Most revolutionaries have some idea of a replacement for the institutions they topple. And, surely, some in Donald Trump’s orbit do. (For a good summary, see the just-published summary of this agenda, by David Graham, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.) But, on the whole, while Trump’s first term was encapsulated in the phrase, “The cruelty is the point,” Trump 2.0 might best be summed up as simply, “The destruction is the point.”
If one set out intentionally to destroy every existing American institution, one could not do better in one hundred days than Donald Trump. This is the result of a simmering stew of ignorance, ideology, and indignation. The question is whether that toxic mix adds up to “intent.”
Trump’s limitless confidence in his own genius is sadly refuted by his signature policy preoccupation: tariffs. There are conflicting views amongst economists as to whether tariffs are paid by the producer or the consumer – but not Donald Trump, who apparently believes that tariffs actually are paid by foreign countries themselves. He also believes that a trade deficit is caused by others forcing you to buy things you do not want, so that if you, say, lose money or go bankrupt it is no-one’s fault but, well, everyone else’s. It is easy to see both where he got that perception and why he declared bankruptcy eight times. Now he has brought that business acumen to the global economy.
There is nothing wrong with reciprocal tariffs – I have supported them for years if used to protect American labor. But Trump’s, which one would assume were calculated by people with more economic knowledge than Trump himself, simply compound his confusion: They turn out to be the ratio of imports-to-exports of each country, rather than actual imposed tariff rates. It is almost as if everyone around the president must adopt his flat-earth opinions even if they know better….
Which takes us to ideology. Today’s conservatism aims at conserving little of anything. In a recent Atlantic article, lifelong conservative David Brooks described how, as the country’s politics and culture have grown more “liberal” over the last few decades, the increasingly embittered conservative movement has acquired a deeply personal sense of grievance. This discontent has fixated on what it sees as a six decades-long, calculated plan by extreme leftists – as if seventy million Democratic voters have all read Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse – to “march through the institutions”: cultural, governmental, educational, economic, military. This then justifies their counter-seizure by whatever means or, if necessary, destruction. (This is actually a worldwide view on the right; see, e.g., my Autocracy Rising.)
This ideological perspective has merged with Trump’s major motivation for returning to the presidency – to wreak vengeance upon all whom he believes have slighted him (which, in fact, has been the story of his life): the FBI, the CIA, the military, the justice system, Europe, Democrats…. It used to be the Left that believed itself to be persecuted by these institutions; today, it is the Right, and they are dismantling the “power ministries” from within. Trump’s appointees – Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel – are not just loyalists; they have long been hostile to the entities they oversee. Their almost farcical incompetence running these institutions (including the carelessness toward national security the Administration exhibited in “Signalgate”) is not a bug – it is a feature.
This confluence of resentments found its reflection in those of Trump’s populist base, which sees no current institution – from the nation’s political parties and government, to its high-falutin universities and condescending graduates in the professions, to the post-industrial economy and global elites – as looking out for their interests. The Trumpist movement, in sum, has always aimed to save the village by destroying it – or, maybe, just destroy it.
That is the framework within which must be understood the current attack on America’s global security. It is not just that the highest military commands have been largely cleansed of career professionals ostensibly to make the military both whiter and more masculine: The military budget as a whole, and the country’s standing forces, are also being slashed.
This is strangely un-conservative. One could argue that this is simply reflects conservative spending-cut ideology more broadly, or the MAGA movement’s resentment of the traditional “elite” focus on foreign wars in which someone else’s kids are sent to die. There appears to be a deeper ideological shift at work here, however.
US military doctrine until now has been to maintain the capacity to wage two major global wars simultaneously. The new, downsized Trump military seems geared not to less foreign intervention per se, however, but rather to different foreign intervention – not Great Power confrontation but rather smaller-scale invasions and conquests: Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal.
This is a vastly different conception of America’s national interests: It is one wholly concerned with real estate consolidation, and parochially confined, at that, to the Western Hemisphere above the Isthmus of Panama. One can argue that each of these putative “acquisitions” concerns resources and economics. But what they really seem to portend is a very different world map and a very different United States: a Fortress America – one of economic autarchy and internal uniformity – a self-sufficient black box which nothing penetrates and from which nothing emanates. Other countries have tried such approaches – Tokugawa Japan and Manchu China come to mind – and they did not exactly produce nations that kept up with the world around them or, eventually, withstood its assaults.
That makes crucial the other part of this vision: a globally partitioned world, better-sorted than the current one, with good fences in between, where, one might suppose, there would be less conflict – another theory (one basically espoused by Trump in his first address to the UN General Assembly in 2017) that, too, has been tried historically (the German government, for instance, espoused it in the 1930s) but did not exactly pan out as hyped.
This New World Order, then, involves ceding all territories to one or the other of the Big Three to develop as they see fit – similar to separate suburban subdivisions: the United States in a Greater North America, Russia in Europe, China in East Asia, echoing the Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia of George Orwell’s 1984. (The Global South is but an afterthought in this.) And, not unlike the settlement of European wars in the 16th Century Westphalian treaties, it implies that, while the borders are intended to be absolute and conflict-free, within these bounds each developer has free reign over his own subdivision. This explains benignly the Administration’s willingness to let Vladimir Putin work his will in Ukraine – and the rest of Europe – while the US works its will in Greenland and Central America.
Harder to explain within any strategic vision, however, is the unilateral disarmament of US cyber-defense against Russia (although, as the Administration has turned over virtually every American’s personal data to a megalomaniacal tech mogul with close ties to both the Russian and Chinese regimes, formal military cyber-surrender may simply be redundant). The Atlantic Alliance is sundered and the US will not soon be wholly trusted again. Scientists and academics are already fleeing abroad; one must wonder how long until laid-off federal nuclear experts and intelligence operatives do so, as well. America’s competitors have been strengthened geopolitically by Washington’s Trump-induced chaos.
The scene that keeps flashing through my mind in recent months is the ending of Akira Kurosawa’s final masterpiece, Ran: The kingdom lies in ruins as the queen calmly admits she has been a foreign agent all along, who willfully brought about this destruction and chaos (the translation of the film’s Japanese title). Yes – spoiler alert – she is decapitated, but it is too late for that to amount to some rough justice: The destruction – whether ignorant, ideological, indignant, or intentional – is total and irreversible.