Trump’s biggest deal ever: Global chaos and disaster

It’s become conventional to describe Donald Trump’s foreign policy as incoherent or contradictory — hell, I’ve almost certainly done it myself. One could argue that those labels fit all too well at the end of a week when Trump has “unleashed global chaos” (to quote a Friday report in the Guardian) with a long list of varying tariff rates inflicted on virtually every country in the world.

But that conventional explanation is basically wrong, and leaves the curators of mainstream foreign-policy wisdom flopping back and forth trying to untangle the Trump decisions they like from the ones they hate. Trump’s apparent pivot from Russia to Ukraine, after a full decade as the dog at the end of Vladimir Putin’s chain, has aligned him (for now) with liberal-democratic elite opinion. But that’s literally an accident, or a case of stopped-clock syndrome; the same commentators who shower praise on Trump for his suddenly adult views of the Ukraine war are of course shocked and saddened by his brazen effort to use extortionate tariffs to punish Brazil for prosecuting his good buddy Jair Bolsonaro over some, y’know, minor and petty infractions involving an attempted military coup.

For Trump, those things are not different at all. He thought he and Putin were buddies too! But he has now concluded, hilariously late in the game, that the former KGB operative — who, unlike Trump, possesses a sophisticated theory of global power relations and his nation’s place in history — was stringing him along the whole time, dammit. This Russia switchback must be causing serious ructions among the more Putin-friendly or Putin-curious factions of the MAGA-verse, which would be fascinating to learn more about. Such is not our topic today.

My point here is that Trump does indeed possess a coherent theory of power, or at least one that makes sense to an awful lot of people, including those who don’t necessarily love him or support all his so-called policies. His theory of power could be called a lot of things, such as fascist, authoritarian, monarchic or quasi-religious. Those are all somewhere in the ballpark, but their hifalutin poli-sci flavor fails to capture the gooey, delicious nougat center of Trumpian power relations. In the MAGA worldview, power is personal and individual, flowing outward from the great man (so great but so flawed — LOL!) through his lieutenants and followers, imposing his will on the world for the greater good of — well, no, not literally everybody, but you know what I mean.

Difficult as this is for non-MAGA outsiders to perceive or believe, there is a pleasurable and even erotic component to the Trumpian exercise of power: The world has f**ked us for too long, and this man’s gleeful exercise of power is the instrument through which we will f**k the world right back.

Trump’s theatrical displays of greed, lust, domination and cruelty clearly feel, to many people, like satisfying revealed truths about human nature, compared with the distant, seemingly impenetrable and largely dysfunctional machinery of democratic politics. If we’re really being honest with ourselves (which is a funny thing to say, since none of us ever is), we’re not entirely sure that pseudo-Machiavellian conception of reality is wrong.

Furthermore, the Trumpian theory of power and the political conclusions it supports create a mutual feedback loop of reinforcement and gratification. If “democracy” has all along been nothing more than a scam rigged to benefit the powerful, then the solution lies in blatant, shameless and overtly infantile version of one-man rule. The same kind of simplistic sandblasting temporarily serves to set the MAGA faithful and even the MAGA-curious free from all the supposedly complicated issues shoved down our throats by university eggheads and Washington liberals, whether about immigration or economic inequality or racial justice or climate change or whatever else — electric cars, offshore wind farms, low-flow toilets. All these libtard delusions or abstractions may or may not involve a global conspiracy of baby-eating celebrities — such theories are seductive, but not mandatory — but whatever. Fake news, all of it.

This falls well short of an original analysis, but the MAGA promise has never meant returning to any specific and definite era of the American past, since all of those come with obvious and identifiable problems. There is actually no making America “great again,” only an inarticulate and unfulfillable promise to make America into something new, as a cartoon melange of memes and themes: white supremacist but not exclusively white; intensely masculine but with occasional fembot girlbosses; fully employed with F-250 pickups and cruise-ship vacations for all, no income taxes and low-cost health care somehow paid for by … but it’s no good getting too granular. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

My purported topic here is foreign policy, another area where Trump’s exercise of personal and individual power has already begun to feel a lot less pleasurable, even to his most devout followers. He rode into office on his illusory reputation as a dealmaker, vowing to settle the wars in Ukraine and Gaza within the first day or the first week or in any case very soon. As both conflicts have gone from extremely bad to much, much worse, Trump has  resorted to blaming them on Joe Biden. Apparently he is powerless to overcome decisions made by his famously enfeebled predecessor.

Trump is about half-right regarding the enormous humanitarian disaster of Gaza, without any serious doubt the worst failure of the so-called world order since the genocidal civil war in Rwanda. It took the overlapping bad policies of two nominally opposed presidents, along with the reality-distorting Svengali powers of Bibi Netanyahu, to make that happen. But Trump’s tariff policies, a seemingly inexplicable throwback to the disastrous economics of the Gilded Age, are entirely his own thing and supported by almost literally no one — but they perfectly distill his personalist theory of power.

Last Thursday night’s announced tariff schedule certainly seemed incoherent to anyone expecting some approximation of mainstream economic theory, whether of the laissez-faire or interventionist or even post-Marxist variety. But they make a lot more sense as a laundry list of mob-boss rewards and punishments, which is much closer to the truth.

Why are slightly different tariff rates — all of them punishingly high and likely to cause serious economic damage, not least to the wallets of American consumers — being imposed on India, Taiwan and South Africa? What the hell did Switzerland, of all nations, do to deserve a disastrous 39 percent tariff when most of Western Europe is taxed at less than half that rate? (If you’ve been going back and forth on that $43,000 Patek Philippe Calatrava wristwatch, the time is now, my dude!)

There are familiar answers to those kinds of questions: Trump’s understanding of international relations is entirely transactional and even personal. His most alarming proposed tariffs should be understood as negotiating tactics or “in our next episode” reality TV teasers, not as considered decisions rooted in any sort of theory or strategy.

Indeed, we could spend several hours paging through the hit list and conjuring up plausible explanations: Trump, or more likely his trade guru Peter Navarro, is eager to bring the Swiss pharmaceutical industry to heel — although that does nothing to explain the weirdly specific 39% number. That’s lower than the Bolsonaro-punishment tariff of 50% inflicted on Brazil, but more than the 30% imposed on South Africa over its fictional “white genocide” or the temporary 35% tariff on Canada for declining (so far) to become the 51st state. Of course those aren’t necessarily the official justifications, or not in every case — but who are we kidding?

As boring and abstract as the details of international trade agreements may be — agreements enforced through a combination of whimsy and extortion, in this case — this arena is where the Trumpist fantasy of power is most likely to crash headlong into reality. We can already see the economic damage inflicted by Trump’s endless array of personal beefs with other nations and their leaders represented in declining employment numbers and jagged, unpredictable spikes in financial markets, and it’s going to get a lot worse than just higher prices at Albertson’s or on Amazon.

There wasn’t a whole lot to be said for Joe Biden’s foreign policy, in all honesty. Like a lot of that administration, in the rear-view mirror it looks like a holding pattern in between two eruptions of widening chaos. Tony Blinken spent four years as secretary of state talking about the return of a “rules-based order,” and even superfans like Tom Friedman of the New York Times had trouble explaining what that meant, or why the increasingly unreliable United States should be trusted to set the rules.

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Biden’s now-infamous bear hug with Netanyahu a few days after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, was not the proximate cause of the former president’s downfall, but it surely didn’t help, and stands as a potent symbol of his deeply conflicted one-term presidency. It’s even more painful to acknowledge, in retrospect, that on a human level that gesture was entirely understandable under the dreadful circumstances, and that it reflected Biden’s lifelong and sincere commitment to the Zionist project.

But still — those were the days, am I right? Even if they were also the last days of an expiring empire. Biden was not an inspirational or effective leader on the world stage, but his administration’s actions were generally predictable and comprehensible, and conformed to a familiar if mildly mendacious theory of global power and how to use it.

No doubt Trump’s voters told themselves they were voting for lower prices on eggs and gasoline, which they are now dimly realizing they will not get. But let’s give them a little credit: Below the surface, they were also voting for a new and thrilling (but actually ancient!) theory of political power that chucked liberal-democratic orthodoxy under the wheels of history. As with so many political decisions of this era, the impulse was justifiable and the diagnosis was reasonably correct. The treatment, however, was a hell of a lot worse than the disease.