Trump was popular with about ten percent of Canadians before unilaterally abrogating a trade treaty he personally signed. I don’t come on this site to discuss politics. I recently voted for the Conservatives, and my views are moderate. But the paragraphs below sum up how many Canadians view this president. I will concede his constant chaos has garnered a few positive results. But the game is not worth the candle of gambling America’s economy, squandering the goodwill it has built up for decades, trashes the education system that aids American innovation, or threatens democracy and peace. Peace and prosperity? Perhaps. I think Trump knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Extravagant but small town cheap. Has made changes that save pennies (which should no longer be a thing) on the dollar without really addressing the major bad spending decisions. Why fire the Inspectors General? Gut consumer protection and anti-corruption laws? Why do do illegally, when obeying the law would be simple?
We need to understand that however awful Mr. Trump’s behaviour may have been until now – however callous, dictatorial, insane or dangerous, and however it may seem to have defined the limits of what is possible in each regard – it is only going to get worse, and at a rate that will itself defy all expectations.
Consider Mr. Trump’s performance in just the month or so since he took office. Did even the most alarmist of Mr. Trump’s critics anticipate he would not just undercut Ukraine in its struggle for survival against the Russian invaders, but take the Russian side in every material respect – assigning blame for the invasion not to Russia, but to Ukraine; cutting Ukraine out of the negotiations on its fate, while ruling out NATO membership and the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in advance; voting with Russia against a UN resolution denouncing the invasion; and demanding Ukraine pay the United States half a trillion dollars in reparations for the offence of having resisted its own annihilation (and decimating the Russian war machine in the process), a figure that is many times the actual amount of American aid it has received?
Did anyone imagine he would not just make similarly extortionary demands of his NATO partners in return for the United States’ “protection,” but effectively signal that no such protection would be provided, should Russia expand its attacks on Europe beyond the multifaceted hybrid-warfare campaign in which it is already engaged? Did even Mr. Trump’s supporters anticipate that he would also telegraph, in the space of the same few fevered days, that he would abandon Taiwan?
Or, closer to home, did anyone imagine that the original Trump threat to Canada – that we would be included in his proposed global tariff of 10 to 20 per cent, notwithstanding our joint membership in a continental free trade area – would suddenly swell into a special 25-per-cent tariff applicable only to ourselves and Mexico, and then into a campaign to forcibly annex the country? Was, likewise, the invasion and seizure of Greenland, or the Panama Canal, ever envisaged?
Did anyone predict, when the pseudo-official Department of Government Efficiency was first announced, what it would become, scant weeks later: a wrecking ball of dubious legal authority, consisting of Elon Musk and his 20-something acolytes, roaming the halls of various government departments firing officials at random and hacking into government payment websites to prevent duly authorized expenditures from being released and access the most private information, followed the very next week by reduced cybersecurity efforts?
No doubt it was expected that Mr. Trump would pardon some of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. But was it ever suggested he would pardon all of them, 1,500 at one go, no matter how severe their crimes – or that he would harass, prosecute or dismiss the law enforcement officials who brought them to justice?
All of this, as I say, is just in the last few weeks. Mr. Trump’s ambitions have grown materially wilder in that time, his actions more senseless, his rhetoric more extreme – he has lately taken to quoting Napoleon on the virtues of executive lawlessness and referring to himself as The King– than even in the weeks before then, in the demented interval between his election and his inauguration. (No one is willing to tell The Emperor his beautiful birthday suit is leaving America exposed. I get that Trump believes he is divinely inspired. It is harder to see him sitting through an hour long church service where they praise someone else.)
That was the period, recall, when he made a series of nominations for senior government posts that could only be described as perverse. It was as if he had deliberately selected the worst conceivable person for each position, the person most directly hostile to the mandate of the organizations they were nominated to lead. Thus Matt Gaetz, accused of statutory rape, was nominated to fill the job of Attorney-General; the alcoholic weekend television host and civil war prophet Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual abuse, was nominated to Defence; the paranoid conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine crusader Robert Kennedy Jr. to Health and Human Services? For all Kennedy’s talk about fluoridation, communists and bodily fluids, he essentially sounds like Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove, except Kubrick was darkly joking.
None of these were suspected, even through the long months that preceded the election, when Mr. Trump campaigned on an increasingly explicit appeal to fascism, while violating one norm after another – questioning his opponent’s racial identity, fabricating stories about immigrants eating pets and promising to round up and imprison 12 million immigrants in camps, prior to deportation.
Mr. Trump’s conduct in that campaign exceeded anything he had said or done since his attempt to overturn the results of the previous election in January, 2021, which was itself far worse than anything he had done in the four long years of escalating insanity that marked his first term in office, which exceeded by a wide margin even the most fearful projections that had preceded it.
The pattern is unmistakable. Mr. Trump’s actions, his statements, his very state of mind, have been growing worse over many years, and not steadily, but at an ever accelerating pace. This is, I suggest, not accidental. It is a function of his malignant narcissism, a narcissism that requires constant demonstrations of his power to dominate others, or at least to outrage them, or at any rate to hold their attention.
But as behaviour that was previously unthinkable comes to be expected, so it becomes harder and harder to sustain the same level of outrage; and as even a constant level of outrage starts to lose its psychological potency – as any drug will, if taken often enough – so Mr. Trump has been forced to increase the dosage of his self-administered narcotic of transgression. The self-destructive lunacy, and the resulting chaos, that would previously have satisfied him is no longer sufficient. He must take things to the next level, and the next, still crazier than the one before – crazier than he has ever previously done, crazier than anyone expects, crazier than anyone could expect.
If you think things are bad now, then, brace yourself: it is about to get a whole lot worse. If you are alarmed at the speed with which the Trump administration has set about dismantling every institution of American government and every pillar of the international order, you must understand that this is not just the initial burst of activity, the “shock and awe” phase after which things will settle down: if anything, the pace will continue to accelerate.
It cannot be otherwise. It is dictated not only by Mr. Trump’s insatiable psychological cravings, but by the ambitions and objectives of the fanatical ideologues and criminal opportunists with which he has surrounded himself: for where the destruction of everything that surrounds him is for Mr. Trump an end in itself, for Mr. Musk and his followers they offer the chance to rebuild a techno-fascist utopia out of the rubble, or at any rate to make off with as much as they can, while they can.
This rather alters the stakes, and the resulting challenge: of comprehension, let alone formulating an effective response. We have not just to understand what Mr. Trump and his team are up to now, but what they are capable of in future. That would be difficult enough in a normal, linear progression. But on the exponential curve on which Mr. Trump is now launched, it almost defies the imagination.
Take everything, then, that Mr. Trump has done in the last few weeks, and how much of an escalation this represents over his performance in the previous months or years. Now project that same rate of change forward over the next few weeks, or months or years: to Mr. Trump’s still nascent efforts to weaponize the justice system against his opponents, for example, or to seize the power of the purse from Congress; to his readiness to defy the courts, to suppress dissent at home and stamp his rule on other countries, to enrich his family and friends, and to generally sow chaos.
Now apply the same rate of change to the rate of change. That is what we are really up against, and while it is almost impossible to plan on that basis, if we are not at least making the attempt we have not begun to appreciate the true dimensions of the threat that confronts us.
I don’t say for one minute that Mr. Trump will succeed in any of these ambitions. Indeed, it is far more likely that his administration will spin out of control and collapse, overwhelmed by its own internal divisions, by popular opposition and by the multiple cyclones of havoc it has heedlessly set in motion. But that presents challenges of its own.
The world has never before been faced with such a threat. The United States has handed the nuclear codes to a madman, a criminal, a would-be dictator and a moron, all in the same person. Whatever the purpose to which he directs these powers – to impress his dictator friends, to further enrich himself and his cronies, to seize absolute power or just to watch the world burn – we must hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
But his supporters like him. He does speak his mind. And I heard his touch cures scrofula. Since Covid cost the global economy fifteen trillion dollars, that might come in useful if gutting international health causes another pandemic. The Democrats seem silent. Their defence of identity politics was sometimes too much, not popular, and not always the issues voters cared about. But free speech is still important when it is being abused by autocrats, not just academics.
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