The Rube Goldberg election: How Trump turned chaos into victory

In these wild political and cultural times, maybe we can allow ourselves a moment to “have some fun just for the fun of it.” Let’s take an off-beat look at Donald Trump’s 2024 comeback through the lens of Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist who turned everyday tasks into ridiculous, roundabout contraptions.

Goldberg, born July 4, 1883, became famous for illustrating convoluted chain reactions: a ball drops, a lever tilts, a cat jumps, and eventually, the napkin wipes your chin. His crazy spirit seems to have animated the past four years of American politics.

Take the self-operating napkin:

Wikipedia/Public domain

From the waning days of 2020 through November 2024, Democrats and their allies in the media and deep state plotted a simple game. They thought they could topple Trump like dominoes. Line up the indictments, knock over the first tile, and watch the rest fall neatly into place: Trump would give up, his supporters would grow weary, and one or more cases would stick, leaving him ineligible for office and likely even in prison.

Democrats trusted in dominoes. Reality looked more like a Goldberg machine — and divine providence.

The Democrats’ gambit did not pay off.

Instead of dominoes falling in precise order — A into B into C into D — events spun out in unpredictable ways. As I wrote in my 2023 book, “Obvious”:

Instead of things falling domino-style in precise order — A into B into C into D, and so on — life is more like A hitting G falling into C popping up H accelerating M … all the way to Z. We take an action, start the ball rolling, and through many unseen and sometimes quirky circumstances, incredible results materialize.

That’s what happened. Democrats didn’t set off dominoes. They set loose a Rube Goldberg machine.

Trump’s Goldberg moment

One of the strangest, and most powerful, moments came in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 2024. An assassin’s bullet nearly took Trump’s life. Instead, Trump sprang up and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight!” That image electrified the nation.

Add to that miraculous scene a wave through a McDonald’s drive-through window, a campaign dump truck plastered with Trump signs, even headlines about people “eating cats and dogs,” and you begin to see the Rube Goldberg contraption click along — until it delivered not chaos but victory.

Courtroom dramas fizzled. Character assassination failed. Even physical assassination attempts backfired. What Democrats had hoped would be Trump’s undoing became the very chain of events that returned him to power.

Rube Goldberg is spinning in his grave (perhaps literally).

The hand behind the chain reaction

Through another lens, the lesson is simpler: “All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). What looks chaotic to us is under His direction. He arranges the pieces, sets events in motion, and brings about His will.

Democrats trusted in dominoes. Reality looked more like a Goldberg machine — and divine providence.

The game is not over. More events lie ahead, more unexpected turns in the chain reaction. The real question is not whether the machinery keeps moving but whether we will find ourselves on the winning side when the final result arrives.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.