The Next Three Years

 Senator Joseph McCarthy ( in office 1947-57) had a great deal in common with Donald Trump, but no one remotely like Trump has never served as president before.  Yes, Richard Nixon's interior world resembled Trump's quite closely, but Nixon knew that he had to be a completely different person in public in order to be elected--and when Watergate revealed important things about his interior world, he had to leave office.  That Trump was ever nominated by a major party three times, much less elected twice, illustrates the bankruptcy of our political life.  His personality includes some contradictory aspects, I think, and that has made him very hard to interpret from the beginning.  We have learned a lot over the last year--the first year of an unfettered Trump presidency--and I am going to make some very tentative observations about where we seem to be going.

Trump obviously sees the world as a hostile environment in which no one can be trusted.  He also sees himself as the smartest and most entitled person who ever lived.  He has evidently managed people all his life with what is called "intermittent reinforcement," that is, praising them one day and excoriating the next.  Just a few days ago he described the "very good call" that he had with Governor Walz of Minnesota, but this morning he declares that “'Governor' Waltz is either the most CORRUPT government official in history, or the most INCOMPETENT."  He routinely abuses members of the Democratic Party, any Republican who dares to disagree with him, and any world leader who won't do what he wants.  Having made an entire business career out of successfully redefining failure as success, he continually redefines reality on issues from inflation to the trade balance to crime.  Because he is president, no one has the courage to question all his misstatements--not, I think, because they fear retaliation, but because it's too frightening to admit how clueless he seems to be, since he still holds our fate in his hands.   Accounts of Trump's career indicate that he has always used any weapon at his disposal against anyone who stands in his way, and now those weapons include the Justice Department, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the entire US military establishment, all of which are led by men and women entirely devoted to doing his bidding.

The confusing aspect of Trump's personality is this:  when things do not go his way, he uses the strategy that Senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested for the Vietnam War: he declares victory and takes his toys home.  That is how he used to argue for his financial wizardry in the face of repeated bankruptcies, and that is how he now declares that crime has been eliminated from the city of Washington, D.C., and that manufacturing is booming again in the United States.  I recently read a Wall Street Journal article that quoted an observer characterizing him as the greatest reality tv producer of all time, and that observation had some truth, but as I survey both the foreign and domestic situations today, I see little chance that that tactic is going to alter certain key situations fundamentally.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rightly pointed out in Davos that Trump has revolutionized world politics. "Today," he says, "I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints."  He merely confirmed what Trump had said himself, that "my own morality" is the only restraint he recognizes in foreign affairs.  Secretary of State Rubio confirmed that before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he argued that the president was free to take any military action that it deemed "in its national interest," which of course Trump will judge. Trump has just used the American military to remove a hostile head of government in Venezuela and take over that country's enormous oil reserves.  He could easily solve any real security problems involving Greenland within the NATO framework, which allowed the US to create about a dozen bases there during the Cold War, but he instead threatened to take it by force.  He has now sent an "armada" (a word which I hope will not come back to haunt him--see 1588) to Iran, apparently to force some kind of drastic change there.  He threatens and imposes tariffs even in retaliation for domestic steps that foreign governments take that he does not like.  Yes, he did retreat over Greenland, but that was obviously a tactical retreat rather than a real change in world view, as the Iranian adventure proves.  The formation of his Council of Peace, with himself as chairman, suggests that he sees himself as a one-man UN.  Two US presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, played critical roles in attempting to set up  a durable world order based on international institutions enforcing, or at least promoting, impartial rules among nations.  Trump has completely repudiated their legacy.  He rejects any impartial rules and all international institutions.

We also saw Trump reverse course rhetorically regarding the anti-immigration operation in Minneapolis last week after ICE agents killed a second American citizen for no reason, but I expect this to be temporary as well.  His team, led in this case by Stephen Miller, has two goals: to remove several million illegal aliens from the country by any means necessary, and to take steps to crush the active opposition of state governments, local governments, and the hundreds of thousands of US citizens--perhaps millions--who are willing to take to the streets to stop ICE operations.  And while I know many people may not want to hear this, on this point, they are on relatively firm ground.  Our failure to pass laws to legalize the status of men and women who came here without legal permission and who have become functioning parts of their communities is another illustration of the bankruptcy of our politics, one I deeply regret.  Under current law, however, the government has the right to deport these people, and under constitutional precedents going back to 1861 and reaffirmed during the civil rights era, state and local governments have no right to oppose the federal government or pursue an opposite policy, and private citizens' right to protest does not extend to a right to obstruct.  We are headed for a reckoning between left wing Americans who believe, as my contemporaries did 60 years ago, that the rightness of their cause justifies anything, and a hostile federal government.  That reckoning can very easily involve the resort to the Insurrection Act that Trump has threatened and it could conceivably involve the suspension of habeas corpus, allowed in the Constitution in times of "invasion or rebellion," both of which Trump has declared to exist.  The Constitution does seem to reserve the right of suspension for the Congress, but Trump, like Lincoln in 1861, might certainly do it without asking.  The two shootings in Minneapolis are parallel to what happened at Kent State in May 1970, when a National Guard commander, after many hours of taunting and rock-throwing by students, opened his troops to open fire.  ICE may back down temporarily here and there as the months go by, but I will be amazed if their operations cease.

Trump's Justice Department, meanwhile, is spending enormous time and energy on his personal grievances, attempting, it seems, to prove that election fraud really did take place in Georgia (and perhaps elsewhere) in 2020.  That I think will turn out to be a political mistake.  Governor Kemp of Georgia favored Trump in 2020, but he valued his state's right to count its own votes more highly, and I don't think any Georgians appreciate being called crooks or dupes of the Democratic Party.  But Trump is dedicated to this cause, and there is evidence that the government might be preparing some kind of gigantic conspiracy case against Barack Obama, James Comey, John Brennan, and many others for trying to steal the 2016 election by falsely discrediting Trump.  The president has said repeatedly that these men belong in jail, and his Justice Department obviously regards his word as law.

In the last week we have seen some evidence that Republicans in Congress might join with Democrats to restrain the immigration crackdown, and they avoided a government shutdown by promising to consider restrictions on ICE.  That is a hopeful sign.  Meanwhile, Trump's proclamations of "the greatest economy ever" clearly are not persuading the bulk of the American people, and there is a very good chance of Democrats taking over at least the House this fall.  Trump has declared that their victory would be catastrophic and we don't know what he could or would do to try to prevent it.  If it happens, however, we will probably have more chaos--including more failed impeachments.  The other possible restraint comes, of course, from the 25th amendment, but I think things would have to get much much worse before Trump's cabinet would declare him unfit to rule.

Certain therapeutic schools use the concept of "thriving on chaos" to describe people whose early traumas lead them to seek out chaotic situations in which they have come to feel comfortable.  I did not realize until just now that the save phrase was the title of a management handbook published in 1987, more or less at the peak of Trump's real estate career.  That is one book he might have bothered to read, and it would have confirmed his worst instincts.  The president remains the father of our national family, and it is terrifying for children to know that their fate depends on a person like that.  As Carney's speech shows, the rest of the world, who can see Trump as a distance, probably has a better grasp on what the situation portends than we do.  Other great powers may decide to take advantage of the increasing chaos we face at home.  Eventually we will return to a focus on order.