Trump: method in madness

In a thoughtful essay, here is one considered view

This week, I am happy to hand over my Newsletter to Arjan Appadurai, emeritus professor at New York University, an anthropologist and former provost of New School. His is a long discourse but, trust me, well worth the effort to read in full. Whatever else, Trump and Project 2025 have changed the economic, political and social game in the USA; the rest of the world needs to catch up. We also need, in the UK, with our Government toadying up to this neo-fascist regime, to wise up, and fast. If you know a Government minister, pass this Newsletter on.

Appadurai writes: ‘There is some mystery surrounding Donald Trump’s moves to dismantle many cherished principles of American history and its culture of governance: his globalisation denialism; his romance with Russia; his demolition of universities; his contempt for European values and histories; his campaign to humiliate Canada. These are all known examples, but it can be hard to see across them to discern anything like a unified theory of Trump-ism.

‘There are two possibilities here. One is that there is no rhyme or reason to Trump’s actions. He is simply a randomising generator of chaos. The other is that there is a method.

‘I subscribe to the second possibility. I think Trump – and his advisers – know what they are doing.

‘Other tin-pot dictators – like Narendra Modi, Recep Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán – and their countries are distinct from the US in an important way. These autocrats around the world do not have comparable democratic institutions. They can capture, subvert or sabotage democratic traditions in their own countries, using their own means. In each of them, there are longstanding traditions of inequality (such as caste in India), vigorous and celebrated imperial histories (Turkey, Russia and China) and deep traditions of racial and religious nationalism (Hungary and India).

‘But they do not have the special strengths of American democracy: a sturdy commitment to separation of church and state; the distribution of powers between legislature, judiciary and executive; and a deep antipathy towards tyrants, royal or otherwise.

‘Trump thus comes to his dictatorship fantasy – evidenced by his compulsive impatience with advisers, media critics, political opponents or ordinary citizens who question him, and a bottomless appetite for praise and fealty – faced with a globally unmatched set of institutional powers that could theoretically stand in his way. To defeat them, he has hit upon an original formula: to reverse-engineer the liberal institutions designed as guardrails against people like him.

‘The institutions that require repurposing include the world’s most powerful judicial and legislative apparatus, which were designed to keep the executive restrained; a vast body of law and regulation; a massive federal bureaucracy to assure that federal policies are scrupulously enforced; and the world’s largest combination of military and police forces to help the state to assure domestic order and civility. Trump is turning these watchdogs into his personal pets.

‘Trump’s scorched-earth approach to these institutions, their norms and powers, is not designed to improve the originals but to gut them, in part by turning their powers against themselves.

‘The advanced civic infrastructure of the US could not easily be turned against itself. It required careful planning over the Joe Biden years by Trump-allied strategists, think-tanks, policy wonks and planners. During this period, every ideological cough from Trump was turned by these adjunct players into a menu of detailed executive actions.

‘Trump and his supporters, spread across a hefty network of right-wing think-tanks as highbrow as the Heritage Foundation and as lowbrow as Breitbart, have been busy for at least a decade laying the foundations of the greatest democratic rollback in US history, designing a newly minted form of jiu-jitsu to undo the grand American democratic tradition. This form of jiu-jitsu pits law against law, police forces against other police forces, court against court, media campaigns against other media campaigns, science against science, religion against religion, and deals against markets.

‘Thus, Ice is ranged against more conventional police departments, the FBI has been internally polarized, pro-Israel evangelical Christians are turned against more liberal Christians, university trustees are turned against faculty, Robert F Kennedy’s lunatic science is turned against the scientific mainstream, and the supreme court is pitched against the lower courts willing to check Trump’s power.

‘And, of course, there is Trump’s [personal] attack on US higher education, which has been widely dissected, turning universities into hostages of the federal government, and civil rights law into a tool to attack civil rights. It is precisely universities’ commitment to debate as a path to new knowledge that motivates Trump’s effort to take them apart.

‘The very distinctive pillars of American democracy are being turned into fifth columns. Trump and his allies have created a massive autoimmune disorder – one in which the features of American democracy turn on themselves, re-engineering democracy to kill democracy.

‘The West is not exempt from the truism that it is much easier to destroy institutions than to build them. The rise of the 20th century’s most powerful dictators, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini and Pol Pot, show us that massive propaganda combined with brute violence can destroy democratic institutions, however recent, fragile and fledgling.

‘The Trump version of this story is built on the back of 260 years of complex liberal institution-building. To be sure, there are gaping aberrations in this story: a devastating civil war, the persistent enslavement and disenfranchisement of African Americans, racial campaigns against migrants of every stripe and background, paroxysms of rage against organised labour, and virulent anti-communism throughout the 20th century. Nor should we forget the decimation of Native Americans, the crushing of organised labour, the ruthless energy of the open frontier, the rise of robber barons and the cynical abuse of the “right to bear arms”.

‘Still, American liberal democracy retained a remarkable commitment to representative government and to the separation of powers. It also saw a series of constitutional amendments that moved the dial on the right to vote, on race, on women’s rights, and more. Precisely because of [former] abuses, exemptions and deviations from its constitutional ideals, the civil and political institutions of American democracy looked, until recently, as if they were too resilient to easily destroy.

‘Today, Trump and his army of followers are turning the strengths of American democracy against itself.

‘Trump’s entire view of the social contract is based on his idea of ‘the deal’. His long-standing attachment to his self-image as a deal-maker has misled many observers to see him as a crude capitalist, as a speculator, or as a conman. But as a deal-maker, Trump is more like the proverbial American car salesman.

‘In capitalist “common sense”, deal-making is viewed as a direct expression of market ideology, an instance of financial actors making a transaction based on the perceived value of their products, with the agreed price creating a momentary equivalence between the two parties. But it is in fact more akin to barter, which is an evolutionary precursor of the market. It is a primitive form of trade, and when trade broke down in earlier societies, it often led to war. Barter does not require any social contract between the parties, and even less does it require supply and demand, pricing or the invisible hand. It is a face-to-face, immediate transaction, akin to a poker game – or an episode of The Apprentice. Markets, on the other hand, are impersonal, abstract, unforgiving. They are not about winners and losers.

‘This is exactly why Trump’s tariff war feels highly belligerent. It has the tricky logic of barter, where there is no general law of demand or supply, no external source of general price information. It depends on face-to-face relationships, often between parties who may have prior hostilities, major cultural differences, and no shared monetary mechanism to serve as a mediator of value. In this case, mistrust and misunderstanding are ever present during a barter transaction, and any breakdown in communication can lead to conflict, even to war. Trump’s current dealings with many countries have this tense overhang, through which open conflict could break out at any instant.

‘Trump loves wealth, ostentation and deals, but he hates markets, not because of their imperfections but because they, in principle, rest on quasi-religious mysteries – of the “invisible hand”, of supply and demand, of the rationality of prices, all of which are safeguards against political fiat, personal greed and efforts to cook up macro outcomes for micro reasons.

‘It’s not that Trump cares that capitalism enhances inequality, that it is the enemy of planetary sustainability and the most stubborn opponent of economic nationalism of any type. What he disdains is the market – because it obeys no master other than its own rules of price, volume and scale. His weapon against it is tariffs, which he wields in the hopes of bringing it under his control.

‘The market relies on the social contract, that agreement between individuals and government that is based in trust and predictability. Since Trump despises the market, he must dismantle the social contract, in all its forms and guises.

‘Any attack on the social contract evokes atavistic fantasies, a return to Thomas Hobbes’s vision [in Leviathan] of the state of nature, in which human life is nasty, brutish and short. Or it evokes the Nazi version of a pre-contract world, built on racial purity, naturism, savage territorial expansion. Or Stalin’s special brand of paranoid planning, dictated science, and socialist realism in art and culture.

‘But none of them could bring the full force of existing liberal institutions to bear on the pulverising of the social contract, as Trump is doing today in the US. This is because the vast and interconnected force of law, bureaucracy, economy and state were simply not available in Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia and China when dictatorships took shape in these countries. And this was even truer of Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, whose young nations had barely achieved the rudiments of a durable liberal democracy when they were seized by autocrats.

‘Trump’s twisted genius has enabled the reorganisation of the core engineering of American liberal society, to turn its greatest protections against illiberal forces into the biggest weapons of illiberalism. His full-scale demolition of the American social order is based on a remarkable repurposing of the powers of the legislature, of the pesky independence of the courts and of the vaunted guardrails promised by the mass media to seduce many Americans into giving their consent to illiberalism.

‘The jury is still out on the success of the judiciary in resisting Trump’s suborning of legal institutions, because the supreme court is playing its cards very cautiously. For now, a combination of Trump’s instincts and advisers continue to fuel a major assault on the American liberal democratic order by hot-wiring its basic components. The endgame is to repurpose them as carriers of a massive autoimmune disorder – whereby democracy destroys itself.

‘Will Trump succeed? Are we doomed to an autocracy in democratic drag? Not necessarily. To resist Trump, we need to rewire democracy to revive democracy. This requires a move away from moral abstractions and liberal hand-wringing to local political campaigning, non-violent civil disobedience and active social mobilisation.

‘The clock is ticking and we must not allow the wrong man to be the last one standing.’

This week: Tim read The Salt Path by Raynor Winn; a film of the book with Gillian Anderson playing Raynor is just released. It’s the epic – the bon mot exactement – tale of two middle-aged, married people, evicted – through no fault of their own – from their farm, he with a life-limiting neurological diagnosis. They decide, as part therapy, part escape, to walk the 630 miles of the South West Coastal Path. Decades ago, I walked and wild camped on a section of the north Cornish coast route and it was brutal – the scrambling up, and down, sections of towering cliffs with a full backpack (tent, sleeping bag, food, water, stove etc.). It is an astonishing and captivating story (I read it in 24 hours). The book was – and still is – a best-seller. It deserves to be. As a Sunday Times reviewer said ‘this is a book about the triumph of hope over adversity but, most of all, it is about love’.

Music of the week: Richard Wagner’s opera Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). Wagner remains a highly controversial composer, not least for his antisemitism (doubled and redoubled by his wife, Cosima, Lizst’s illegitimate daughter with an Italian novelist). However, this early work is wonderful stuff and all the better for being a mere two hours fifteen minutes long. All the elements that would lead him to the later mighty Ring cycle are present. There is an excellent version on Phillips Digital Classics with the Bayreuther Festspiele Orchestra and Chorus under the baton of Woldemar Nelsson. This performance emphasises the central role of Senta, the heroine, often forgotten. Lisbeth Balsley does not disappoint.