Features
The Paradox of Trump
By Uditha Devapriya
The question is not how Trump can do the seemingly impossible – balancing between the withdrawal of US foreign aid from countries that desperately need assistance, harsh treatment of visa holders from US allied countries, and his rhetoric of being a peacemaker and a dealmaker on the world stage – but whether, in all seriousness, he wants to do it. The problem with many of Trump’s critics – on both the left and the centre – is that they rationalise his actions as part of a wider agenda, when that may not necessarily be the case. True, there is much more predictability – for better or worse – with his policies now, compared to his first term. Yet while there is much madness in his policies and the way he enacts them, there seems to be no proper, cogent method to them, yet.
The other problem is that Trump is launching a full-frontal assault on several fronts, and to isolate the one from the others would be ridiculous. It is hard to pick and choose because, at one strange level, they are all connected. They are implicitly driven by Trump’s brand of isolationism, in which might is right, big fish eat small fish, and, even in rhetoric, moral standards no longer constitute the weight of domestic or foreign policies. The danger with this approach, at least for the Trump administration, is that US institutions have been so used to the opposite of what they are trying to achieve that it will prove to be difficult if not impossible to see these policies through in the longer term.
The US is regularly promoted as a haven for migrants: it is what constitutes the “American Dream” and what has sustained the myth of the melting pot since at least the late 19th century. For better or worse, that myth has come to be accepted as concrete fact, and for the better part of the last century, it is what propelled US soft power on the world stage. Whatever its faults are, the United States has never been short on exchange programmes, fellowships, scholarships, and other initiatives, all sponsored by the State Department, which projected to the world a positive, benevolent image of that country. True, those among us who read and have read on US foreign policy and history know that there was a carefully orchestrated façade beneath these initiatives, that the US, like other powerful countries, has resorted to power and force in the most dubious of circumstances.
Yet immigration, especially during the Cold War, became a sine qua non of US diplomacy. Successive presidents starting from Truman and Eisenhower used their powers to admit migrants from Communist and other seemingly “authoritarian” states. Kennedy started the Peace Corps and USAID, and Senator Fulbright sponsored arguably the US’s most coveted global scholarship programme. All these developments took place against the backdrop of a never-ending battle of hearts and minds with the Soviets and the Chinese, culminating in the South-East Asian wars of the 1960s and 1970s and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The latter marked a turning point in the Cold War: it was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Throughout this period, immigration enabled Washington to claim, not unjustifiably, that whatever its failings were, it at least allowed the young and independent-minded from other parts of the world to come in and prosper.
It is too early to say whether Trump will undo in five years what the country built up in 50. But the travel advisories now being imposed by the US’s staunchest allies, including Germany, indicate a turnaround that the world will take time to adjust to. What the last few weeks have demonstrated is the level of resistance to Executive overreach but also the degree to which the Executive can override otherwise independent institutions, including of course the Judiciary. Every other major official, from the president himself to Elon Musk, Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, not to mention the White House Spokesperson, have lambasted “radical left” judges for supposedly disobeying Trump’s orders, claiming it to be a usurpation of democracy. This has been especially true of the judiciary’s confrontations with Trump’s deportation policies and detention orders.
Trump is, in all respects, every US liberal’s nightmare. Yet he is the embodiment of the kind of disruptive politics that was bound to take root in Washington, sooner or later. If Trump’s first term indicated anything, it was that the Democrats need to shield themselves more proactively against the possibility of a second term. In this, however, they failed, partly because of their own willingness to go tough and swing to the right on many issues that Trump officials are doubling down on.
The Democrats now face the unprecedented dilemma of either opposing Trump, especially on issues like immigration, or being depicted by the right-wing press, and Trump’s acolytes, as evil incarnate. Chuck Schumer’s response to this problem was to support the Republican funding bill. If at all, such developments suggest that Democrats are still not awake to the possibilities of an unhinged Trump presidency, and that when they do wake up, it may be too late – both for themselves and the rest of the world.