Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg since his 3 January seizure of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has been guided by his triumph of the will, as he told the New York Times. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me … I don’t need international law.”
Trump treats the spectacle as a reality TV show in which he is both the executive producer and the host who ultimately declares himself the winner. At his 3 January press conference on the day of Maduro’s seizure, Trump mentioned “oil” 27 times, “money” 13 times and “democracy” not once. He trashed the democratic opposition as lacking “respect” and “support”. The capture of Maduro was a decapitation, not regime change. Indeed, Trump served as a convenient agent of an internal coup of the existing powers, whom he declared “an ally”. “We have to fix the country first,” he said. “You can’t have an election.”
Trump has dubbed his Venezuelan exploit as the “Donroe Doctrine”. It is of a piece with his rebranding of history, along with dropping mention of his impeachments from his picture caption at the National Portrait Gallery and coercing the Smithsonian not to focus on “how bad slavery was”. He told the Times that the civil rights movement of the 1960s resulted in “white people” being “very badly treated”. He presents himself anachronistically as the White Citizens’ Council president.
His “Donroe Doctrine” runs against the intent of the author of the original Monroe Doctrine, the then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who stated that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
Trump announced that he would “run” Venezuela, “money will be controlled by me” and he would control the oil industry there “indefinitely”. His White House released a photo imitating a Wikipedia page that depicted him as “The Acting President of Venezuela”.
He invited CEOs of big oil companies to the White House to convince them to take the plunge into Venezuela, where the oil infrastructure is dilapidated and the oil resembles tar, difficult to extract and refine into usable products like gasoline. The ExxonMobil chief told Trump that realistically “it’s uninvestable” and that the country lacked a proper legal system.
Trump interrupted his meeting to say, “We have many others that were not able to get in. I said, ‘If we had a ballroom, we’d have over a thousand people.’ I never knew you had that many people in your industry.” He got up to gaze from the East Room window at the gigantic hole in the ground he had made of the South Lawn, where his gargantuan ballroom is being constructed. “Wow! What a view. This is the door to the ballroom.” When he returned to his seat he continued discussing the ballroom. “I don’t think there’ll be anything like it in the world, actually.” Later, he said about Venezuela, “I will probably be inclined to keep Exxon out.” Of course, Exxon did not want to go in. No matter. His foreign policy is like a vanity ballroom, or plastering “Trump” above the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts: schlock and awe.
In the meantime, Trump has turned again to his dream of annexing, purchasing or invading Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a Nato ally. The US has maintained military bases on Greenland under a separate agreement since 1951. “If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way,” said Trump. He told the Times that he must have “ownership”, which was “psychologically necessary for success”. The leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom issued a rebuke that Greenland “belongs to its people”. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, would-be viceroy, declared that “nobody [is] going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” Danish and Greenland officials told the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, there was a “fundamental disagreement”.
Trump’s imperialism centers on his imperial self. Vladimir Lenin, in his determinist tract, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917, saw finance capital driving colonialism in search of profits, leading to great power rivalry, the world war and “proletarian revolution”. Trump turns Lenin on his head. He drives the reluctant capitalists into freebooting imperialist adventures with uncertain consequences. Trump represents, in Leninist terms, the lowest stage of imperialism.
His “Donroe” atavism fits with his other primitive throwback policies, from tariffs (recalling the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that deepened the Great Depression) to immigration, racial discrimination and restriction (recalling the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 excluding southern and eastern Europeans and barring Asians).
While Trump strides across the stage posing as a world conqueror, the Quinnipiac poll shows him to be an incredible shrinking man – 57% opposed to “running” Venezuela; 73% opposed to sending troops there; 55% opposed to taking over its oil sales; 86% opposed to militarily seizing Greenland; 55% opposed to buying it; and 70% against military action against Iran. According to the AP-NORC poll, 61% disapprove of his foreign policy in general. The Reuters-Ipsos poll showed only 17% in favor of Trump acquiring Greenland and 4% in favor of military force.
Public disapproval of Trump’s foreign policy now nearly equals the disapproval of his economic policy, on cost of living at minus 25 points. Trump has repeatedly derided the reality of the “affordability crisis” as a “hoax”, “scam” or “con job”, lately on 13 January, as a “fake word”, as though he could magically make it vanish.
The last thing that might occur to Trump is any historical lesson, especially a cautionary story about a president who was far more popular than he has ever been, achieved great military victories and yet was politically defeated.
***
Shortly after President George HW Bush lost the election of 1992, I went to his White House to learn how the mighty had fallen from the pinnacle of victory in the Gulf war. I met with Richard Darman, one of the most thoughtful and capable people there, who had been at the center of both the Reagan and Bush administrations and was especially close to James Baker, who had left as secretary of state to take charge of Bush’s campaign at the end. Darman had been Reagan’s staff secretary, deputy secretary of the treasury to Baker, and under Bush the budget director. I had been speaking as a journalist with Darman since the start of the Reagan administration.
Darman told me about the research that the Bush campaign had conducted that exposed the phenomenon of how the positive transformation of his image had become his undoing in public opinion. Darman’s story of a reversal of fortune casts an unexpected historical light on how the perception of Republicans in the forthcoming midterm elections as supine weaklings and Trump’s psychodrama as a strongman may combine to undermine them all. The performance of supreme power is not always what it seems.
In October 1987, on the eve of the campaign when Bush would emerge from the vice-presidency, Newsweek published a cover story headlined, “Fighting the Wimp Factor”. “Bush suffers from a potentially crippling handicap – a perception that he isn’t strong enough or tough enough for the challenges of the Oval Office. That he is, in a single mean word, a wimp.” The story was wildly unfair to the college athlete, the second world war pilot who had been shot down and former CIA director, but it captured the awkward conundrum he faced as the Connecticut Yankee who donated to Planned Parenthood and ridiculed Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts as “voodoo economics” to remake himself into the Texas congressman opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and uncomfortably sought to assume Reagan’s mantle.
Constrained by his belief that boastfulness was coarse, Bush’s overcompensation was embarrassing, half-joking he was a “pit bull”. On the eve of his invasion of Panama and seizure of its military dictator, Gen Manuel Noriega, Bush was subjected to scathing criticism. “Prudent Meets Timid”, ran the front-page headline in the New York Times. The conservative columnist for the Washington Post, George Will, ripped “An Unserious Presidency”. A Democratic congressman stated, “There’s a resurgence of the wimp factor.” When Bush launched Operation Just Cause on 20 December 1989, he consulted with congressional leaders of both parties who gave their approval; Noriega, who had come to power through a coup, was removed; and the rightfully elected president took office. Bush’s popularity rose to 80% in the Gallup poll. Yet “the wimp factor” lingered.
On 2 August 1990, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait to grab its vast oil reserves. The United Nations security council issued the ultimatum to withdraw or face “all necessary force”. In the Gulf war, a coalition of 43 countries led by the US defeated Saddam to restore Kuwait, but did not march to Baghdad or occupy Iraq. Bush’s popularity soared to 89%, the highest of any president ever recorded. At last, he had vanquished “the wimp factor”.
On 6 March 1990, Bush spoke to a joint session of the Congress, to proclaim “a victory for every country in the coalition, for the United Nations. A victory for unprecedented international cooperation and diplomacy … a victory for the rule of law.” The jubilant Republican members waved small American flags. The big-name potential Democratic presidential candidates declined to run.
Darman explained to me that Bush’s Gulf war triumph had persuaded the public that he was not a “wimp”, but truly strong. They believed he was a leader with a steely core. When the recession deepened, they believed he was strong, but reasoned that he would not help them and became embittered against him. Enter Bill Clinton who felt their pain with his program of “Putting People First”.
On its surface, Darman’s explanation seemed counterintuitive. Through a strange political alchemy, however, the stronger Bush appeared, the weaker he became. The greater his accomplishment loomed, the more he was diminished. His towering act was unquestioned, but led paradoxically to his political demise.
When Bush lost, it was a commonplace that he had been a foreign policy president who neglected economic policy, that he was a patrician whose strained attempts to establish rapport with those falling into the vertigo of a recession – “Message: I care” – jangled as off-key. But it was not so simple. The metamorphosis of his image also propelled the dynamic.
George W Bush remained a captive of his father’s dilemma, which he sought finally to dispel. His invasion of Iraq in an elusive quest to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction was widely understood at the time as “Unfinished Business”, as the Economist put it, in part a reaction to his father’s war, followed by his political defeat, and the lingering smoke of the “wimp factor”.
Donald Trump smashed the Bush legacy to gain control over the Republican party and recast it in his own image. Trump humiliated and shoved aside Jeb Bush, the family and party heir apparent, the brother of George W Bush and son of George HW Bush, and the former Florida governor, in a debate on 13 February 2016. “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” Trump said. He added, “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction – there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.” Then Trump blamed the terrorist attack of September 11 on George W Bush. Jeb sputtered, “I am sick and tired of him going after my family.” Trump surged to a two-to-one lead for the Republican nomination.
After the death of Barbara Bush in early 2018, President Trump issued an official White House statement that he would not attend her funeral. A frail George HW Bush was soon hospitalized. Trump trashed him at a rally, ridiculing Bush’s signature slogan for his program of voluntary civic engagement. “Thousand points of light,” Trump said. “What does that mean? I know one thing. ‘Make America Great Again’ we understand. Putting America first we understand. Thousand points of light, I never quite got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out? It was put out by a Republican, wasn’t it?”
Bush died a few months later. Trump’s insult was his imprimatur on his own Republican party that on bended knee pays him tribute or else. On 14 January, the Republican Senate, its internal dissenters crushed, blocked a resolution to require Trump to seek congressional approval for military force in Venezuela.
So, the Republicans defer again to Trump, evade their constitutional role and careen heedlessly toward the midterm elections. They define themselves as weak and useless in service to his perceived unchallengeable strength. The more he struts, the more they falter; the more dramatically he postures, the weaker they are perceived. But the strongman, never thought to be a “wimp”, not only ignores the economic plight of the majority but displays open contempt.
At the Detroit Economic Club on 13 January, Trump boasted that all is swell: “We’re the hottest country.” Trump has launched a criminal investigation of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he has insulted as “bonehead”, “low IQ”, “stupid”, “not a smart person”. Powell responded that the investigation was a “pretext” for political retaliation in Trump’s attempt to destroy the Fed’s independence and a threat to the economy’s stability.
In Minneapolis, an ICE agent killed a US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, driving away from a protest scene. Trump blamed her for her killing as “highly disrespectful of law enforcement”. A flood of ICE agents into the city has since fostered violent melees, which have provided the excuse for Trump to threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act. “Trump has made ICE a 70-30 issue – for Democrats,” states the pollster G Elliott Morris.
Trump claims to stand above any and all restraints: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He has articulated his justification for his rapacious behavior from the intimacy of the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room to the icy expansive of Greenland. He is the Superman, the Ubermensch.
Trump’s brief words to frame his philosophy were better explained by Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1889, which later became an ur-text against the “slave-faith” of the Enlightenment and for Naziism and the cult of personality. Nietzsche contrasted the superior “master morality” with the “slave morality”. The “noble” and “aristocratic” master “does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: what is injurious to me is injurious in itself; he knows that it is he himself only who confers honor on things; he is a creator of values. He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification.” Nietzsche exalted this as the “DOCTRINE OF THE WILL TO POWER”. He wrote that “in real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.” He mocked the “enchained class of spirits” who spoke of “Equality of Rights” as well as the “Christian faith” as “self-mutilation”, leading to the “DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE”.
It would be eminently safe to wager on the betting markets that Trump has never read Nietzsche or could offer the thinnest account of his work. Nonetheless, Trump has fashioned himself as a child of Nietzsche. A thousand points of light? The lights are going out all over America.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
