Trump is the wrong answer to the right questions
The US president has an uncanny ability to spot the faultlines in the old order and manipulate them to his advantage
Rana Foroohar
© Matt KenyonDonald Trump is a bad answer to good questions.
Never has this been clearer than in the last two weeks.
Are Latin American drug cartels a scourge?
Of course.
Is forcibly deposing Venezuela’s president and seizing the country’s oil the way to get rid of them?
Probably not.
Would most of the world like to see regime change in Iran?
Yes.
Is a threat of military strikes against the country going to make that happen?
Unlikely, particularly when there’s no clear successor.
Are Russia and China together an increasing threat to Arctic security?
You bet.
Is blowing up Nato by seizing Greenland the solution?
I think we all know the answer.
One of the reasons that Trump rose as a political figure in the first place — and few elites saw it coming — was that he was willing to question anything and everything about conventional politics, economics and foreign policy: the liberal meritocracy, the Washington Consensus, the idea that free trade was an unfettered good.
It was a tonic welcomed by a public disenchanted by centrists on both sides of the aisle who had for decades failed to acknowledge and address the problems of the old order that were hiding in plain sight.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke about this “pleasant fiction” in his powerful Davos speech last week, and listed several examples of the problems of the old order, from “trade rules . . . enforced asymmetrically”, to “international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim”, to the myth that America could continue to police the world, ensure a stable financial system and resolve global conflicts without more global burden sharing and better accounting for new great powers like China.
Politicians globally, not just in the US, “avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality”.
In lieu of honesty and a sensible conversation about how to transition to a new world order, we got Trump.
He has no real answers, only ego, sharp animal instincts and a talent for turning the tables on adversaries at any given moment.
Witness how the geopolitical turmoil of the last two weeks has wiped the topic of affordability, with which Democrats were gaining some political traction, from the headlines in the US.
While Trump has nibbled at solutions to affordability (a credit card interest cap, proposed limits on home ownership by large investors), his overall approach has been Autocracy 101.
When there’s trouble inside the nation, turn the public’s attention to problems outside it.
Trump isn’t the solution to any of the world’s problems, but he does have an unerring ability to see where the fractures and faultlines in the old order are, and to make hay with them.
When Treasury secretary Scott Bessent mocks the ineffectuality of “European working group[s]”, those of us who’ve spent time reporting in Brussels know exactly what he’s talking about.
Yes, the European Union has needed to think more realistically about its own security and economic integration for a long time.
It is too bad that it has taken a figure as destructive as Trump to bring these issues to a head.
Those who oppose the US president and are seeking a better way towards a new world order would do well to think about real answers to the questions he raises.
Those questions resonate with people, which is the only reason he can gain traction.
Domestically, for example, Democrats running in the midterm elections this autumn need strong ideas about how to craft a better immigration policy: Trump’s ICE raids aren’t the answer, but nor is a totally open border.
Democrats also need to get serious about addressing corporate power, rather than “calling up Elon Musk when he tussles with Trump and offering him whatever he wants if he’ll come back to our side and kick in a few nickels to our candidates”, as Senator Elizabeth Warren put it in a speech earlier this month, referencing how members of her own party court Big Tech.
Trump was able to grab working-class voters because Democrats became the party of the rich when they took a neoliberal, deregulatory turn in the 1990s under Bill Clinton.
They need to disassociate themselves from Davos Man and the Epstein Class and reclaim the populist tradition that has been so distorted by the Maga movement.
The world as a whole also needs answers: to challenges of Chinese mercantilism, the falling labour share of GDP and the new threats of technology-based job destruction.
While it’s smart that countries like Canada and many in Europe are looking to diversify their trade away from Trump’s America, how is the world going to deal with the fact that China’s global trade surplus is rising, not falling?
Will Europe finally grab the low-hanging fruit of investors looking to diversify away from the dollar by deepening and further integrating its own capital markets?
Or will the members of those working groups in Brussels keep wringing their hands?
I stopped going to Davos a few years ago because I simply couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of it any more (few people there really want to change the global order).
But I must give Trump credit.
By showing up in Switzerland and continuing to challenge the status quo, he has focused the minds of world leaders on the desperate need to create a new and better order.
Trump came to power by illuminating the hypocrisies of our system, even as he embodied them.
We still need answers to the questions he has raised.
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