Dangerous, deceitful and mean-spirited — can the Trumpians be stopped?

Daily Maverick

2 days ago

The shambling yet catastrophic path of Donald Trump's second administration has made this writer worry that the damage inflicted on the nation by the president and his team of nihilists may not be contained, let alone reversed.
Let's be clear. In South Africa, State Capture represented a sustained effort by well-connected individuals to extract wealth, usually without providing the services ostensibly being paid for by those government payments, and its tentacles reached deeply into many parts of the government apparatus.
By contrast, the US version of State Capture has generally not been about a lack of services. Rather, it is an ongoing skewing of the government's services or payments that favours a select few at the exclusion of the greater good.
This has gone hand-in-hand with the use of the government's powers to carry out punitive efforts against those who disagree with the incumbent president's views.
Let us state clearly: this is wrong; it is increasingly dangerous; and it needs to be stopped. Decisively.
For three decades, I worked as a US diplomat in Africa and Asia. I was reasonably secure in my understanding that the US's fundamental security and national interests were bound up with a nation that cherished its diversity and vigorous debate, and was broadly supportive of egalitarian economic policies domestically.
Internationally, it created or strengthened partnerships with other nations in the furtherance of such goals and in opposition to those who would encourage authoritarianism.
Yes, the US made mistakes, but they were not an intrinsic part of the national culture. Opposition to such breaches of faith could take hold and reverse course.
I continue to believe in such values, and I hope (and still largely believe) a majority of my compatriots also do so. Unfortunately, the present administration clearly does not place much faith in these values. It shows its real temperament and contempt for us in nearly everything it says or does — at least when it is not simultaneously generating confusion and fear about its own frequently conflicting positions.
At an international level, what passes for a Trump Doctrine aligns the nation with an authoritarian government like Russia, a country now engaged in a vicious, unprovoked assault on its Ukrainian neighbour. That nation is eager to be embraced by the West as an increasingly democratic, modern state. But the odd course of the Trump administration flies in the face of nearly all of Europe willing to back Ukraine, and recognising the threat to European security and peace that this invasion means.
Every US diplomat and former diplomat I know cringed at the embarrassing, demeaning treatment that Trump and his lackeys doled out to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House live on television. This has come about even as Trump has continued to stroke the ego of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, strongly implying that Ukraine effectively started the war by declining to knuckle under to Russian demands regarding its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Unrequited love affair
Critics on the left and, increasingly, on the right as well, describe Trump's unrequited love affair with Putin as bizarre. But it is more dangerous than simply being bizarre. It contains the seeds of future pressures on the nations on the eastern flank of Europe, ultimately degrading the achievement of a peaceful continent.
In the meantime, as most readers know, the US president continues to insist Canada and Greenland must, somehow, inevitably become part of the US, even if their own inhabitants (or Denmark, as the party responsible for Greenland's foreign affairs) have repeatedly said they have no interest in such an arrangement. The bitter irony, of course, is that both Denmark and Canada have — for decades — been consistent allies and supporters of broader allied resolve under the Nato umbrella.
Most recently, Trump administration officials have been attacking Western European nations for trying to establish reasonable guardrails against hate speech in their societies. Instead, US officials have been arguing that the governments of such nations are the real enemies of democracy.
Where this growing animus toward Europe comes from, no one really knows, but it continues, regardless. Some ascribe it to envy that Trump (and his senior appointees) cannot rule like an eastern patrimonial despot and, regrettably, must deal with people and institutions they do not like.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration had previously been locked in a tight embrace with Israel (and especially its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu), reaching back to Trump's first term of office, from 2017 to 2021. The newest iteration of policies is a combination of right-wing populism and business deals (for favoured friends of the president and the presidential family itself).
Trump has explicitly stated that his government now has little or no interest in the internal politics or arrangements of the nations concerned. In parallel with this, the human rights office in the State Department is undergoing a serious downgrade. And the annual Human Rights Report first issued during the Carter administration — the massive report relied upon by governments and NGOs alike — is set to be dumbed down to avoid criticising governments Trump approves of, as part of the 'see no evil' aspect of his 'America First' mantra, as long as the money flows.
Further, at this point, it has become nearly impossible to state with clarity what the Trump policy towards the Israel/Gaza crisis is right now, other than the constant refrain that the Abraham Accords, which created diplomatic ties between Israel and several Arab nations, should be expanded to countries like Saudi Arabia. (That nation has made it clear, however, that it sees no prospect of that happening until the Gaza fighting ends and a realistic road towards a Palestinian state comes into view.)
The other limb of the current administration's efforts is to once again restrain Iran's nuclear ambitions. However, this comes after it had broken the restraints on such efforts negotiated under the Obama administration, by leaving the multicountry agreement during Trump's first presidency.
Trade policies
All of these issues stand in real clarity by contrast to Trump's international trade policies, which are undermining generations of pro-economic integration and pro-globalisation international economic policies pursued by all previous presidents since World War 2.
In the past four months, the Trump administration has thrashed about with threats of massive tariffs, then partial retreats from such draconian levels, followed by new variations on tariffs and threats. All of this has been without clear legislative mandates.
A new, rueful acronym, Taco (Trump always chickens out), has recently taken hold as shorthand for describing his chaotic economic policies. The tariffs are ostensibly designed to encourage investment inside the country as an import replacement strategy, despite nearly unanimous responses from economists that tariffs are really a new tax on consumption by domestic consumers.
Moreover, any rehoming of the old-style metal-bashing industrial base is not likely to occur for years — if ever — especially if businesses cannot figure out what the tariffs and investment subsidy policies will be in the future, and with their effects on complex, globe-straddling supply chains.
All this mishmash of messaging doesn't include discussions about Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill'. This is the massive tax and budget bill that would, if passed by the Senate after its passage by the House of Representatives with one vote to spare, eviscerate yet more of the government's programmes, offices and functions, as well as skewing tax cuts to the rich. It would also include, over the longer term, cuts in healthcare programmes, and would have what economists project to be a major impact on the budget deficit and the overall level of government debt.
An important critique is coming from the bond market. Or, as The Hill newspaper reported, 'On May 21, a lackluster 20-year US Treasury bond auction delivered what can only be described as a resounding vote of no confidence in Washington's economic stewardship. The numbers were as stark as they were symbolic: a bid-to-cover ratio of 2.46 and a yield of 5.047 percent — the highest in five years.'
Wrecking ball
And then there is the damage created by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a wrecking ball decimating or destroying agencies like the Voice of America and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (aka the weather bureau, among its other functions), and essentially eliminating most of the country's foreign aid programmes.
The secretary of state can insist, as he did just the other day in an act of abject obeisance to the Trump presidency, that this latter move has hurt no one. But others point to studies showing that many thousands are on the cusp of death or have already died because of the abrupt cancellation of grants in health and nutrition, especially the Pepfar programme in Africa.
Nonetheless, Musk and his chainsaw are, at least for now, out of the formal picture with the end of his special government employee status, but who knows what will happen next month — or if he will return in some other act of legerdemain.
Tackling several of the country's premier cultural institutions, meanwhile, the Trump administration has attempted to remove the leadership of some Smithsonian Institution museums and the heads of the Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center, all of them for being bastions of wokeness and DEI, whatever those might mean in Donald Trump's imagination.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration, waving the bloody shirt of its putative fight against anti-Semitism on college campuses, is now effectively waging a punitive war on some of the country's premier universities — cancelling research grants, threatening their tax-exempt status that underpins the country's university financial systems, and it is ramping up criticism of academics who publicly hold views that the administration sees as the enemy at the gates.
All of this can have much larger impacts. As The Economist put it: 'The attacks have been fast and furious. In a matter of months the Trump administration has cancelled thousands of research grants and withheld billions of dollars from scientists. Projects at Harvard and Columbia, among the world's best universities, have been abruptly cut off. A proposed budget measure would slash as much as 50% from America's main research-funding bodies. Because America's technological and scientific prowess is world-beating, the country has long been a magnet for talent. Now some of the world's brightest minds are anxiously looking for the exit.
'Why is the administration undermining its own scientific establishment? On May 19th Michael Kratsios, a scientific adviser to President Donald Trump, laid out the logic. Science needs shaking up, he said, because it has become inefficient and sclerotic, and its practitioners have been captured by groupthink, especially on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)… The assault on science is unfocused and disingenuous … [and] the administration is doing it grievous damage. The consequences will be bad for the world, but America will pay the biggest price of all.'
Self-inflicted damage
Most recently, as an example of serious self-inflicted damage, a new report on the nation's health issued by the Department of Health and Human Services under the bizarre leadership of Robert F Kennedy Jr, turns out to have at least partially been authored by AI apps, including imaginary scientific citations and authors. This is not something Trump critics have made up; rather, the report was the Trump team's own work product, further lessening the government's credibility with many.
All this comes hand-in-hand with additional clampdowns on immigration (unless you are an Afrikaner farmer, apparently), and the refusal to adhere to court orders to return US citizens or permanent residents who had been summarily shipped off to prisons in El Salvador.
And now, most recently, there has been the announcement that the State Department is going to examine the social media accounts of applicants for student or study visas, as well as — presumably — revoking the student visas of numbers of Chinese students who might have connections to that country's governing party or its defence establishment as potential security risks. (Does the administration not realise that applicants are routinely screened rather carefully by the State and Homeland Security departments before they are issued a student visa?)
Taken as a whole, with Trump at the helm, the US government has increasingly become an angry, even deceitful enterprise, designed to reward its supporters, but punish everybody else, either by negative actions or a bestowal of benefits selectively on its friends.
There is much more beyond what is listed above, and the temper of the Trump administration seems a reflection of its leader's own mean-spirited — never forget a slight or insult — personality. They see enemies everywhere within the nation; they pick fights with nations that have been staunch allies for decades; and they somehow find warmth in embracing autocrats and absolute monarchs. That is not the ethos of the nation I represented.
Many of us are now hoping that the more than 100 court suits now contesting actions by the Trump administration will begin chipping away at this shambolic journey. In some places, demonstrations against the worst Trumpian excesses are beginning. Further, we can still hope the mid-term congressional election in 2026 will redress the party balance sufficiently to give a supine legislative branch the starch to oppose some of this madness.
Living abroad as I do, many of the people I encounter are confused or astounded by what is happening in the US. Worse, some are convinced Trump's madness is the real America. Too many seem to believe all Americans espouse Donald Trump's views (whatever they really are at any given time), rather than the fundamentals of the country's national character, history and traditions that I had thought I understood rather well and had conveyed to my foreign friends and acquaintances.
Still, despite this litany of ugliness, I remain cautiously optimistic that even in the midst of this national 'fugue state', the country can right itself and 'the angels of our better nature', to echo Abraham Lincoln, will reassert themselves — but they had better up their game before it is too late.