Fareed on the Court of King Trump
Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
February 7, 2025
Fareed on the Court of King Trump
So far, the second Trump administration has featured a familiar pattern, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column: The president makes big, dramatic announcements—and then his coterie of aides, Cabinet secretaries and supportive Republican lawmakers must pretend the policies are great, and the wins impressive, no matter what.
Trump’s threats of tariffs on Canada and Mexico produced few meaningful gains, Fareed writes: “The ‘concessions’ that Mexico and Canada made were either small-bore or policies they were already pursuing. Mexico agreed to send thousands of troops to the border at the Biden administration’s request—and is doing the same for Trump. In the case of Canada, Trump’s own statement on Truth Social notes that Canada was agreeing to ‘implement’ its border plan (much of which had been announced in December).” The move to dismantle USAID prompted Secretary of State Marco Rubio to blast an agency he had supported in the past. Trump’s Gaza announcement drew praise, even though many of his backers had previously admired Trump’s desire to get the US out of foreign wars and occupations.
“Trump’s White House is now a court,” Fareed argues, “and his courtiers scurry around, aware that the mercurial monarch might change his mind at any time. ‘TikTok is terrible!’ can suddenly become ‘TikTok is great!’—and they need to pivot quickly. … The largest effect, though, is on American democracy. Scholar Francis Fukuyama has noted that the history of modern government has been a steady movement away from ‘patrimonial’ rule—the rule of a single strongman to benefit his family and friends—toward rule by institutions and rules and norms. He notes that in the United States, we are seeing the return to patrimonial rule as ‘citizens freely debating laws are replaced by supplicants begging the king to favor their interests.’”
The Trumpian Blitz
With a buyout offer to federal employees (halted for now by a court), the ongoing move to unravel USAID (also paused partially by a court), a freeze on federal grants (also paused) and Elon Musk’s extra-governmental DOGE reform unit’s proximity to the US Treasury’s payments system, David Wallace-Wells argues in a New York Times guest opinion essay that the early days of Trump 2.0 have featured “a blitzkrieg against core functions of the state, operating largely outside the boundaries set by history, precedent, and constitutional law, and designed to reduce the shape and purpose of government power to the whims, and spite, of a single man. Or perhaps two men.” (The second being Musk.)
Foreign policy can be subtler, more obscure terrain, but in his Substack newsletter Home & Away, Richard Haass marvels at the drama of Trump’s foreign-policy pronouncements.
“It is impossible not to be struck by the hubris of it all,” Haass writes. “Taking Greenland. The Panama Canal. Canada. And now Gaza. Trump 2.0 is grandiose in his aims. History matters not. Nor do the desires of others. We already have four candidates for the 51st state in less than three weeks. Somewhere someone is surely designing the new American flag. I cannot discern much of anything in the way of a traditional, formal policy process, one in which the situation is carefully assessed, relevant history introduced, options developed and weighed, risks and costs factored in, tradeoffs debated, and implementation considered. It is easy to get things wrong when policy is made in such a haphazard way. This account of how the president arrived at his Gaza ‘policy’ is equal parts instructive and unsettling.”
Richard Haass will join Fareed on Sunday’s GPS to discuss Trump’s recent foreign-policy moves, including his Gaza announcement, and what it all means for US allies and adversaries.
No More USAID?
A judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s move to put at least 2,200 USAID employees on paid leave tonight. But Trump’s attempt to dismantle the agency—the full name of which is the US Agency for International Development—has been met with intense criticism from the foreign-policy community.
USAID distributes nonmilitary US foreign aid around the world. At The Wall Street Journal, senior opinion editorial producer Mark Kelly says that while the agency’s supporters point to its lifesaving assistance and the goodwill (and soft power) it buys for the US globally, some of USAID’s disbursements indeed sound ridiculous. Then again, Washington Post fact-check columnist Glenn Kessler writes that some of the Trump White House’s claims about USAID expenses (“condoms for Hamas,” Trump said) are misleading or false. A White House “news release … listed 12 examples, plucked from the websites of right-wing media,” Kessler writes. “But the numbers cited—as low as $32,000—hardly justify the claim that these are ‘massive sums’ of money. In fact, they are so low that some of the funds appear to have been awarded at the ambassador level, without Washington involvement. At least one dated from the first Trump administration, and some were actually State Department grants, not USAID.”
Trump has pointed out that unwinding USAID will save money. Describing the agency’s work, however, the Associated Press notes that foreign aid accounts for less than 1% of the US federal budget.
On the Center for Strategic and International Studies podcast The Truth of the Matter, CSIS Sustainable Development and Resilience Initiative Director Noam Unger points to chaos sown by the sudden and drastic move to all but end the agency: US “embassies around the world … are busy trying to sort out the implications of this, as opposed to the countless other things that they’re supposed to be doing on a daily basis,” Unger says, describing USAID as “a projection of US foreign policy, of US priorities around the world.”
Samantha Power, who directed USAID during the Obama administration, writes in a New York Times essay: “Many of the hungry and sick people who depend on U.S.A.I.D. are at risk of dying. … Unless these cruel and immensely counterproductive actions are reversed … future generations will marvel that it wasn’t China’s actions that eroded U.S. standing and global security, paving the way for Beijing to become the partner of choice around the world. Instead, it was an American president and the billionaire he unleashed to shoot first and aim later, eliminating an institution that is a cost-effective example of what once distinguished the United States from our adversaries.”
… And Why That Makes
Sense for Trump
Of course, the move fits well within Trump’s agenda of pulling America back from its decades-long role of underwriting and upholding the Western-dominated, institution-infused global order—on the theory that the US gets taken advantage of and can strike better deals by throwing around its weight. At the World Politics Review, Paul Poast writes: “[S]uch a ‘soft power’ argument” for continuing USAID “may not hold sway with those who want the U.S. to play a lesser role in the world. Having prestige and status abroad doesn’t matter if your focus is largely, even exclusively, at home. Giving aid might be what is done by the leader of the free world, but not if that leader would rather be left alone.”
At the Carnegie Endowment’s Emissary blog, Stewart Patrick acknowledges the same while offering sharp criticism: “No recent move tells us more about President Donald Trump and his administration’s disdain for America’s global reputation … The episode reveals the transactional nihilism at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy, which recognizes no positive purpose for the United States in world affairs. … If the agency dies, so will many innocent people. And so will the still-lingering reputation of the United States as a country that takes an enlightened view of its own self-interest and stands for more than just itself in world affairs.”
Unplugging From Russia
Europe has mostly decoupled from Russian energy supplies since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But what of the countries on Europe’s eastern flank, most exposed to potential Russian aggression and, coincidentally, most entwined with Russian energy?
Russia still controls the electric grids of the neighboring Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. That will change tomorrow, as they switch over to EU grid connection.
CNN’s Clare Sebastian writes: “‘How to prepare for a power outage?’ reads the Facebook post from the Estonian Rescue Board, the country’s civil defense agency. The picture shows a young woman holding up a power bank, over a table loaded with water bottles, a flashlight and other emergency supplies. … Preparing the population for what most see as the unlikely scenario of power outages is the final stage in a years-long project. ‘Everything should flow smoothly,’ reads the rescue board post, ‘but unexpected situations can arise… whether that be because of the actions of our hostile neighbor to the East, unexpected weather conditions or technical failures.’”
Timothy Rooks writes for Deutsche Welle: “The move is merely symbolic, as the three nations have not bought Russian or Belarusian electricity since May 2022.” But at the Council on Foreign Relations, Szymon Kardaś writes that now, “the EU and member states must ensure the security of the energy infrastructure through which the Baltic states are connected to the EU electricity system” amid broad European concern about potential Russian sabotage, not just of Baltic power lines. Kardaś hopes, ultimately, for “better cooperation between EU member states, thus deepening integration and strengthening the EU energy market.”
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