Trump: two more views

I had promised in last week’s post on the Liberal Party to return to the topic this week. I’m not sure that I’ll get time, but here’s another angle on the topic in the shape of two views of Donald Trump: the man who is not only directly responsible for some of the Liberal Party’s woes, but also a symbol of the malaise that has eaten away at the party from the inside.

First up is Simon Tisdall in the weekend’s Guardian, on Trump’s foreign policy. His argument is that Trump and Vladimir Putin are reprising the roles of Hitler and Stalin in 1939, sharing a common hostility to liberal democracy and planning to divide Europe between them. While he recognises that they fall short of the originals in some ways, he suggests that the similarities are much more significant than the differences.

Having previously compared the current situation to Munich in 1938, I’m in no position to criticise this sort of alarmism. And I think Tisdall is accurate about much of what is going on, including the ideological underpinnings of Trump and Putin: “Their anti-democratic ultranationalism nurtures foul ideas of ethnic and racial supremacy that most Europeans had long consigned to history.” The same goes for his call for European leaders to work together to counter this “concerted pincer movement.”

Nonetheless, his picture of Trump just doesn’t stack up. Warning the reader not to take seriously his recent pro-Ukrainian comments, he attributes them to “his pinball policymaking, which ricochets randomly from one wacky idea to another.” But surely that counts against the picture of a planned assault on Europe’s liberties. No-one would ever have described Hitler or Stalin as “ricocheting randomly” – they would change tack when necessary, but they had coherent (if evil) objectives and worked consistently to pursue them.

So while I think Trump’s hostility to European values is genuine, the immediacy of the threat is less than Tisdall’s analogy would make it seem. Appeasement of Hitler, as we now know (and should have known then), was futile, but appeasement of Trump is not foolish in the same way. It’s reasonable to think that some combination of flattery, pushback and neglect will keep Europe safe on the American front while it deals with the much more serious danger from the east.

And making the transition from foreign policy to domestic, that’s also the message of the second view, from Paul Krugman in a substack post last week. Krugman takes on the idea that Trump is in the process of establishing an autocracy along the lines of Putin or of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán; while he accepts that that’s his intention, he offers reasons for thinking that it is much less likely to be successful.

The key difference according to Krugman is that Putin and Orbán were both genuinely popular during the early part of their rule. Putin won reasonably fair elections in 2000 and 2004, and Orbán won a landslide in a fair election in 2010. But Trump is deeply unpopular, with approval rates lower than any president in living memory, and his political base is very narrow, with wafer-thin majorities in congress.

That matters, because his authoritarian agenda incorporates a large element of bluff. It’s about moving quickly on many fronts at once, disorienting opponents and preventing any co-ordinated resistance from emerging. But if the administration’s moves aren’t backed by popular support, their opposition will eventually be able to regroup. As Krugman puts it:

It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.

If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.

Trump’s ability to recover ground is limited because reality is ultimately not on his side; his policies can’t meet the expectations of the voters. Tariffs will not bring prosperity, domestic drudgery will not make women happy, the god of the fundamentalists will not magically appear to set things right and global warming will continue whether people believe in it or not.

And those who are set on emulating Trump, including the insurgents in the Liberal Party, will find they run into the same limitations.

(The previous two views on Trump were here, back in February.)