Under Donald Trump, the United States no longer operates as a serious nation.
Being serious about power and interests should be the simple first step of any nation, especially a superpower. A serious nation carefully calculates its power, weighs interests, judges its international course, and builds a sturdy policy to promote its wealth and future. The consistent purpose is to persuade partners and outwork potential foes. As the superpower, America has expressed its identity in the norms and principles it has built into the international system.
Donald Trump torches it all. Rather than a consistent course, he offers shock and showmanship. Great television makes for strange government. Trump crashes policy and distorts American power. His zig-zags aren’t merely a tactic, they amount to the whole strategy. Don’t bother to plot a course to a destination; it’s more fun just zooming all over the map.
Trump has revolutionised the Republican Party, transforming it into a raging cult. It hacks at the machinery of government, sacking public servants, dismantling departments and closing agencies. The chant is to smash the “deep state” but the result is a weakened and bemused government.
America’s trade policy is remade, even as US economic influence in Asia declines. The protectionist consensus is at its strongest in American politics since the Great Depression, nine decades ago. The US has given up on free trade. Washington hasn’t had anything constructive to offer the Asia-Pacific on trading relations since Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership the day he became president in 2017.
Globalisation isn’t dead, but it’s fracturing. Trump distrusts the system America created. Globalisation-minus-the-US is no oxymoron; the moron tendency triumphs. US strategy and alliances are roiled by a president who can’t think long-term and believes only suckers make permanent promises to allies and friends.
Trump in hyperdrive pushes the trend towards a post-American world.
Having spent a couple of months around Washington, I depart with a repeat line from a previous dispatch: Trumpworld is even stranger close up. This elegant city has an edgy feel. It’s still a jolt to see uniformed troops patrolling the streets. The National Guard was ordered to deploy in August when Trump — in the White House’s words — “declared a crime emergency in the nation’s capital and vowed to make streets there safe again.”
At least the armoured vehicles are no longer guarding the forecourt of Union Station. The young troops are cheerful enough but growing bored with acting out the role of an army of occupation. The coup theatrics are all about politics, not policing. The Republican president sends the National Guard only to cities controlled by Democrats.
Fall is always glorious here, and the leaves are vivid. Autumn heading to winter is a description of how Washington feels: much is changing and the politics, like the weather, is turning frigid.
Not many people in Washington have cause to recall prime minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to the White House last month. That day will live in local memory as the moment Trump sent in the machines to demolish the East Wing of the White House. His attacks on the building that symbolises the presidency goes beyond metaphor to become a motif for a wrecking-ball president.
The kicking the president is inflicting on the federal government has many human faces. The public servants being assailed by the administration are people living in Washington and the commuter suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Many good people are suffering. What Trump is doing to America’s government will take a long time to repair. And in suburbs around here, there’s an ironic taste to the slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
More than the expression of a giant ego, MAGA is a declaration of Trump’s right to dominate. This is the personality he has been selling America from the start. An example of all that has followed was a speech in early 2016, nine months before he was first elected president, when Trump proclaimed: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” Incredible it was, and incredible it is.
Under the old rules of American politics, the tsunami of Trump untruths should have washed him away. By the final year of his first presidency, the Washington Post factcheck said Trump had reached a grand total of 20,000 false or misleading claims.
The fibs cascade anew in the second presidency. Surveying this administration’s first nine months, the New York Times’s David Sanger concluded “the only thing predictable about Mr Trump’s handling of global affairs is that it will be an unpredictable mix of instinct, grievance and ego. And there is little evidence that his tantrums, swerves and reversals are strategic and thought-out, as his supporters sometimes insist, rather than the products of impulsivity, mood and circumstance.”
The falsehoods and fantasies are merely the president describing the great world being created by his greatness. Trump isn’t interested in policy or theory. He does “alternative facts,” a phrase that epitomises the golden sands (always glitzy gold) on which the very stable genius stands.
Trump’s game theory is from Dungeons and Dragons. He’s playing as a “chaotic neutral,” an individualist who cares little for rules or precedence and thrives in spontaneity.
The president isn’t a person; he’s a TV character. That insight is from American television critic James Poniewozik. TV was born at the same time as Trump, Poniewozik writes, and TV is his soulmate. Trump thinks like a TV camera: “If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want? It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.”
A working title for this bizarre political soap opera would be The Ego has Landed. The latest Ego episode is the proposal for a two-headed coin. The US Treasury proposes to celebrate America’s 250th birthday next year with a one-dollar coin depicting Trump on both sides. On one side his face is in profile, on the other he is standing in front of the US flag, with first raised, beneath a three word slogan: “Fight. Fight. Fight.” Heads, Trump wins. Tails, Trump wins. He would be the first sitting president on a coin in 100 years.
The Trump soap opera challenges the comedians. How to mock something when the truth is so much stranger/funnier/outrageous than any parody? The singing satirist Tom Lehrer observed long ago that political satire was rendered obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No spoof or caricature comes close to what Trump serves up daily. And, yes, he is campaigning to get the Nobel.
Plenty of giant egos have occupied the Oval Office. Why does this president pose such a threat to America’s power and its institutions?
One difference is that no previous president has had such a focus on generating cash for himself. Trump is running a for-profit presidency. The New Yorker estimates that since he returned to power in January this year the Trump family business has made $3.4 billion, including $2.3 billion from cryptocurrency.
The for-profit president works to help his fellow millionaires. Along with the $4 trillion in tax cuts signed into law in July, the administration is quietly killing regulations so it can give hundreds of billions of dollars to companies and investors. New notices from the Treasury and tax service, business reporter Jesse Drucker writes, “are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors and a variety of multinational corporations.” The changes gut a 2022 law introduced by the previous Biden administration aimed at corporations making more than $1 billion a year in profits.
On foreign affairs, describing Trump as isolationist doesn’t quite capture his mindset. A more accurate descriptor is “unilateralist.”
“Isolationism” is a policy label and Trump doesn’t do policy so much as ride the vibe and his latest impulse. Rather than isolated, the unilateralist president imagines America alone and on top. The rest of the world should look up and pay homage — and pay. From the dominant position, the US issues unilateral demands.
The unilateralist reaches for what he wants with force, threat, demand and bluff. If that doesn’t achieve complete victory, he’ll do a deal. The deals are all zero-sum and the sum must favour the United States. Trump still operates like a real-estate developer aiming to win the best property, then extract maximum rent.
No cognitive dissonance for Trump; he seldom has to balance competing ideas because his guide is instinct, not intellect. A Great America is made Great Again by its Great Leader. Untethered from responsibility other than to itself, America can pursue the single goal that has always been at the centre of Trump’s life: get even richer.
As critics observe, Trump seeks to rule, not govern. Everything should be in thrall to the whim of the Leader. In Trumpworld, the president has absolute authority, and can be as authoritarian as the mood dictates. The performances will be outrageous, because grand theatre is fun. As one element of his greatness, the Leader is ever unpredictable. Reward your friends. Punish your enemies. Keep score. Win.
In his second presidency, Trump has created an administration in his own image: a team deeply serious about serving the Leader, but unworried about the serious business of government. No adults in the room this time. The kids are running the show.
In “A Confederacy of Toddlers,” the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols observes: “The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity… the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence.”
Trump wants to destroy much of the government system, to do away with checks and balances that limit his power. The “No Kings” protests across America are a shrewd indictment of the president’s character and his desire to rule by fiat.
Among Trump’s followers are those who see the president as the perfect instrument to “burn down Washington,” the original subtitle of a book by the head of the Heritage Foundation about how to institutionalise Trumpism by torching institutions. The foundation created Project 2025 to write the conservative agenda for Trump’s administration “to take down the deep state and return the government to the people.”
The United States approaches a constitutional crunch. The crisis hasn’t arrived, but the storm builds. The question is stark: how much will the US bow to presidential diktat and directive?
The US has long had elements of an imperial presidency; Trump aims to get the full Imperial. He wants a completely free hand. When the president declares an “emergency,” Trump argues, he should be able to respond as he pleases. Here is a classic play from the autocrat handbook: in a crisis, the strongman should not be delayed by parliament or hampered by law.
“Emergency” powers were invoked by Trump to bypass congress and impose tariffs on nearly every US trading partner. The Supreme Court must rule on whether the tariffs are legal and the extent of Trump’s emergency powers. Can Trump declare anything a crisis then do whatever he wants? The court’s decision will have huge implications for America’s economy. And politics. And for Trump’s authoritarian personality.
The Trump persona is brazen, with a clear element of cruelty. A key attack word in the president’s vocabulary is “nasty.” Trump can deliver nasty-with-feeling. “I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them,” he says.
During Trump’s first term, in “The Cruelty is the Point,” Adam Serwer argued that the president rejoiced in inflicting cruelty: “Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear.”
Trump’s disdain for those who are liberal, “woke” or weak is more than an expression of hate for his opponents. He seeks to dismiss all opposition as useless or illegitimate. Nothing must impede the right to rule.
Harsh style serves an autocratic purpose for a president who always expects to win. The point is not to create or drive policy, but to express the Trump personality, to Make Trump Even Greater.
The Trump soap opera shreds policy and principle and power. An unserious America is being run by ego, not intellect. •
