Is there another way of looking at the Trump presidency?
As Donald Trump's presidential term comes to an end, and while waiting to know whether it will be renewed, Mathieu Creson proposes to take a retrospective look at the Republican president's policies, avoiding the pitfall of a biased analysis by the controversies about it.
It is instructive to compare the way Americans talk about the interior of the United States with the way Europeans view this country from the outside. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear the latter, and in particular the French, declare that the United States is the country of inequalities par excellence, where racial divisions reign above all else, which are also often there. perceived as “systemic” or endemic. In the current context, it is repeated over and over again that Donald Trump has only fueled hatred in the United States over the past four years; he would have spent his time throwing oil on the fire, we hear or read everywhere, and this with an intention that could not be clearer: to galvanize ever more his electoral base in order to ensure his own re-election in 2020.
Continually rehashed for four years by the mainstream media in the United States, this commonplace is also very widespread in our media and among our "experts" on America, a good part of whom seems to be unable to speak of Trump other than on the tone of disdainful sneer and disapproving dismay, even though his record was not entirely free from some successes. Across the Atlantic, the Trump phenomenon has given rise to a new syndrome called TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), which is characterized by a tendency to hysterize reactions as soon as the mere name of Trump is mentioned.
One of the rare authors in France to have been able to distinguish between things concerning Trump and to have seen the successes with which we can legitimately credit the latter, Nicolas Lecaussin, echoes what is called the TDS in the United States. speaking for his part of "trumpophobia", which, he rightly writes, "prevents not only thinking but also quite simply informing" 1.
Let us concede that Trump could legitimately have seemed outrageous or irritating in form. His personality clearly sets him apart in the history of American presidents, and he is unlike any other Republican. But due to the anti-Trump media fierceness that has raged for at least four years, it emerges a portrait of the President of the United States that hardly anyone in France would dream of tempering, if only by wondering what 'there is no other way of looking at its record and the political struggle it embodies.
Almost everything that is currently circulating about Trump can in fact be summed up as follows: he is only a compulsive follower of Twitter, a man in the wild, an endless propagator of fake news, a narcissist obsessed with what others think of him, a first-class boor incapable of understanding anything about the complexity of the problems facing the United States; he would also be immature, unpredictable, unable to concentrate on a subject for more than a minute, incompetent, reluctant to learn, overly confident in his "gut" 2 and unfit for presidential office.
Here we find the old tendency - particularly true among the French - to treat American presidents with condescension: after the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, the actor of series B Ronald Reagan, "the idiot of Texas" George W. Bush, So we have been entitled for four years to the real estate developer and the host of reality shows Trump. (Note that the only American presidents who find favor in our eyes are still Democrats: the universal revulsion doomed to Trump is met by the no less universal adulation with which Obama has been surrounded.)
However, the violence of the media attacks against the US president has escalated as never since the 2016 election, with some mainstream US media even giving the impression of having since turned into real anti-Trump ideological war machines. .
A resolutely "non-sacrificial" foreign policy
Let us distinguish Trump's rational criticism from the systematic anti-Trump ideology: if the first is perfectly legitimate, the second loses all credibility insofar as it focuses solely on Donald Trump's wrongs, entirely neglecting the question of the possible merits of his politics. In terms of foreign policy, we can certainly address certain criticisms of Donald Trump: thus the apparent absence of real intellectual foundations for his political and diplomatic action on the international scene. National Security Advisor under the Trump administration in 2018 and 2019, often associated with the neoconservative movement and author of the recent book The Room where it happened (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2020), John Bolton was able to say: I quickly realized that Trump had no vision. He is neither a Republican conservative nor a leftist Democrat. It’s nothing. And I think that's a problem. If you don't have a philosophy, you don't have goals and you go anywhere. Trump is exactly in this situation ”3.
John Bolton says he will not vote for Trump or Biden, and this will be the first time he has not voted for the Republican nominee. But at the same time he admits that Biden is very likely to pursue a foreign policy that will be worse than Trump's: "His foreign policy will be, at best," he says, "as bad as that of Obama. But there is a risk that it will be even worse, because of the pressure from the left wing of the Democratic Party that it will be subjected to "4. Trump therefore appears here as a lesser evil, and the question for a voter who is aware of this reality is therefore whether of two evils one should choose the lesser, or whether, like Bolton, one should refuse to choose. That said, we will come back to the successes of Trump's foreign policy a little later, because there are some and we must know how to recognize them.
In an interview published in Le Monde, political scientist Robert Kagan denounced the “selfish” use of American power by Trump, even going so far as to speak of a transformation of the United States by the latter into “a rogue superpower ”5… If we can consider that Obama tried to reduce the“ American hyperpower ”, Trump, Kagan tells us, wanted to restore the supremacy of the United States, but in an unprecedented way: Trump's America has become a superpower again, but it is now a "one-sided" superpower, essentially geared towards its own interests. The complaint of "unilateralism" was routinely made in the United States, it will be remembered, particularly during the Second Iraq War. Kagan considers that America of today - "a very active, very strong America that thinks only of itself," he said in the same interview with Le Monde - has become truly "one-sided." We object to Kagan, however, that a country cannot be blamed for taking its best interests into account above all else.
In this regard, it is interesting, it seems to me, to compare Trump's foreign policy with what the philosopher Ayn Rand wrote on this subject. "An appropriate solution, one can read in his book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal (1966), would be to elect statesmen - in the event that they appear - with a radically different foreign policy, a policy explicitly and proudly." devoted to the defense of the rights and national interests of America, rejecting foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation ”.
Let us therefore ask this question: is it reasonable for Europeans to always demand from the United States (except when the latter, according to them, set themselves up as "policemen of the world") that they carry out a foreign policy that one could describe, in Ayn Rand's vocabulary, “sacrificial”?
That the erosion of the liberal international order, denounced by Kagan, is in the interest of the United States, on the other hand, is an idea that can be discussed, and that I have in fact discussed in a previous article.
Is this the only point on which the Trump administration's foreign policy can be considered "Randian"? One might think so a priori so, Ayn Rand having further written in the same book: "The essence of the foreign policy of capitalism is free trade - that is to say the abolition of trade barriers, protective tariffs, special privileges - the opening of the world's trade routes to international free trade and competition between individuals from all countries who deal directly with each other ”.
We would be wrong, however, to see Trump as an advocate of protectionism as such. This is what essayist Dinesh D’Souza reminds us in his latest book United States of Socialism (All Points Books, 2000), when he writes:
“Trump is also, as Reagan was, a defender of free market capitalism. The only caveat one might have on this is Trump's position on trade, which is in fact very much compatible with the principles of free trade. After all, Trump favors tariffs not because he wants to curb trade between nations but because he wants to subject countries like China and France to an obligation to remove their own tariff barriers. Trump's goal is not to erect tariff barriers, but to eliminate them and create a level playing field in international trade. We can agree or disagree with his strategy, but we must remember that he intends to encourage and not to dissuade free trade in the world "(p. 250-251).
This is also the conclusion reached by Franz Olivier-Giesbert in his editorial in Le Point of September 10, 2020, in which he admits his regret at having criticized Trump's alleged “ultra-protectionism” 4 years ago: “In renegotiating the treaties, he writes, the American president wanted only to put an end to the somewhat infantile ingenuity of the West in their trade relations with nations which, like China, find it difficult to admit reciprocity. In the name of poorly understood liberalism, they have often tended, like the European Union, to give them satisfaction, at the expense of their own interests ".
Trump's “protectionism” is therefore better understood when placed in the more general framework of the American foreign policy pursued by him for 4 years, which is underpinned by the desire to restore a more level playing field between countries, be it redefining the funding of military cooperation organizations like NATO, or of international trade agreements7.
Trump's "isolationism" or, to use Robert Kagan's word, Trump's "unilateralism" can also be understood as a refusal to continue to carry alone the burden of collective responsibility, in favor of greater accountability of other countries with which the United States is engaged in an international cooperative effort. During the commemoration of the landing on June 6, 2004, George W. Bush declared that "if it had to be done again, the United States would do it again for its allies".
Europe has grown accustomed throughout the twentieth century, from World War I to the war in Kosovo, to rely on the United States to solve its problems for it, incapable as it was. 'put an end to it herself. In this regard, we can consider that Trump did not shatter international cooperation bodies so much as he did in fact force Europeans and others to become more in control of their own destiny and not always expect everything from the United States. In the Middle East, we can also consider that Trump's effort has consisted in better empowering several countries in the fight against terrorism.
In an issue of La Croix L’Hebdo (week of October 23, 2020), journalist Marianne Meunier legitimately asks the question: "In foreign policy, should we throw everything away from Donald Trump? The first mistake, she rightly writes, would be to judge the entirety of her foreign policy solely on her tweets. As Maxime Lefebvre, diplomat and professor of international relations at ESCP, says, "we must be careful not to judge Donald Trump's foreign policy by the yardstick of his tweets and his madness, it cannot be summed up to that ”9. Franz-Olivier Giesbert in his editorial in Le Point, already quoted, also questions "what not to throw away from Trump".
We have already spoken of the new American firmness on China's business practices. Robert Kagan also concedes this point, saying of China: "This country has long taken advantage of a certain American shyness to break the rules, or loot intellectual property" 10. What about the Iranian case? While Obama had practiced a policy of openness towards Iran, Trump decided in 2018 to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, a decision which was strongly criticized around the world. , with the exception of countries allied with the United States in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Trump will therefore have put an end to the ingenuity of Obama, who, as Franz-Olivier Gisbert put it, "had taken the pledge [of the Iranian leadership] at face value."
After the attack on two oil tankers, one Norwegian, the other Japanese, in the Arabian Sea in 201912, or even after the drone bombardment of Saudi oil installations, the United States responded by launching a air raid against General Qassem Soleimani13. Regarding Trump's decision to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel, Franz-Olivier Gisbert adds that the US president "has thus lifted Israel out of its unseemly condition, of" a Jew of the nations. " This move, he continues, was not accompanied by the dreaded scenario of politico-media well-thought of a major conflict within the Middle East, if not beyond.
Trump’s domestic policy: the policy of lowering taxes and deregulation and fighting America’s new “democratic socialism”
A grievance often made against Trump is that he was the "president of the rich." Nothing is more false than this assertion, as Nicolas Lecaussin remarkably demonstrated in an article entitled "Trump, the 'president of the rich' who enriched the minorities, the poor and the middle classes - Tax cuts and eliminating regulations that are more effective than redistribution ”14.
Based on Census Bureau statistics, Nicolas Lecaussin recalls how the median household income increased by $ 4,379 to reach $ 68,700 at the end of 2019, which represents an increase of 6.8% compared to 2018 This, he adds, is the highest level ever reached by these incomes after inflation since 1967. However, far from having benefited above all the wealthier classes, this increase has mainly benefited minorities, including the Black. "Thanks to Trump's economic policy," adds Nicolas Lecaussin, more than 4 million people have emerged from poverty, which has fallen to its 1959 level, mainly for blacks whose poverty rate has never been so low. ". On the other hand, the black unemployment rate had reached, for the first time since the 1970s, only 5.4%, against 7.5% under Obama15.
It is therefore interesting to note that if the Democrats of today are generally known for their discourse in favor of minorities, it was in reality Trump who made it possible to substantially improve their conditions through tax cuts and deregulation measures decreed by him.
The mainstream media that make a point of scrutinizing Trump's statements - necessarily all fanciful ramblings according to them - under scrutiny of the facts, have they shared these numbers as much as journalistic ethics would have dictated?
Probably not, for the American ideological left must at all costs maintain the idea that it is the “progressive” Democrats who work for the good of minorities, unlike the evil, heartless Republicans who would only care about the fate of the minorities. more fortunate and would display a sovereign contempt for the more modest workers. You really have to read the article in question by Nicolas Lecaussin in its entirety to understand how Trump's tax cuts have borne fruit for the benefit of the greatest number, and not for the benefit of only great fortunes, idea endlessly rehashed by the disinformation campaigns of "progressive" ideology. Thus Nicolas Lecaussin writes:
“These economic and social successes can be explained, not by a strengthening of redistribution and an increase in social assistance, but by tax cuts and the elimination of regulations. The economic and fiscal policy launched by Trump in November 2017 as the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” a campaign pledge, will have changed the American economy. It has given a breath of fresh air, and to households and businesses with many bold measures, that Americans have been waiting for ”16.
While Trump has striven from this point of view to prolong the "Reagan revolution" with its tax cuts and deregulation, several members of the left wing of the Democratic Party, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (often called by her initials AOC in the United States), dream of restoring the preeminence of the Big Government, in the continuity of the political action of Obama. This is clearly evident in his draft Green New Deal, which provides for an unprecedented expansion of federal action in the economic field.
The idea of a "Green New Deal" was invented in 2007 by NGOs and environmental research groups, before being recently taken up by AOC. The reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal is obviously not innocent and clearly reflects a desire to follow the long American tradition, born with Herbert Hoover and FDR in the twentieth century, favorable to the extension of Big Government17. Based on a report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 18 dating from October 2018, the AOC Green New Deal provides in particular for a forced conversion to exclusive use in the United States renewable sources (solar and wind energy) by 2035 for electricity production. This program also includes a social component, consisting in particular in the creation of universal French-style health coverage, the establishment of free public universities, and the guarantee by the federal state of employment.
AOC further proposes to finance the Green New Deal by taxing at 70% the income exceeding the 10 million annual dollars19. The forced conversion to the use of 100% renewable energies, involving the complete abandonment of nuclear and fossil energies, in reality poses many problems, both economic and energetic or environmental, and therefore appears to be an expensive environmentalist dream. , ineffective, even counterproductive20. As has been rightly written, the Green New Deal actually reflects the rise of an eco-socialism in the United States, based on "a political scientism of economic and social planning", in the tradition of the old " scientific socialism ”21.
We can therefore see that the 2020 presidential election is all the more important as it sees two radically contrary visions of the economy opposing each other: free and deregulated for Trump, state-controlled and based on redistribution for AOC and its members. supporters. Granted, Biden is not AOC or Sanders. Sensitive however to the ideas of the latter, Biden is nonetheless what the essayist Dinesh D'Souza calls a "rampant socialist", who "advances quietly", while AOC or Bernie Sanders are openly socialists, even if they would defend this new variant of socialism in the United States: “democratic socialism” 22.
For Dinesh D'Souza (who has just directed the documentary Trump Card, a counterpart to his book United States of Socialism), the socialism which is currently progressing in the United States is not really Marxism, founded on class struggle and State control of the means of production and exchange. Instead of dividing society between proletarians and capitalists, today's socialists introduce more criteria of social segmentation, such as ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. In the United States this is called "identity politics", and can also be called multiculturalism. The ultimate goal of current socialists in the United States, Dinesh D’Souza tells us, is to create a majority coalition of oppressed minority victims. The American socialists thus hope to make their ideas triumph by assembling a majority and by exercising, in the name of this majority, a tyrannical power over the minority which remains. D'Souza rightly notes that it was not Trump who created the division and chaos that we currently see in American society: it is rather, he says, the pre-existing divisions in society that made being born Trump.
Trump is usually considered to be someone inherently immoderate. For D’Souza, it is above all the present times that are immoderate. In this regard, D’Souza draws a comparison between Trump and Lincoln. Lincoln wasn't particularly an immoderate person per se; but upon arriving in Washington in 1861, and seeing what D’Souza called the "gangsterization of the democrats," Lincoln was forced to move on. D'Souza also compares Trump to Lincoln on another point: indeed, for Lincoln, the essence of slavery is theft, in the sense that the fruit of one's labor is usurped by the 'other. D’Souza insists that today's American socialists prefer to work to create this majority coalition of so-called oppressed minorities in order to attack another minority: those of creators and innovators.
Here again, no offense to what some anti-Trump libertarians claim, this one is closer to Ayn Rand than one thinks: it is the current progressives who intend to make believe that it is legitimate and normal for the majority to demand from this minority of inventors that they pay them a substantial share of the fruits of their labor, if necessary by using the ethnicist argument: if these innovators have enriched themselves, indeed argue certain American progressives, it is because they exploited minorities, particularly ethnic minorities, or else it is because their ancestors exploited the ancestors of these same minorities during the period of slavery. It follows from this idea that innovators or their forefathers have in fact "stolen" the fruit of the labor of others, and that it is therefore legitimate to take it in return.
While the only existing minority is that of the individual, as Ayn Rand had said, current American socialists therefore impose a multicultural, in reality retrograde, vision of American society, thus reviving social discrimination, however qualified. of "positive". Under the guise of "generosity" and "progressivism", they are in fact acting, D’Souza continues, for essentially patronage ends. They understood that this coalition of minorities considered oppressed constitutes a real electoral windfall. Because as the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw said, "any government which robs Peter to dress Paul can always count on Paul's support."
To this, the American progressives reply that they do not intend to revive socialism, but rather to be inspired by the Scandinavian model. Here again, D’Souza responds appropriately, emphasizing how erroneous their reference to the Scandinavian model is. Indeed, the Scandinavian model is not based on the same multicultural approach to society. D’Souza also insists on the fact that the Swedes are certainly "socialists" in the redistribution of wealth, but also and above all capitalists in the production of this same wealth. Moreover, minorities are not encouraged to group together to extort the fruits of their labor from the richest, and the tax is much more equal, with everyone paying it up to their income. D’Souza therefore comes to argue that it is in fact Venezuela, and not the Scandinavian countries, which constitutes the true model of American socialists ...
Trump's fight is by no means a fight against minorities, and it has been recalled previously how much he has actually done for them in the past 4 years economically. As Thomas D. Klingenstein wrote in an article entitled "Patriotism vs. Multiculturalism "(Volume XIX, Number 2, Spring 2019), the real fight that Trump has waged actually lies in the defense of America against the onslaught of multiculturalism. Emphasize that this has absolutely nothing to do with a hypothetical and ridiculous defense of "white supremacism."
Because as we have said, and as the whole tradition of liberal thought understands, there are basically only individuals in a society.
The progressives' parade is to call anyone who dares to attack the evils of multiculturalism as "racist" or "xenophobic". Oddly vilified on the moral level, the opponent to the multiculturalist sectarian drift of American society is thus ostracized from public opinion, relegated to the rank of "pitiful", to use the way in which Hillary Clinton had qualified part of Trump's electorate shortly before the 2016 election.
It is important to distinguish here two multiculturalisms: on the one hand, the original multiculturalism of the United States, which has always been founded on the adherence of new immigrants to the founding principles of the United States and to the Constitution; on the other hand, the current ideological multiculturalism, which reigns in much of American universities and the media, and which is based on ideas and values roughly contrary to those which underpinned the original multiculturalism.
As Thomas D. Klingenstein writes, “America is a multiracial society with citizens from all corners of the world. Despite its multiplicity, or rather thanks to it, the country has strived to unite around a single national political culture based on natural rights, individual liberty and republican government. Multiculturalism is yet something else, the antithesis of these unifying principles and common patriotism. Nurtured in our colleges and universities, multiculturalism is a senseless exercise in self-flagellation. "
"He sees America's past as a series of crimes against humanity: genocide, racism and all of its comorbidities."
So what should we expect from the November 3 election? As D'Souza writes in United States of Socialism, if Trump loses, the American left will try to make believe that the years 2016-2020 will have been a parenthesis in recent American history, during which the Americans will have gone mad. It will strive to thwart the actions taken by Trump and it will discredit all those who dared to support him on certain points. (p. 254). Above all, if Trump loses, the United States will take one more step on the road to “democratic” and “identity” socialism, and the Trumpian concept of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) will disappear. (Ibid.) On the other hand, if Trump wins, he will complete the Reaganian revolution of the 1980s - applied to the current context - by returning to America's fundamental principles of individual freedom, the American dream and full respect for private property.
