Trump’s biggest deal ever: Global chaos and disaster

It s become conventional to describe Donald Trump s foreign procedures 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 review 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 situation of stopped-clock syndrome the same commentators who shower praise on Trump for his suddenly adult views of the Ukraine war are of syllabus shocked and saddened by his brazen effort to use extortionate tariffs to punish Brazil for prosecuting his good buddy Jair Bolsonaro over particular 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 battle 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 in contemporary times Related Does Donald Trump want to carve up the world or keep it all for himself 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 assistance 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 Intricate 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 theory of power could be called a lot of things fascist authoritarian monarchic 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 Trump s theatrical displays of greed lust domination and cruelty clearly feel to plenty of 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 resolution 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 state 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 certainly 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- pickups and cruise-ship vacations for all no income taxes and low-cost physical condition 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 procedures another area where Trump s exercise of personal and individual power has already begun to feel a lot less pleasurable even to his the majority 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 episode 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 mishap 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 There s 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 Last Thursday night s revealed tariff schedule certainly seemed incoherent to anyone expecting specific 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 percent tariff when most of of Western Europe is taxed at less than half that rate If you ve been going back and forth on that 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 bulk 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 exchange guru Peter Navarro is eager to bring the Swiss pharmaceutical industry to heel although that does nothing to explain the weirdly specific number That s lower than the Bolsonaro-punishment tariff of inflicted on Brazil but more than the imposed on South Africa over its fictional white genocide or the temporary tariff on Canada for declining so far to become the st state Of class those aren t necessarily the official justifications or not in every development but who are we kidding As boring and abstract as the details of international deal agreements may be agreements enforced through a combination of whimsy and extortion in this incident this arena is where the Trumpist fantasy of power is majority 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 mentioned for Joe Biden s foreign strategy 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 Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts Biden s now-infamous bear hug with Netanyahu a minimal days after the Hamas attack of Oct 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 reported 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 in fact ancient theory of political power that chucked liberal-democratic orthodoxy under the wheels of history As with so multiple political decisions of this era the impulse was justifiable and the evaluation was reasonably correct The medicine however was a hell of a lot worse than the illness Read more from Andrew O Hehir on DJT v The World Who s a true American and who decides JD Vance has answers Alligator Alcatraz American history from the dark side Zohran Mamdani and democracy Three days that shook the world The post Trump s biggest deal ever Global chaos and tragedy appeared first on Salon com