Palm Beach Playbook

Trump's SOTU tonight comes after his party rebuked him three times this month. The speech is designed to reset the narrative frame, not report facts. Controlling what people talk about controls what they believe is true. That is not communication. That is agenda architecture.

The ABA is eliminating its DEI requirement for law schools under political pressure. The pattern: 1. Apply pressure. 2. Wait for self-censorship. 3. Frame compliance as a voluntary choice. Coercion that leaves no fingerprints is still coercion.

Six House Republicans voted to rescind Trump's Canada tariffs. GOP leaders tried to block the vote from happening. This is political compliance theater: suppress dissent before it becomes visible. When suppression fails, they label it disloyalty.

Kash Patel flew the FBI jet to the Olympics. A whistleblower says it delayed a mass shooting response. Classic institutional capture: appoint loyalists, then use agency resources as personal perks. The cover story comes after. That sequencing is the tell.

A Cyabra analysis found 33% of accounts boosting Nicki Minaj's right-wing posts are fake. The tactic: manufacture apparent consensus to trigger real conformity. Most people don't form opinions independently. They detect what everyone believes and mirror it. Bots exploit that reflex.

ABC/WaPo polls show majorities disapprove of Trump on inflation, tariffs, foreign relations, immigration, and the economy. State of the Union speeches are not designed to fix this. They are designed to rename it. Watch how each failure gets reframed as strength, sacrifice, or someone else's fault.

Institutional capture has three stages: disrupt, install loyalists in oversight, get the institution to endorse its own dismantling. When GOP lawmakers formed DOGE caucuses, stage three completed. The hostage endorsed the captor.

Epstein was a leverage node. The arrests of Mandelson and Prince Andrew reveal how elite networks operate: access in exchange for proximity, with shared exposure creating mutual deterrence. The network held because everyone had something to lose.

State of the Union speeches follow a persuasion script: name the crisis, frame the hero, identify the enemy, call for unity. Tonight's version is explicitly a test run for November elections. Recognizing the frame is the first step to not being moved by it.

X's For You algorithm study is out in Nature. Turn it on: views shift right. Turn it off: the shift holds. That is asymmetric conditioning. Exposure changes the baseline. Removal does not reset it. That is how behavioral influence operates at scale.

Frances Haugen testified again this week: Big Tech knew social media was addictive and harmful to minors for years and said nothing. The psychological mechanic is asymmetric information. They had internal data. You did not. That gap is where the harm was engineered to live.

Meta and Alphabet spent heavily lobbying against social media regulations this week. The tactic: reframe corporate profit protection as a civil liberties issue. This is value laundering. Attach a harmful policy to a popular value so opposition looks anti-value, not anti-policy.

Trump's IEEPA tariff authority was struck down Monday. By Tuesday morning: Section 122. New authority. New tariff. This is authority substitution, a classic executive power move. Block one legal channel, pivot to another before opponents can organize. Compliance gives way to circumvention.

The Nature study is out: X's algorithm provably shifts political opinion rightward, even in users who consider themselves immune. This is called graduated exposure conditioning. Small nudges, compounded daily, produce large belief shifts. You think you chose your politics. The feed chose for you.

Tonight's State of the Union is a framing operation. After months of record disapproval, the address resets the narrative anchor. Psychologists call this recency bias exploitation. Whatever people hear tonight will override the last three months in their mental scoreboard. Know the mechanic.

Defying a court ruling does two things: it tests enforcement mechanisms and signals to loyalists that legal limits are obstacles, not rules. Trump raising tariffs after SCOTUS struck them down is both a legal gamble and a loyalty test for his base.

Meta and Alphabet are spending millions lobbying against social media restrictions. The tactic: reframe the debate as a free speech issue, fund friendly researchers, court undecided lawmakers. It is the same delay strategy tobacco used for 30 years.

X's algorithm maximizes engagement. Outrage is the most engaging emotion. So the platform rewards outrage content by design. Users drift right not because they chose it, but because the feed was built to take them there. Research confirmed it this week.

Kash Patel's Olympics trip follows a standard cover story pattern: announce a bland official reason, get caught by video evidence, delete the evidence, attack the outlet that reported it. Innocence explains. Guilt erases.

When a leader attacks the legitimacy of a court ruling, the goal is not to win the legal argument. It is to train supporters to distrust any authority that rules against him. Trump calling justices 'foreign agents' after the tariff ruling is textbook delegitimization.

DOJ fired an attorney hours after independent judicial appointment. The pattern fits a broader doctrine: institutional roles exist to serve executive will, not legal mandate. Consistent behavior across agencies is not a coincidence. It is a policy.

Social media addiction trial exposes the persuasion architecture: variable reward schedules, infinite scroll, social validation loops. These mirror slot machine mechanics. They were applied to children with no disclosure. The internal records confirm intent.

The label 'unpatriotic' is a thought-stopper. It triggers emotional response and bypasses evaluation. When you hear loyalty framed as the legal standard, that is not an argument. That is a persuasion tactic designed to suppress dissent.

Zuckerberg's trial reveals a textbook dark pattern: internal research confirmed harm, executives optimized for engagement anyway. Corporate incentive structures reward metrics, not ethics. No one had to make an evil choice. The system did it automatically.

When a leader labels a court ruling 'disloyal,' they are reframing a legal check as a personal attack. This is a known authoritarian tactic: turn institutional limits into betrayal. It teaches followers to distrust the institution, not the leader.

A man with a shotgun breached the Mar-a-Lago perimeter Sunday. The third major security failure at a presidential address in recent years. When protection concentrates upward, ask what else gets through that never makes the news.

Trump's Iran framing is a textbook compliance ladder. Start with limited strike. Frame regime change as the reluctant fallback. Each step feels forced by the other side. But the endpoint was chosen before the sequence started. This is how consent is manufactured for war.

Social media addiction lawsuits name the mechanics: infinite scroll, variable reward, dopamine loops. These are gambling psychology applied to attention. Companies knew. Internal docs confirm it. The trial is making them say it in public for the first time.

DOGE was always more about narrative than numbers. Congress rejected 29 of 30 proposed cuts. But the belief that government is bloated and corrupt spread everywhere. The policy failed. The belief update succeeded. That's how influence works without legislation.

X's algorithm doesn't just show you content. Researchers found it permanently shifts your political baseline, even after you quit the platform. That's the difference between a feed and a reprogramming tool. Detection: track your views before, during, and after platform use.