Into the Trump Era

NOT JUST AMERICA but the world after January 20, when Donald J Trump will take oath as the 47th president from Capitol Hill which four years ago was the site of a mob attack that awarded an unsavoury epilogue to his underappreciated first term, has already become an alarmist’s scenario. No politician has come to take his much-disputed place in history, exuding hope and fear in equal measure, as Trump has. It is even reported that a former First Lady is avoiding the Inauguration, as she did the funeral of Jimmy Carter, lest she be afflicted by his toxicity. To be afraid, very afraid, of the first felon-president is a kind of mental preparation to face the demon.

Or: Is it a form of liberal rejectionism at a time when the impulses of democracy are increasingly incompatible with ideological elitism, no matter from Left or Right?

Anti-Trumpism, despite the size of his mandate, as the most responsible liberal position may have been made redundant by the power of impatience, but a cursory look at the op-ed pages will show how the temptation to turn a mandate into a civil society error still prevails. The pre-Inauguration anxiety does more than minimise popular will. It fictionalises the world’s most powerful politician, and that is partly because his clarity of purpose is clouded by his bluster and hyperbole.

When he says he wants to own the mineral-rich, autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, it is an outrageous expression of his focus on security and economy. His desire to make Canada the 51st state of America cannot be more than an over-the-top negotiation tactic on trade and tariff with his northern neighbour. What rattles most the still influential liberal establishment is his zero tolerance on unchecked immigration. In a country built on the dreams of immigrants, such a position is a repudiation of the foundational morality of America—so goes the extreme idealistic criticism of his policy.

Immigration is one topic Western liberals hate to confront. Even as they run away from it, the influx through porous borders continues to tilt the political balance. The politics of avoidance and evasion only makes it easier for the Right to bring an issue that can disrupt the social profiles of nations to the polling booths. The image of the border-defying dreamer is too remote a romance to be used against the hard reality of draining national resources and subverted demographics. Being a needy performative politician, Trump turns genuine causes into loud set pieces.

Style considerably diminishes the incoming president’s substance. In the Trump theatre, nothing is impossible, for politics is a show of strength. The profile of the strongman himself has changed. The old version characterised by stifled democracies and subjugated institutions has been replaced by the new model that benefits from the optimisation of democracy itself. The dictator as strongman is not the one who sways politics today; the conviction-politician who plumbs the depths of resentment has come to stay here. The sociology that sustains Trump’s offending style is made of America’s anger.

And it’s the legitimacy of this anger that makes him an uncompromising advocate of American exceptionalism. The MAGA roadshow may be pure kitsch that plays with the mass mind—as kitsch in politics always does—but it serves the purpose of the nationalist performer who has already made America First a grassroots invocation. The Trump foreign policy pleases no foreign powers; perhaps he is one of those strongmen who do not invest in friends or try to make any. What shapes his worldview is his faith in America’s transactional power.

On the eve of the Trump Inauguration, it is the looming image of a hustler that overshadows the clarity of the Trump mission, whether on China or Iran. Joe Biden, as a president of placidity, did not do anything bolder to dispel the impression of being a pastiche of the Obama presidency, which itself was apologetic about American power. The reality of a president pumped up by patriotism has only added to the nervousness of countries that were getting used to the ‘decline’ of America.

Trump is not a foreign policy moralist—somebody else’s war cannot be allowed to be at America’s expense, unless a historical ally is involved. No place for Wilsonian idealism here. He is not a Reagan without the Gipper’s elegance either—he won’t play the part to win history. Conservatives nostalgic about the Reagan era are still struggling to cope with the brazenness of Trumpism, an aggressive variant of national conservatism.

Trump is not alone. Politicians who wield power with no moral inhibitions, that too in the name of the Nation, are today indulged by democracy. Some of us pretend that they are there due to an error in choice. Don’t we know?

AmericaCanadademocracyDonald Trumpforeign policyimmigrationJimmy CarterMAGA