What we learned from Trump about power
The defeated president raised the curtain on corruption at the center of political power and the business world in which he made a career, the corruption he himself has always practiced
His America First approach to foreign policy kept the United States out of wars, then degenerated into delusions of Chinese plots around Covid
Trump has explicitly practiced the neoliberal approach to politics, which sees citizens as dependent on absolute hierarchical power
He also demonstrated the hypocrisy of Washington, where all baseness is tolerated as long as it is practiced in secret, but thanks to him we now know how power really works
Now that Donald Trump is preparing to become history, many are drawing the first budgets of his presidency. Most of these comments are hostile and superficial: the president is insulted for his racism, his xenophobia, his inefficiency, ignorance, insensitivity. Many of those who defend it focus on the same aspects but for them racism, xenophobia and arrogance are to be considered virtues and not despicable defects.
My budget is different: Trump was right and he taught us to learn how power really works in the United States.
AMERICA FIRST BUDGET
Trump was not wrong in the founding principle of his foreign policy: America first and moderate isolationism. There are only two possible foreign policies for the United States: America First or that of American exceptionalism, that is, the ideology under which American supremacy derives from the unique qualities of our republic.
The supremacy of the United States clearly implies a hierarchical international system in which the United States is at the top and other countries are placed in inferior and subsidiary positions. The ultimate and undeclared goal of this approach is world domination.
The United States is certainly not the first country to have cultivated such dreams: from Egypt to Rome, to the Byzantine empire, to the Muslim empire to Charlemagne, to the Huns, to Tamerlane, to Napoleon, to Hitler, to the communist empire of 'USSR… the list is long.
While the odds of achieving this supremacy goal are very low, what is certain is that the road is paved with war. The ideology of the "indispensable nation" determines, by definition, "infinite wars for an infinite peace", to use the words of writer Gore Vidal. It is certainly not by chance that America has been at war almost continuously over the past eighty years.
The America first approach puts, at least formally, all countries on the same level and claims that America will pursue its own interest, and expects the same behavior from other states.
Now, Trump is certainly not a scholar of international relations, yet in his speech to the United Nations he made it clear that he also expects from countries like Algeria or Zimbabwe the same approach that he has given to the United States.
In America First politics, the United States will always end up hitting harder than others, by virtue of its size, but it has no desire or illusion to rule other countries or, worse yet, explain to them how to manage their own internal affairs. It is a type of pragmatic politics that makes war much less likely: on interests it is possible to negotiate, on ideologies it is impossible.
Trump has more or less followed this line until his obsession with China is welded to the Covid-19 pandemic that he seems to have always regarded as some kind of Chinese plot to oust him from the presidency. Yet he did not start new wars and he also made some significant moves to end wars that the United States has been fighting for two decades for which no one in Washington can find a rational justification. They were imperial wars, of the kind from the Desert of the Tartars, in which the top of the empire soon forgets where its soldiers are fighting and why.
THE CASA BIANCA COMPANY
In addition to these contributions to foreign policy, Trump's four years have also taught us a lot about how the logic of political power and that of the business world works. Upon entering politics, Trump applied exactly the same approach in the public sphere that he has followed for half a century in the business world. He treated citizens like him dependent on him that he could manage at his leisure and, if necessary, fire.
He considered his presidency in the same way that Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, considers his position in the company: he can do everything, without any limit, any rule, any law. .
Many accuse Trump of ignorance, but I believe it is the wrong way to approach the issue. He is certainly not interested in the Constitution of the United States and the complex rules on which politics in a democracy is based because he - perhaps consciously, perhaps instinctively - is convinced that those rules should not exist.
The only rules he is familiar with are those of companies, where conflicts are resolved by shouting “You are fired”, you are fired. A purely hierarchical decision is based on power determined by wealth and not limited by any external constraints.
By introducing economic principles into politics, neoliberals have done serious damage to the public dimension of decision-making and to democracy. They have pushed many companies back down to the level where all that matters is the conflict of personal interests. Trump is the perfect student of this neoliberal school because he applies its principles without pretense, without shyness, without hypocrisy.
DOWN THE CURTAIN
Trump has also pulled down the curtain that usually separates citizens - spectators of the political game - from rulers and has unraveled all trafficking, exchanges of favors, blackmail and the once obscure uses of power for personal ends. He brought them to the stage, made them visible to all who attended the show.
While in other administrations these illegal or semi-legal activities - such as receiving money from foreign entities, jumping from one profitable office to another, cheating on taxes - were practiced with discretion and even decorum, during the Trump years they were conducted in public. , without any barrier to hide them from the eyes of the citizens.
It was thanks to Trump, we have to admit, that we were able to see the enormous corruption that lies at the heart of the political process.
But Trump has also done much more. The style he brought to the presidency was the same one that he had honed in fifty years of business that have always included illegal or in any case not entirely legal practices. Practices that have not prevented him from having a brilliant career in the New York business community, becoming rich, popular, a welcome guest at many parties in the city, including those to finance election campaigns such as Hillary Clinton's for the United States Senate. The mere fact that Trump's style was not considered abnormal or censurable made it clear that everyone around him had used the same means to get to the top. And this was not only true in New York, but all over the world: as an entrepreneur, Trump concluded agreements for his various activities in Scotland, Russia, the Middle East, China ... Some of his associates betrayed him, to obtain contracts millionaires, but no scandal for Trump: he would have done the same in their place.
SINS MUST BE KEPT SECRET
Trump has given us one last important lesson. He showed the depth of corruption and impunity for crimes at the heart of politics and business. These are sins that cannot be forgiven, but if they are cultivated in secret they are accepted or at least managed. The ostentatious sins are not. Those who will now come to the White House in Donald Trump's place will do their best, not to change the nature of power, because the cracks we saw in the Trump years are systemic, but to hide it.
But now that we have seen the truth, it will be much more difficult to obscure it again and pretend that nothing has happened.
