Project Syndicate
The Twilight of US Global Influence
Jun 12, 2025
While US President Donald Trump focuses on elevating and enriching himself, he is also actively dismantling the underpinnings of American power. This might be lost on his supporters – at least for now – but it is abundantly obvious to the rest of the world, especially America’s enemies.
Featured in this Big Picture
PS editors
Timothy Snyder
Jill Kastner
William C. Wohlforth
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Richard Haass
Jan-Werner Mueller
PS editors
The Big Picture
PS editors
Timothy Snyder
America’s Weak Strongman
Timothy Snyder
Jill Kastner
Why Is Trump Unilaterally Dismantling US Defenses?
Jill Kastner, et al.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
The Future of American Soft Power
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Richard Haass
The Trump Doctrine
Richard Haass
Jan-Werner Mueller
Trump’s Corruption Is in a League of Its Own
Jan-Werner Mueller
The Big Picture
Jun 12, 2025
PS editors
Elon Musk’s days of dismantling US institutions in the name of “government efficiency” may be over, but America’s enemies still have plenty to celebrate. US President Donald Trump’s administration remains committed to destroying America’s state capacity, foreign alliances, and global reputation.
As Timothy Snyder, Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, observes, Trump’s believes he is projecting strength: once US institutions are destroyed, only “his presence” remains. But, as countries like China and Russia understand well, eliminating the “government departments overseeing money, weapons, and intelligence” can only make him weak, as it leaves the United States without any “actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.”
This could have dire consequences for US security, warn King’s College London’s Jill Kastner and Dartmouth College’s William C. Wohlforth. By “gutting agencies that serve as bulwarks against foreign meddling,” the Trump administration is “unilaterally disarming” the US. And by creating a “cohort of financially precarious, potentially disgruntled” former intelligence employees, it might even be handing weapons to America’s enemies.
Making matters worse, explains the late Harvard scholar Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in his final commentary, the Trump administration is “surrendering” America’s soft power – the basis of the “empire by invitation” the US built over the last several decades. The US cannot hope to compete with China – which has been investing in its own soft power since 2007 – while “weakening trust” among its allies, destroying institutions like the US Agency for International Development, “asserting imperial aspirations,” and “challenging laws at home.”
But America’s declining global influence might not be immediately apparent to the Trump administration, because, as Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, points out, the “Trump doctrine” dictates that the US will “no longer try to influence or react to how countries conduct themselves within their borders.” Trump is more concerned with “doing business” than with “chang[ing] the world.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Trump’s acceptance of the gift of a $400 million airplane from Qatar, writes Princeton University’s Jan-Werner Mueller. Beyond shedding light on the Trump regime’s unusually brazen corruption – most kleptocrats “at least try to conceal their ill-gotten gains” – this episode may “foreshadow future political turbulence for what is already the most corrupt administration in US history.”
America’s Weak Strongman
Jun 5, 2025
Timothy Snyder
US President Donald Trump is strong in a relative sense: after he destroys institutions, what remains is his presence, surrounded by incompetent sycophants. But he is weak because, having destroyed so much state capacity, the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.
TORONTO – Over the past two months, financial investors have hit upon a new trading strategy, based on a simple rule: TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out. America’s president threatens to slap massive import tariffs on friends and foes alike, or to remove the Federal Reserve chair, only to back down when the whip of the market imposes its uncompromising discipline. Then he switches back to tariffs, only to back down yet again.
It’s a pattern that extends beyond the economy. In fact, it’s the defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency. But Trump is not just “chicken.” He is a weak strongman, and America’s adversaries may understand that better than most Americans.
Many Americans fear Trump, so they imagine that others must, too. But no one outside America fears Trump as such. America’s friends fear an arsonist – someone who destroys what others have created. And America’s enemies welcome the destruction wrought by Trump and by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. When Musk recently stepped down, the leading Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin lamented his departure: “DOGE made a great favor to the entire world liquidating USAID, Health department and Department of education.”
Trump is strong in a relative sense; after he destroys institutions, what remains is his presence. But he is weak because, having destroyed the government departments overseeing money, weapons, and intelligence, the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world. He plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But his strength consists solely in his audience’s submissiveness. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it.
To be sure, Trump’s charisma is a kind of strength. But it cannot be brought to bear on any problem, and it is irrelevant outside the US. Trump’s supporters might think that America needs no friends because it can intimidate its enemies without help. But we already know that Trump cannot make Canada or Mexico – much less China, Iran, or Russia – do his bidding.
That only works at home. For years, Trump has used rallies and social media to inspire random violence against his domestic opponents. This has led to a self-purge of the Republican Party and forged a docile cohort of congressional cadres. The people who submit to Trump perceive him as a strongman, but what they are experiencing is their own weakness. And their weakness cannot magically become strength in the wider world.
The capital letters and exclamation points in social-media posts that Trump has directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent months, demanding that he stop the war in Ukraine, have had no effect on Putin’s emotional state, let alone on Russian policy. And inciting stochastic violence won’t work on foreign leaders. No one in Irkutsk is going to threaten or harm Putin because Trump posted something on the internet.
One could be generous and interpret a Trump post threatening sanctions as an act of policy. But words matter only when there is actually a policy, or at least the possibility that one might be formulated. But for there to be a policy, there must be institutions staffed with competent people. And Trump’s first policy was to fire those who would be competent to design and implement a policy. Many of the people who knew anything about Ukraine and Russia, for example, are simply gone from the ranks of his administration.
In their place came Trump’s flailing efforts to make concessions to Russia regarding Ukrainian sovereignty on his own – without Ukraine and without any allies. It didn’t work. His position was so weak that Putin naturally assumed he could get more and duly escalated Russian aggression in Ukraine. Trump is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and the wolves can tell the difference.
It’s an obvious point, but it must be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. Even if he wanted to, Trump cannot credibly threaten Russia without functioning institutions and competent civil servants. To make sanctions work, for example, he would need more people on the job, not fewer. Moreover, foreign powers would need to believe that the Department of the Treasury is more than an American billionaire’s plaything. Unfortunately, their intelligence agencies read the newspapers.
Americans can choose to ignore that the state capacity needed to deal with adversaries has been gutted and/or entrusted to people whose only qualification is absolute fealty to Trump. But the destruction of the institutions of US power creates a very simple incentive structure for America’s enemies. The Russians hoped that Trump would return to the White House precisely because they believe he weakens the US. Now, as they watch him dismantle the CIA and FBI, putting the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi in charge of intelligence and federal law enforcement, they can only think that time is on their side.
That is why Putin has ignored Trump’s demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine, and why Russia will use any ceasefire that may occur to prepare for the next invasion. Putin is justifiably confident that a US neutered by Trump will be unable to respond, that the Europeans will be distracted, and that the Ukrainians, after years of war, will find it harder to mobilize again.
What is true for Russia also holds for China. The weak strongman helps the People’s Republic. Time was not really on China’s side before Trump. While a generation of Americans had feared that China would surpass the US economically and militarily, the trend lines in recent years were no longer so clear, or indeed had reversed. But now that Trump has set a course to destroy America’s state capacity, China can simply take what it once would have had to struggle to gain.
Wall Street might profit from the TACO trade in the short term, but a weak strongman brings only losses. While Trump’s supporters might be tempted to believe that he has made America a titan among nations, the opposite is true. As a strongman, Trump destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.
Why Is Trump Unilaterally Dismantling US Defenses?
Apr 28, 2025
Jill Kastner
, William C. Wohlforth
While the Trump administration is entitled to reorganize the bureaucracy within the parameters of the law, its indiscriminate gutting of national-security agencies contradicts 2,000 years of great powers using defense, deterrence, and diplomacy to manage foreign threats. Americans are owed an explanation.
LONDON – In 1933, when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to normalize relations with the Soviet Union, he told Joseph Stalin that the Kremlin would first have to knock off its subversive activities inside the United States. Likewise, when President Ronald Reagan wanted to ease Cold War tensions, his Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, made it clear to Mikhail Gorbachev that Soviet spooks must stop spreading lies about AIDS being caused by US bioweapons research.
President Donald Trump seems to want to follow his predecessors in improving relations with the Russians. But instead of demanding that the Kremlin curtail its skullduggery, his administration is unilaterally disarming – offering a quid with no quo. Since returning to office, he has gutted agencies that serve as bulwarks against foreign meddling.
For example, the new administration has fired FBI officials who were involved in criminal cases against Trump, depriving the bureau of dozens of its most experienced agents, as well as removing or reassigning top officials at the FBI’s national-security group and intelligence division. At the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, at least 17 employees tasked with protecting electoral integrity and combating disinformation have been sacked under the guise of returning the agency to its original focus on critical infrastructure (never mind that electoral systems fall into that category).
Similar cuts have taken place at the CIA and the NSA: the director and deputy director of the latter were fired apparently on the advice of the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. And on top of it all, Trump recently signed an executive order cutting funding for the US Agency for Global Media, which supports, among other things, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of America.
All these cuts leave America vulnerable to foreign subversion. Gutting the FBI weakens its ability to investigate foreign meddling, while firing the experts who help defend US elections gives America’s enemies more opportunities to sow confusion with conspiracy theories and cast doubt on election results.
We have already seen the effects of such malign influences in American politics, and now the problem will get even worse. The arbitrary firings at intelligence agencies create a cohort of financially precarious, potentially disgruntled current and former employees who will be targeted by foreign intelligence services; efforts by Russia and China to hire former employees are already ramping up, aided by recruitment agencies that may or may not reveal their clients’ identity.
Similarly, silencing strategic foreign broadcasters like Radio Free Europe deprives the US of a valuable source of soft power around the world. At a time when Russia and China are expanding their own soft-power operations, it makes no sense to shut these organizations down.
Having just written a book about the history of subversion, A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion, we can speak to how odd this behavior is. In all our case studies of subversive activity and how to counter it, from the ancient world to the present day, we haven't seen a single example in which a target unilaterally disarmed. What’s going on?1
Foreign efforts to weaken or change the policies of a top power are as old as statecraft itself. While the Trump administration is entitled to reorganize the bureaucracy within the parameters of the law, its indiscriminate approach contradicts 2,000 years of great powers using defense, deterrence, and diplomacy to manage foreign threats.
A country defends against foreign meddling by educating its citizens and hardening itself against would-be attackers – for example, by providing resources and advice to election workers at the local level. It deters subversion by threatening painful responses if matters get out of hand – for example, by broadcasting unpleasant truths into the subverter’s territory, or by shutting down key capabilities, as US Cyber Command did to Russia’s Internet Research Agency during the 2018 midterm elections.
Targeted countries also use diplomatic carrots and sticks to keep adversaries’ subversive operations at a tolerable level – for example, by offering to reduce their own subversive measures (such as democracy promotion, which is threatening from the Kremlin’s perspective). But for such measures to make any strategic sense, a quo must follow the quid.
Is the Trump administration engaged in elaborate dealmaking behind the scenes, perhaps encouraging the Russians to back off in a mutual de-escalation? If not, what we are witnessing is unprecedented. It makes no strategic sense for the US to stop playing hardball with enemies who are continuing to subvert it.
Unilaterally removing the guardrails that protect against disinformation, election meddling, and similar hostile activities is obviously dangerous. Is there some unappreciated strategic logic to disrupting America’s defenses, or is Trump driven solely by his neuralgia over the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia during his first term?
Given the Trump administration’s apparently self-destructive moves, Americans are owed an explanation. While some tactics may need to be kept secret, the broader strategy should be subject to democratic accountability. In the case of both Roosevelt and Reagan, trade-offs in the subversion game were transparent and public. Under the former, official US policy was to withhold diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until various conditions were met – among them a halt to subversive activity in the US. Under the latter, the Active Measures Working Group at the State Department worked publicly with editors and diplomats worldwide to publicize Soviet disinformation.
Chaos in US defenses leaves the country vulnerable to its adversaries. If Trump truly cares about America’s sovereignty, he should make a persuasive effort to reassure the public that the country’s defenses are not being compromised.
The Future of American Soft Power
May 16, 2025
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
This text – which will be featured in the next issue of our magazine, PS Quarterly: Post Americana – is the final commentary written by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a giant of international relations and one of Project Syndicate’s first contributors. It caps a rich legacy of field-defining insights into the workings of global politics.
CAMBRIDGE – Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. That can be accomplished by coercion (“sticks”), payment (“carrots”), and attraction (“honey”). The first two methods are forms of hard power, whereas attraction is soft power. Soft power grows out of a country’s culture, its political values, and its foreign policies. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power. But over the long term, soft power often prevails. Joseph Stalin once mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” But the papacy continues today, while Stalin’s Soviet Union is long gone.
When you are attractive, you can economize on carrots and sticks. If allies see you as benign and trustworthy, they are more likely to be open to persuasion and follow your lead. If they see you as an unreliable bully, they are more likely to drag their feet and reduce their interdependence when they can. Cold War Europe is a good example. A Norwegian historian described Europe as divided into a Soviet and an American empire. But there was a crucial difference: the American side was “an empire by invitation.” That became clear when the Soviets had to deploy troops to Budapest in 1956, and to Prague in 1968. In contrast, NATO has not only survived but voluntarily increased its membership.
A proper understanding of power must include both its hard and soft aspects. Machiavelli said it was better for a prince to be feared than to be loved. But it is best to be both. Because soft power is rarely sufficient by itself, and because its effects take longer to realize, political leaders are often tempted to resort to the hard power of coercion or payment. When wielded alone, however, hard power can involve higher costs than when it is combined with the soft power of attraction. The Berlin Wall did not succumb to an artillery barrage; it was felled by hammers and bulldozers wielded by people who had lost faith in Communism and were drawn to Western values.
After World War II, the United States was by far the most powerful country, and it attempted to enshrine its values in what became known as “the liberal international order” – a framework comprising the United Nations, the Bretton Woods economic institutions, and other multilateral bodies. Of course, the US did not always live up to its liberal values, and Cold War bipolarity limited this order to only half the world’s people. But the postwar system would have looked very different if the Axis powers had won WWII and imposed their values.
While prior US presidents have violated aspects of the liberal order, Donald Trump is the first to reject the idea that soft power has any value in foreign policy. Among his first actions upon returning to office was to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, despite the obvious threats that climate change and pandemics pose.
The effects of a US administration surrendering soft power are all too predictable. Coercing democratic allies like Denmark or Canada weakens trust in our alliances. Threatening Panama reawakens fears of imperialism throughout Latin America. Crippling the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 – undercuts our reputation for benevolence. Silencing Voice of America is a gift to authoritarian rivals. Slapping tariffs on friends makes us appear unreliable. Trying to chill free speech at home undermines our credibility. This list could go on.
Trump has defined China as America’s great challenge, and China itself has been investing in soft power since 2007, when then-Chinese President Hu Jintao told the Communist Party of China that the country needs to make itself more attractive to others. But China has long faced two major obstacles in this respect. First, it maintains territorial disputes with multiple neighbors. Second, the CPC insists on maintaining tight control over civil society. The costs of such policies have been confirmed by public opinion polls that ask people around the world which countries they find attractive. But one can only wonder what these surveys will show in future years if Trump keeps undercutting American soft power.
To be sure, American soft power has had its ups and downs over the years. The US was unpopular in many countries during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. But soft power derives from a country’s society and culture as well as from government actions. Even during the Vietnam War, when crowds marched through streets around the world to protest US policies, they sang the American civil-rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” An open society that allows protest can be a soft-power asset. But will America’s cultural soft power survive a downturn in the government’s soft power over the next four years?
American democracy is likely to survive four years of Trump. The country has a resilient political culture and a federal constitution that encourages checks and balances. There is a reasonable chance that Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 elections. Moreover, civil society remains strong, and the courts independent. Many organizations have launched lawsuits to challenge Trump’s actions, and markets have signaled dissatisfaction with Trump’s economic policies.
American soft power recovered after low points in the Vietnam and Iraq wars, as well as from a dip in Trump’s first term. But once trust is lost, it is not easily restored. After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia lost most of what soft power it had, but China is striving to fill any gaps that Trump creates. The way Chinese President Xi Jinping tells it, the East is rising over the West. If Trump thinks he can compete with China while weakening trust among American allies, asserting imperial aspirations, destroying USAID, silencing Voice of America, challenging laws at home, and withdrawing from UN agencies, he is likely to fail. Restoring what he has destroyed will not be impossible, but it will be costly.
The Trump Doctrine
Jun 4, 2025
Richard Haass
For a long time, the United States sought to promote democracy and respect for human rights, annoying some and inspiring others. Those days are now gone, in some ways for better, but mostly for worse.
NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump’s second administration is barely four months old, but already there are signs of an emerging foreign policy doctrine. And like so much else about his presidency, it represents a striking departure from the past.
Doctrines play an important role in American foreign policy. With the Monroe Doctrine, announced in 1823, the United States asserted that it would be the preeminent power in the Western Hemisphere and would prevent other countries from establishing competitive strategic positions in the region. At the outset of the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine pledged US support to countries fighting Communism and Soviet-backed subversion.
More recently, the Carter Doctrine signaled that the US would not stand by if an outside force sought to gain control of the oil-rich Persian Gulf region. The Reagan Doctrine promised assistance to anti-Communist, anti-Soviet forces and countries. George W. Bush’s Freedom Doctrine, among other things, made clear that neither terrorists nor those who harbored them would be safe from attack.
What these and other doctrines have in common is that they signal to multiple audiences critical US interests and what the US is prepared to do to advance them. Doctrines are intended to reassure friends and allies, deter actual or would-be enemies, galvanize the bureaucracy tasked with national security matters, and educate the public.
Although no Trump Doctrine has been explicitly put forward, one has begun to emerge all the same. You could call it the “look the other way” doctrine, the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” doctrine, or the “none of our business” doctrine.
Whatever the label, the doctrine signals that the US will no longer try to influence or react to how countries conduct themselves within their borders. The administration has refrained from criticizing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for arresting his principal political opponent, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for repeated attempts to weaken the country’s judiciary, or Hungary’s long-serving prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has steadily undermined democratic institutions there.
While Trump has disparaged the foreign policy of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the economic policy of Chinese President Xi Jinping, he has not made an issue of either leader’s repression of his own people. The Trump administration has also cut back or dismantled many of the instruments, including Voice of America, the Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for Democracy, long used to promote civil society and democratic movements around the world.
The closest there was to a public articulation of the new doctrine came in Saudi Arabia on May 13. Trump spoke with admiration of what he described as that country’s great transformation, adding it “has not come from Western interventionists … giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs … In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
Trump’s actions, above all his pursuit of business deals with authoritarian governments in the Gulf and far beyond, underscore these words’ import. Unlike Reagan, Carter, Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, Trump has made it clear that the US has no interest in advocating for human rights and democracy, speaking out against authoritarian abuses, and pressing for the release of political dissidents.
To be sure, the look-the-other-way doctrine avoids the sort of overreach that characterized Bush’s presidency, when zeal for spreading democracy led to the costly, ill-advised invasion of Iraq. It also makes it easier for the US to work constructively with governments carrying out policies at home that would normally pose an obstacle to commercial ties or cooperation on critical bilateral, regional, or global issues.
But the downsides of the new approach offset these considerations. The Trump Doctrine increases the odds that governments so inclined will double down on domestic repression and efforts to subvert democracy – a form of government often associated not just with greater personal freedom but also with free markets supported by the rule of law and less aggressive foreign policy. Promoting democracy thus benefits US investors and limits the risk that America becomes mired in costly or prolonged foreign conflicts.
The Trump Doctrine also distances the US from many of its traditional friends and allies, most of which, not coincidentally, happen to be democracies. Such estrangement works against American influence.
That said, the ability of the US to conduct a foreign policy that supports freedom abroad depends in no small part on its willingness to practice what it preaches. No country can talk the talk without walking the walk, and the Trump administration’s violation of many of the norms and practices that sustain democracy would undermine its ability to advocate for it elsewhere, were it so inclined.
No doctrine is entirely consistent – during the Cold War, the US often supported anti-Communists who were anything but democrats – and Trump’s doctrine is no exception. There is a self-serving, rightist bias. His administration has been critical of European governments and has made clear its preference for far-right forces, including the nationalist Karol Nawrocki, who won Poland’s presidency. Despite reducing America’s foreign entanglements, Trump has also waged a campaign against Greenland and Canada.
But these are exceptions. The thrust of the Trump Doctrine – not to allow anti-democratic behavior to get in the way of doing business – is clear.
For a long time, the US sought to change the world, annoying some and inspiring others. Those days are gone, in some ways for better, but mostly for worse. The US has changed. It is coming to resemble many of the countries and governments it once criticized. It is as tragic as it is ironic.
Trump’s Corruption Is in a League of Its Own
Jun 2, 2025
Jan-Werner Mueller
When it comes to corruption, Donald Trump has no rival among world leaders. While other kleptocrats at least try to conceal their ill-gotten gains, Trump revels in it, signaling to the world that this White House is open for business, even to states that also finance terrorist organizations.
PRINCETON – Remember the airplane that Qatar gave Donald Trump? It was just over a week ago that the American president accepted this $400 million “gift” from the Gulf monarchy – a move that was somehow certified as legal by his attorney general, Pam Bondi, herself a former lobbyist for Qatar. In the days since, Trump has doled out seats for a private dinner to the largest holders of his personal “memecoin.” With Trump, the corrupt conduct has come so fast that it is hard to keep up, making it difficult for public opinion to focus on any particular scandal.
Yet there is something special about the plane story. It sheds more light on the peculiarities of Trump’s regime in comparison to other kleptocracies, and it may foreshadow future political turbulence for what is already the most corrupt administration in US history.
The backstory is that, after receiving a private tour of the Qatari Boeing 747 – a gilded “palace in the sky” – in Florida, Trump is said to have become fixated on it. Boeing’s delivery of new Air Force One jets apparently has been delayed until 2027 or later, and here was a plane with all Trump’s favorite trappings: gold (whether real or fake) and an excess of ornamentation in a style that one architecture critic calls “regional car dealership rococo.”
Originally, palaces served as the residences of Roman emperors. By mixing official administration and private life, they signaled that the state belonged to a particular person. Thus, as an aesthetic form, the palace is fundamentally inappropriate in a democracy (unless, as in some former or current monarchies, there are clear design choices that distance the occupant from anything resembling dictator chic).
Trump’s total disregard for the functional requirements of Air Force One further demonstrates that he is mainly interested in a made-for-TV presidency. Only what is immediately visible matters. Never mind that it may take years to bring the “flying palace” up to standard (Air Force One is supposed to be a flying command post capable of surviving nuclear war, free of any enemy listening devices). The fact that this process might cost billions is secondary to the immediate impression of getting a great “deal” and basking in the ersatz glamor of Gulf state royalty.
No wonder Trump’s administration has ended up being staffed by inexperienced – and, in more than one case, evidently incompetent – TV talking heads, mostly from Fox News. But even more important, the plane signals to everyone that America’s president is open for business and eager to monetize his office. As South African President Cyril Ramaphosaput it during his recent visit to the White House: “I am sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”
In this regard, the Trump regime is fundamentally different from other autocracies in which the ruler enriches himself and his family. After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have always been careful to hide their ill-gotten wealth. The murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was targeted precisely because he exposed Putin’s corruption, offering undeniable evidence of “Putin’s Palace” on the Black Sea. Similarly, Orbán faces growing public scrutiny of his son-in-law, one of the country’s richest individuals.
Thus, when it comes to corruption, Trump is in a class of his own. Since he has always sold himself as a successful businessman, any new venture – no matter how obvious the conflict of interest – appears to strengthen his brand. And unlike other aspiring autocrats, he does not worry about international organizations, let alone international opinion. There is no need, for example, to try to fool the European Commission into thinking that European Union funds are not being siphoned off to your cronies and family – as Orbán has long taken pains to do.
On the contrary, by having his attorney general shut down anti-kleptocracy units and abolish penalties for US companies paying bribes abroad, Trump is sending a clear signal that self-dealing is now the business of America. And once people are convinced that everyone is corrupt, those truly committed to kleptocracy have won the game.
Americans are learning the hard way that simply exposing corruption takes you only so far. There is a long-running pattern of right-wing populists coming to power as great anti-corruption crusaders, only to extend the swamp. It is naive to think that such flagrant betrayals will doom them politically. All too often, they convince their followers that corruption is not corruption, but rather a legitimate part of the mass clientelism typical of populist regimes. The “real people” get benefits and bureaucratic favors (including clemency), while everyone else gets nothing.
Other populist tricks work only in particular contexts. For example, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, shadowed by accusations of tax fraud throughout his career, would wink at Italians: “Everyone is doing it. I’m just particularly good at it.” If this sounds familiar, that is because Trump said much the same thing when he ran for the presidency in 2016. But he has gone further than Berlusconi in actually gutting the tax authority, making things easier for cheats.
That said, the Qatari plane scandal could disrupt the pattern of impunity. As evidence of brazen corruption, it is much easier to grasp than, say, abstract schemes to profit from cryptocurrency purchases (at least until a financial crash that affects everyone). It can also be read as a flying admission of failure. Have we really reached the point where a major US company, Boeing, can no longer deliver equipment on time to the most powerful person in the world? One is reminded of the East German leaders who were ferried around in Volvos – a tacit acknowledgement that the state socialist regime’s industrial capacities were insufficient.
Last but not least, even die-hard Trump supporters are queasy about his taking “sacks of goodies” from a state known for funding Hamas. The supposedly “free” gift might yet turn out to be politically costly.
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