigation → consequence. If each outrage is instantly displaced by a fresher outrage, consequence can’t catch up to stimulus.
B. Convert governing into show: the institution becomes a stage prop
Rucker & Leonnig give you the “absurdity made routine” moment in operational form: a press conference is conjured because Trump “simply wanted to have one,” and aides are forced to treat that whim as standard procedure.
- “In any normal government, this kind of knee-jerk decision would be madness. But in the Trump White House, this was just another Thursday.”
- “There was no thematic purpose… The president simply wanted to have one.”
- “I… see stories of chaos—chaos… ‘This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.’”
- “Trump cared more about putting on a show than… governing.”
What “normalizing absurdity” does here: it forces the bureaucracy to metabolize whim as workflow. Once that becomes habitual, the question stops being “is this legitimate?” and becomes “how do we manage it?”
C. Absurdity as a loyalty filter: “survival” requires division
Mary L. Trump frames the psychology as a survival tactic: division is not a side-effect; it’s the operating requirement.
- “An effective response would have entailed a call for unity, but Donald requires division. It is the only way he knows how to survive…”
Combine that with Baker & Glasser’s “combative” rule-set:
- “A senior White House official… Three Rules… ‘Never apologize’… ‘The only way you survive… is to be combative.’”
What “normalizing absurdity” does here: it makes “loyalty to the leader’s reality” more important than competence, law, or shared facts.
2) Explication: propaganda doesn’t just lie — it
shrinks the mind’s field of options
Sherman’s Ailes material gives you the meta-rule of the right-wing TV political machine: simplification isn’t a communication style; it’s a control strategy.
- “Roger understands you must simplify, simplify, simplify.”
When you simplify enough, the public isn’t asked to evaluate; it’s asked to feel (outrage, disgust, belonging). And that means absurd claims can be metabolized as normal so long as they serve identity.
3) Explication: “cruelty laundering” — make the monstrous feel administratively reasonable
Guerrero shows how “absurdity as normal” is built with language that turns people into threats and policy into “common sense.” Miller/Trump messaging is explicitly described as conjuring an “invasion” and “animals” to mobilize the base:
- “Miller helped Trump conjure an ‘invasion’ of ‘animals’…”
- Trump: “They’re animals.”
- “The demonization of migrants… a tool with which to mobilize the base.”
- “With it, he sold cruelty…”
What “normalizing absurdity” does here: it moves a public from “that’s inhuman” to “well, that’s the border.” The rhetorical emergency (“invasion”) becomes the permission slip for policies that would otherwise remain unthinkable.
4) Explication: scandal-as-shield — drown “crime” in “spectacle”
Kendzior names the tactic bluntly and ties it to the public’s conditioned response:
- “Trump covers up crime with scandal.”
- “The public… ‘it’s just Trump being Trump,’ will then surrender its own demands for accountability.”
- “This is called ‘normalcy bias’…”
This is the heart of your question. Treating absurdity as normal is profitable because it converts “alarm” into “shrug.” It turns the citizen from watchdog into spectator.
5) Implication: who benefits — and how the benefits cash out
A. The principal beneficiary: the leader who wants consequences to lag behind action
If the system learns to treat the abnormal as routine—another Thursday—then the leader can impose costs continuously while opponents are stuck litigating yesterday’s outrage.
This is why Baker & Glasser’s portrait of Twitter matters: it is described as both “cannily strategic” and “utterly random,” and precisely for that reason it dominates the agenda:
- “Twitter was… a way of controlling the national conversation… a megaphone for conspiracy theories… both cannily strategic and utterly random.”
- “Trump invariably chose ‘hot.’”
B. The enabling beneficiaries: institutions and elites who prefer
normalized dysfunction
to decisive accountability
The Divider’s impeachment material shows how normalization becomes an escape hatch for elites: a formula that lets them avoid saying “innocent” while also avoiding removal.
- “an elegant escape for… Republicans who did not want to declare Trump innocent… but did not want to remove him…”
- “there will be no fair trial in the Senate.”
When absurdity is treated as normal, “this is unacceptable” quietly becomes “this is unfortunate but survivable.” That stance benefits every actor who wants to minimize disruption to themselves more than they want to stop the pattern.
C. The ecosystem beneficiary: propaganda entrepreneurs and grievance brokers
Ailes’s “simplify” rule, plus the broader Fox-style shaping of “serious” vs “tabloid” content, is the infrastructure that makes absurdity emotionally legible and commercially sticky:
- “The Fox News brand had been set… programmed news to appeal to conservatives.”
- “Roger understands you must simplify, simplify, simplify.”
Absurdity becomes profitable when it is packaged into repeatable narratives: enemies, betrayal, humiliation, revenge, salvation.
6) A tight synthesis: absurdity normalized = accountability delayed = power concentrated
Put the corpus together and you get a single operating logic:
- manufacture attention through outrage churn
- force institutions to operationalize whims (“another Thursday”)
- recruit identity through simplified propaganda
- launder cruelty through demonization (“invasion,” “animals”)
- hide substantive wrongdoing behind spectacle; induce “normalcy bias”
Who benefits? The actor (and network) for whom consequences are the only real threat—because normalization turns “Stop him” into “Manage him.”
