Yves here. Yours truly has been of the view that the most coherent explanation for Trump’s actions is that represent an extreme need to dominate, and other considerations are at best secondary. Notice how Trump has gone berserk over his inability to crush Ansar Allah, has had far too many counter-productive shows of pique with respect to Project Ukraine (due both to Zelensky, despite his weak position, refusing to come to heel, and having the Russian negotiators run rings around he team, albeit they all seem to be so full of themselves as to have not yet worked that out).
However, Trump playing chaos generator has heretofore been a central feature in his efforts to get the upper hand. So why has he been extreme (typical) and rigid (not) on the subject of tariffs, even with some oligarchs once in his camp now making forceful criticisms?
As much as depicting Trump as a wannabe dictator is a bit simplistic, his insatiable maw of desire to dominate others winds up looking not all that different if you blur your focus a bit. IMHO a dictator would want to make sure he wound up controlling things of value, as opposed to breaking them just for the fun of exercising that much power.
This post conveniently skips past the lack of any meaningful opposition by the feckless Democrats to Trump’s brazen moves. Why are they not filing suits or providing amicus briefs? Why so little use of their bully pulpits? Why are Sanders and AOC the only pols regularly out on the stump? Trump’s “dictatorship” is a function of cowardice and spinelessness among the putative elites.
Lawrence Wilkerson said that Colin Powell kept a quotation attributed to Thucydides on his desk: “Of all manifestations of power restraint impresses men most, partly because it is the form which power least often takes” Clearly a mode of operation not in Trump’s repertoire.
By Jake Johnson, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
Analysts puzzling over the bizarre formula the Trump administration used to calculate its country-by-country tariff rates are wasting their time, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in a response to the American president that has gone viral in recent days as global markets continue to nosedive.
“It’s not economic policy, it’s not trade policy,” Murphy (D-Conn.) said in remarks recorded after Trump announced the sweeping tariffs last week. “It’s a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy.”
While President Donald Trump’s universal tariffs on imports make no sense as an effort to rectify the failures of the status quo trade regime and bring back offshored U.S. jobs, they are comprehensible when viewed as “a tool to try to compel pledges of loyalty, this time from companies and industries in the United States,” Murphy argued.
“You have to understand that everything Donald Trump is doing is in service of staying in power forever—either him or his family or his handpicked successors,” the Democratic senator continued. “He’s trying to destroy our democracy.”
Murphy contended that the president designed the tariffs to be so widespread that corporations across private industry would have to come to the White House and “make an agreement with Trump in which he gives them tariff relief in exchange for a pledge of political loyalty.”
“What could that pledge look like?” Murphy continued. “Well, maybe they agree to champion his economic policy publicly. Maybe they agree to make contributions to his political campaign. Maybe they agree to police their employees to make sure that nobody that works for that company works for the political opposition.”
Politicoreported late last week that businesses across corporate America “fear Trump’s wrath” and are thus declining to criticize the president’s tariff policies even as they wreak havoc worldwide and threaten to spark a devastating recession.
“There is zero incentive for any company or brand to be remotely critical of this administration,” one unnamed public affairs operative told Politico. “It destroys your ability to work with the White House and advance your policies, period.”
“While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power.”
Murphy is hardly alone in seeing Trump’s tariffs as an instrument of power consolidation.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, wrote Monday that “we’re turning into a dictatorship” as Trump conjures “fake national emergencies” to jack up tariffs, deport people en masse without due process, gut efforts to combat the climate crisis, and dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
“As Trump declares emergency after emergency to justify his reign of terror, he’s simultaneously eliminating America’s capacity to respond to real emergencies,” Reich wrote. “Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power.”
One analyst, Zack Beauchamp of Vox, argued the tariffs are more a symptom of the decline of U.S. democracy rather than a cause of it.
“Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes,” Beauchamp wrote. “The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.”
“It’s still possible that Trump steps back from the brink,” he added. “But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: The long decay of America’s democratic system means that we are all living under an axe. And if this isn’t the moment it falls, there will surely be another.”