Samuel
Johnson claimed that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels; the even
more cynical Ambrose Bierce countered a century later that it was the first.
Both opinions are wrong in our time when it concerns the current occupant of
the Oval Office, for whom zenophobia is his first and last refuge.
It’s hard
to conclude otherwise when the current Chaos President was only a Chaos
Candidate when he descended from Trump Tower to launch his 2016 campaign by
differentiating himself from the rest of the GOP pack with a diatribe against
Mexico for sending “people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing
those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime,
they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Sure
enough, just when some in his own party came to have buyer’s remorse about
returning him to the White House because of the tariffs he imposed, Trump
deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador without even a bow toward due
process—an act so brazenly unlawful that even the conservative-oriented Supreme
Court felt obliged to intervene.
Economists
have been pointing out the costs laid on an already inflation-scarred American
consumer by Trump’s tariffs. But Trofimov’s article might be the best I have
seen on how the President’s domestic and foreign policies, by re-casting
America as a predator nation, are combining to wreak havoc on the economy.
Trumponomics?
No, more like Bullynomics, especially after Trump sneered that Federal Reserve
chair Jerome Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!”
As part of
its authoritarian appeal, Bullynomics is an economic model that can be copied
and practiced at the local level.
Recently,
for instance, a longtime county restaurateur related to me how she was
approached on an inspection of her building. “So,” the official started out, “I
understand you’re a big Democrat.”
“Oh, no,”
the restaurateur answered with a straight face. “I’m five-foot-two. I’m only a
little Democrat!”
Who will
benefit—who is already benefiting—from Trump’s destabilization of the
international monetary and diplomatic order? Two countries that, before he returned
to power, were experiencing economic crises brought on by their own authoritarian
rulers: Russia and China.
Russia was
reeling from Ukrainian resistance to its invasion and the West’s solid opposition
to its aggression mounted by the Biden administration—until Trump threw
Vladimir Putin a lifeline by disgracefully dressing down Vladimir Zelensky in the
now-notorious Oval Office meeting.
As for
China, I was pulled up short earlier today when I came across a The New York
Times story from last September headlined, “Calling ‘Garbage Time’ Over
China’s Ailing Economy.”
And now? Xi
Jinping is posing as an icon of stability following Trump’s stop-and-go signals
on across-the-board tariffs. With its wealth of raw materials, it looks poised
to withstand whatever the President throws at him.
Trump has
always celebrated his “brand.” But it is obvious that now the essence of that
brand is bullynomics, and that it may leave the United States as substantially
weakened as Britain was after the ill-advised 1956 Suez affair.
(The image
accompanying this post, showing Yaroslav Trofimov in Toronto, was taken Dec. 1,
2024, by Mykola Swarnyk.)
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