THE VIEW FROM TRUMPWORLD

 

For many educated Americans with even a passing knowledge of US foreign relations, President Donald Trump’s latest machinations on the world  stage are very likely baffling.  If we are baffled, however, it is because we are failing to understand that Trump doesn’t see the world from the point of view of a world-class leader, but rather, from that of a mobster.

A lot of us were shocked and infuriated during his first term when he dissed our Western allies, while embracing every murderous dictator he had ever longed to meet. It was clear that these were “his people”, and that it mattered little to him what the people of the United States had sacrificed in the past to help democracy and freedom ring throughout every Western nation, following the worst war in the history of the world.

We watched him disrespect the memories of men and women sacrificed from our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations, and belittle the pain, hardship and suffering endured by those like my father (and yours), who put their lives on hold to fight fascism and the expansive imperialism of a madman in Europe, and survived. He belittled that cause and our elders, calling them “losers and suckers” and asking rhetorically “what was in it for them.” Those brave people, the ones who understood the value of defending the free world, and who continued to support that cause, when the Soviet Union crushed the freedom of Eastern Europeans following World War II, back when US presidents understood that Russian tyrants were our enemies.

We witnessed too, his denigration of the noble institution of NATO, which he dismissed as being over and of no importance to the US—that great alliance which has been the mortar holding together Western peace and democracy for the past seventy-five years. An all-for-one-and-one-for-all pact in which the US earned its leading role with the blood we spilled on European soil in two world wars. A role which has been almost totally responsible for launching the US to world leadership status on the global stage.

Trump shocked patriotic and democratic Americans in those first four years by speaking in disparaging and arrogant terms to those previously highly respected Western allies, while at the same time referring in the most glowing of terms to murdering despots like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un (with whom he said he had “fallen in love”), and like China’s Chairman Xi (whom he admired for becoming leader for life and suggested perhaps the US should follow suit with him). He preferred Russian talking points to US intelligence, revealed things to Putin that the Kremlin never should have known, and mishandled a treasure trove of classified documents putting American lives in danger.

And then he threw the country into chaos by, for the first time in history, refusing to participate in the peaceful transfer of power, after losing an election, and created further chaos by inciting an insurrection designed to halt certification of the election he had lost, apparently bent on remaining in office as an ad hoc authoritarian ruler.

The majority of Americans breathed a sigh of relief when he was finally gone, and talked about how our democracy had dodged a bullet. It had been a close call but democracy was intact and we could all sleep easy.

But then, something utterly insane happened. Slightly more than half of voters who actually voted in the 2024 election put this despot back into office, not caring that he was a convicted felon, a court certified rapist, a man indicted on charges of election tampering, inciting an insurrection, and gross mishandling of America’s secrets. None of that mattered because people were worried about eggs being more expensive than when he was in office, and about whether they would be able to keep affording fuel for their gas-guzzling SUVs and giant pick-up trucks.

Trump ran on that. But anyone who was even half-awake during his first term was at least vaguely cognizant of the fact that, if Trump’s lips are moving, he’s lying. That is, except when he talks about using the power of State to destroy his personal enemies, or when he talks of dismantling any part of American democracy that keeps him from doing exactly what he pleases with no consequences. Those are promises—vendettas—that he is serious about keeping.

How all of that is affecting democracy at home is becoming more shockingly evident by the day. Adding insult to injury for every small-d democrat in the nation,  Trump is already, after only a month in office, describing himself in monarchic terms on Truth Social, where, referring to himself,  he wrote LONG LIVE THE KING!  That message was repeated under the White House’s official X handle captioning a Time-style fake cover with an illustration of Trump wearing a crown. In the same flurry of narcissistic, self-congratulatory messages, Trump also quoted—without saying he was quoting him—Napoleon Bonaparte saying,   “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Napoleon was, of course, also a narcissist, an emperor and a despot.

The consequences of Trump’s dictatorial actions on the home front will even shortly begin to become evident to his most fanatical followers when they start to understand that what he does will negatively affect them as well where the rubber meets the road. Especially when the high prices they were so worried about and that were a decisive factor in his re-election, are not going down. On the contrary, thanks to the president’s reduction in taxes on the rich and soaring tariffs on international trade, prices can only be expected to rise.

But they’ll also start to feel the pain of their decision to return him to office when their Social Security and health care benefits are affected, when the cost of their medication rises, when their farming subsidies are cut, when their flights are canceled because of a hamstrung Federal Aviation Agency, and when every government office they must deal with is rendered totally ineffective because it has been stripped to its bare bones.

Returning to the foreign relations front, just because common everyday people have no idea of the importance of America’s status on the global stage doesn’t mean that it is unimportant, since our leadership in that arena is what defines US power and its ability to continue to shape democracies abroad and to influence the world through its allies. Trump clearly doesn’t care about that. He thinks of the US as a big business to be run as ruthlessly as he and Elon Musk have always run their own. His attempt to turn US relations with Ukraine into a protection racket in which he conditions aid—already earmarked by Congress—on President Zelensky’s signing over half of the country’s wealth of natural resources to him, should make every American feel ashamed. Every American but him, of course, because if there’s something we can be assured of, it’s that Donald Trump has no shame. And it’s not a first by any means because he already sought to blackmail Zelensky during the earlier Trump administration, by withholding vital defense aid unless the Ukrainian president dug up dirt on the son of his political rival, Joe Biden.

Worse still, he is now blaming the victim for causing the crime. (If you’ve been paying attention to his take on sexual assaults and molestations he and his cronies are accused of, you’ll understand that this stance is nothing new for him). Let’s be clear: The reality, the unvarnished facts, are that Russia, an imperialist power, run by a dictator, and a natural enemy of the United States, invaded Ukraine, a sovereign, democratic nation, unprovoked, and based on the sole self-justification that Ukraine was seeking closer ties to the West, and that it had cast off a puppet government put in place by the Kremlin. Any other interpretation is political spin and an out-and-out lie.

Yet, Trump now insists that Ukraine “never should have started” the war of Russian aggression against it. And that, instead of fighting tooth and nail against that invasion, it should have rolled over and “made the deal” that Putin offered. Which for any sovereign nation, was no deal at all, but rather capitulation to Russian dominance.

Ukraine is not, of course, the only place where the US stands to lose ground in the world due to the ham-handed fashion in which the new US thugocracy is mishandling international relations. Eastern European leaders are already on alert, since, with the US (actually Donald Trump, not the US as such) taking the side of Vladimir Putin and accepting Russian propaganda talking points as truth, if Ukraine falls, there is no way an emboldened Putin will stop there, or until all of Eastern Europe is once again under Russian dominance.

Meanwhile, Western European leaders have been left scrambling and are holding emergency meetings to decide how to approach this new reality. After reestablishing firm US-European and NATO ties during the four years that Joe Biden sought to pick up the pieces of American diplomacy shattered under Trump’s earlier four years, they find themselves back at square one after the unthinkable happened and Americans brought a convicted felon back to office again. Clearly, they have to be thinking that, no matter what happens next, the US is no longer a reliable ally. As such, they are now discussing ways in which Europe can disengage from US dominance and start fending for itself in the face of new threats of Russian expansionism.

But I am concentrating on the Ukraine situation because it is a case in point for how Donald Trump views the world. And as I said at the beginning of this essay, his viewpoint is not that of a world leader, but of a mobster.

Let me explain: Trump sees the world not as the sophisticated strategic game that it is, in which strong alliances are vital to the mutual defense of democratic nations. First of all, Trump is not a believer in democracy—not that he is above using the democratic process to gain access to power. It’s just that once in power, he no longer plays by democratic rules. So for Trump, organizations like NATO, the UN, the Organization of American States, and any agency within the government he heads designed to halt corruption or to place checks and balances on the powers that be, are meaningless.

On the contrary, Trump is incapable of complex thinking. Things for him are quite simple. As simple as they are for any mob boss—it’s no coincidence that Trump has more than once expressed his admiration for 20^th-century bootleg mob boss Al Capone (clearly and conveniently ignoring the fact that “Scarface” died in prison on a federal rap). Capone embodied everything Trump admires: raw power backed by violence, accumulation of a vast fortune through any means necessary, lawlessness, and accountability to no one but himself.

Trump, then, doesn’t identify with his predecessors. He doesn’t see himself as the elected leader of a free and democratic nation, guided by an ironclad Constitution and controlled in his actions by the checks and balances of a carefully created three-branch system. He sees himself simply as the head of the greatest military power on earth, and as such, as the Boss, the capo dei capi, the Boss of all bosses.

It follows, then, that he has little or no respect for any of the “minor bosses”—the European leaders, for instance, who, throughout post-war history, have been our friends and allies. If he is the Boss, then they are beholden to him, and, in his simple mind, are worthy only of his contempt and his vengeance if they fail to toe his line.

That means that he sees the world as being divided, much like the mob, into “families”, each with its own turf and its capo dei capi, and it is only for the other Bosses that he reserves his respect. For Trump, there are three “families”. America, Russia and China. Their bosses, Putin and Xi, are, if not his friends, then at least his colleagues, his equals, and he respects their “businesses”, like they respect his, even if, as in the case of China, he exacts certain payments for allowing their businesses to overlap. Business, after all, is business. But they keep their territories clearly marked and try their best to keep out of each other’s way, at the expense of the minor bosses, whom they see as their underlings. Because a turf war between the three families would be “bad for business”.

This is why I’m using Ukraine as my example. Because in Trumpworld, Ukraine doesn’t count. And the only sovereignty it has is because the Boss on its turf allows it to have it. And it can only have it if the Boss is happy with its performance. For Trump, Ukraine, and, very likely, all of Eastern Europe, belongs to the Russia Boss. Asia belongs to the China Boss. And the West belongs to the US Boss. The Middle East is something of a no-man’s-land, but the three are careful not to step on each other’s toes there either—hence Trump’s abandoning of Syria to its Russian regime oppressors during his first term. The fact that it all backfired under Biden is Putin’s problem, but it wasn’t the America Boss standing in the Russia Boss’s way, and the people of Syria be damned. Same goes for the Ukrainians in the simple black and white rules of mobster ethics.

You might say, then, that Trump, a mobster dolt looking to set up a thugocracy, with nobody really doing much to stop him, thinks he’s playing checkers on the world game board. Xi and Putin, meanwhile are playing chess, and Putin has just put Trump in a check move that leaves America’s king in danger of capture.