The “Gulf of Mexico” is to be renamed the “Gulf of America”. Greenland is to be annexed and the Panama Canal to be acquired. Canada is to become the 51st state. How will these feats of expansionism be achieved? Donald Trump could not reveal that – for reasons of state.
These edicts, mooted at Trump’s news conference earlier this month, represent a taste of the foreign policy brewing in the cauldron of his mind. No courtier contradicted him. In fact, they appear in lockstep with their monarch. When a reporter asked Trump what he thought of Elon Musk making middle-school taunts to Great Britain, King Trump’s face tensed up at the mention of the untethered power behind the throne and he tersely changed the subject. And what about JD Vance? Trump’s very own Thomas More has seemingly vanished, keeping his head down so as not to end up in the Tower and lose it.
Yiddish proverb: “A fool can throw a stone in the water that it takes ten wise men to retrieve.” Trump can be considered a fool, yet he is president once again, and so even his most unhinged utterances should be herded into the reassuring pen of some sort of serviceable meaning. And so they are put in the strategic category of “flooding the zone” and classified as manipulations of the public mind. They are stones, though, thrown by a political idiot, a money-besotted businessman propped up by Musk, the richest man in the world. But people have to tag the stones with meaning to avoid losing their minds. Sometimes they throw nonsensical stones of their own.
One is the term “populist”, widely used now to describe the sea change in American politics. But populism is a strategy for taking power and holding on to it, not for governing. Replacing experts with a caste of crackpot elites, for example, is hardly a strategy for governing. This is why, for several years now, self-declared right-wing-populist intellectuals, when they discourse on “populism”, largely talk about what Trump needed to say to get elected, and what Democrats were not saying that got them unelected. None of them write about any kind of moral vision at the heart of populism. That is because there isn’t one.
Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837 and arguably the US’s only truly “populist” president, passed one piece of major legislation during his time in office: the Indian Removal Act, which saw the relocation of native Americans from the east to the west. Trump will be lucky if his kindred policy of the deportation of undocumented immigrants gets off the ground. An image of an injured or killed child and that should be the end of that.
What Jackson exhibited was powerful emotions. He was openly driven to take revenge on what he considered the aristocratic cabal of politicians who, he believed, stole the election from him in 1824. Personal attacks on his wife, Rachel, for bigamy (and smoking a pipe) enraged him. Legions of people became swept up in Jackson’s wounded passion. Populism is pretty much that: magnetic feeling surging in a moment when old categories of reason and judgement are disintegrating. In Jackson’s era, it was an Industrial Revolution during a time when language yielded to action. Jackson was admired for his apoplectic temper, having challenged people to several duels, killing a man in one of them. Indeed, language becomes action. Tweets – the digital missile of choice for both Trump and Musk – are both language as action, and action spent in words.
In an age of transformation, it is easy to miss the fact that some essentials never change. Far from being “populist”, the Republican Party is on the cusp of finally attaining, if only briefly, its heart’s desire since the New Deal: radical tax cuts and abolition of expensive regulations. The right-wing intellectuals might blather on about anti-democratic theorists like Strauss, Schmitt and Mosca. But the elites of the Republican Party wouldn’t know the difference between Giorgio Agamben and Giorgio Armani. They care only about the accumulation of wealth.
That is why Trump’s politics come down to savings. He is about as exciting a populist figure as a piggy bank. Mexico will pay for the wall; Canada for American protection; Nato will “pay its share”. Tech is good if tech kitties up enough dough. Greenland will provide precious minerals and save the US money. Owning the Panama Canal will save the US money. Drilling on preserved land will raise riches. Mass deportations will bring down inflation. Costly Zelensky is, Trump said, “the greatest salesman who ever lived”. “The most beautiful word in the dictionary,” Trump proclaimed, “is tariff.” The key to Trump’s political success, in his mind, is the raising or abolition of the debt limit. Otherwise, without borrowing huge sums of money, and without a foreign policy whose core is saving money, he will never pay for the extreme tax cuts he wants to sustain for his super-rich friends.
It is not exactly the thrilling, transformative populism said to be slouching towards democracy, though it is anti-democratic in its heedlessness. But it makes its predecessor, neoliberalism, look like the spirit of romanticism. There will, of course, be inevitable consequences of such an impoverishment of political imagination. Revolutionary leaders, as Trump is being characterised, do not scour their republics like medieval housewives looking to save. There will also be a silver lining to Trump’s deal-hunting politics. For as long as he is president, America doesn’t have to fear a fascist revolution. It costs too much.
[See also: The edge of anarchy]
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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors