On Thursday evening, Jason Furman, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, tweeted out a picture of himself leaving his office for the last time, with the message "Turning out the lights." Whether it was deliberate or not, Furman's message echoed the words of Lord Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, who remarked to a friend, in August, 1914, "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."
Grey's words, spoken on the eve of the First World War, are sometimes seen as an elegy for a halcyon period of globalization, peace, and prosperity. Listening to Donald Trump's dark, inward-looking Inaugural Address, on Friday, it was easy to believe that we are at another historical turning point.
Perhaps the trepidation and fear over Trump taking over as President will turn out to have been overdone. Let us hope so. But there can be no doubt that these feelings are genuinely held, and not just in the United States. Around the world, there is still astonishment that such an inexperienced, volatile, and disruptive figure could become America’s President. Indeed, Trump's elevation has raised foundational questions not just about the future of democracy in this country but about the entire American-led global order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.
After Election Day, there were those—President Obama among them—who suggested that moving into the White House would moderate Trump's behavior: that he would become more Presidential. But, after watching how Trump conducted himself during his lengthy transition, it’s hard to find anybody today who still harbors any such hope. Trump will be Trump will be Trump, and we don't have much choice but to get used to it.
Even for the Republicans who are allied with him, that won't necessarily be easy. We've never had a President who has adopted the public persona of a professional wrestler, baring his teeth, railing at his opponents, and trying to fling to the canvas anyone he deems to have crossed him, even members of his own party. We've never had a President with a far-flung business empire that he has refused to give up, placing him, according to many ethics experts, in contravention of the Constitution. We've never had a President who seems to spend most of his time watching cable news and firing off salvos on social media. We've never had a President who openly expresses admiration for an authoritarian Russian leader while simultaneously pouring scorn on U.S. intelligence agencies.
Finally, it's hard to recall a President who had such little interest, or expertise, in the details of governing. Wayne Barrett, the legendary Village Voice muckraker who died on Thursday, at the age of seventy-one, had covered Trump for almost as long as anybody. (He published a book about him, in 1992.) “Donald just has no interest in information," Barrett told Jennifer Gonnerman, shortly after the election. "He has no genuine interest in policy. He operates by impulse.”
Impulsive behavior is one thing. The worrying thing about Trump is that his impulsiveness is combined with authoritarian instincts and, according to some accounts, an unhealthy interest in populist dictators. According to a 1990 profile of Trump in Vanity Fair, his former wife Ivana said that he kept a book of Hitler's collected speeches by his bedside. Last weekend, when a reporter from Germany's Bild magazine asked him, in reference to his Scottish-German heritage, whether there is anything “typically German” about him, Trump didn't object to the absurdity of the question. Instead, he replied, "I like order and strength."
On Thursday, the Huffington Post reported that Trump's transition team had requested tanks and missiles to be part of his swearing-in parade, and that the Pentagon had turned it down. (“They were legit thinking Red Square/North Korea-style parade,” a source said.) The story hasn't been confirmed, but Trump hasn't hidden his desire to showcase some of America's deadly hardware. The military "may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump told the Washington Post, in an interview published on Wednesday. “That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.”
As I noted in November, Trump's ugly rhetoric and disdain for liberal pieties don’t necessarily mean he is Hitler, or Mussolini, or even Vladimir Putin. But Trump’s Presidency does represent a challenge to American democracy, and the institutions upon which its vitality depends, such as an independent judiciary, a Congress willing to provide meaningful oversight of the executive branch, and an active citizenry. As David Remnick wrote on Thursday, the mere existence of the Constitution isn't enough to guarantee the preservation of liberty.
At this early stage, there are plenty of reasons for worry, but there are also some for hope. In their craven complicity with Trump's trampling on government ethics guidelines, congressional Republicans have demonstrated that, so long as he enables them to enact their conservative agenda, they are perfectly willing to go along with an American variant of Perónism on the Potomac. Even some Republicans, though, are balking at the prospect of the United States distancing itself from its European allies and embracing a Russian government that sought to interfere in the election. Under the leadership of Senator John McCain, they have also vowed to conduct a proper investigation into Russian meddling.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Senate Democrats finally found their voice in grilling some of Trump's dubious Cabinet selections, including Betsy DeVos, a longtime critic of public schools who is slated to be Education Secretary; Scott Pruitt, a climate-change skeptic who was chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency; and Steven Mnuchin, a former hedge-fund manager who raised money for Trump during the campaign and was rewarded with a nomination for Treasury Secretary. Senate Democrats control only forty-eight seats (including independents), so they can't block Trump's appointees outright, or prevent the Republicans from repealing some of Obama’s signature legislation, including the Affordable Care Act. But the Democrats can delay things and use the confirmation process to shine light on some of the areas that the Trump Administration might rather keep obscured.
What of the press? In some parts of it, particularly the broadcast networks, there will be a tendency to accord Trump the same sort of respectful coverage that normally goes with the Presidential office. (Witness some of the gauzy portraits of the new First Family that appeared this week.) But, away from Fox News, the soft-soap treatment will only extend so far. Trump is already at war with one broadcast network, CNN, and he is sure to lash out at anyone who dares to run a story he doesn't like. In many parts of the media, indeed, it is now a badge of honor to be singled out in this way. And, meanwhile, many print publications, including this one, have seen their subscription numbers grow strongly since November 8th. Evidently, there is an enhanced public appetite for serious and critical journalism.
That goes to the earlier point about the need for an active and involved citizenry. It should never be forgotten that Trump lost the popular vote by almost three million. On Saturday, large-scale protest marches will be held in dozens of American cities. The one in Washington will start out on the southern edge of the U.S. Capitol, proceed west along Independence Avenue, turn right on Fourteenth Street, and then head east along Constitution Avenue, just south of the White House. It is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of people. In New York, up to a hundred thousand protesters are expected to march along Forty-second Street and up Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower.
People in other countries, meanwhile, will be looking on with awe and anxiety. For seventy years, the United States has led a global order based on mutual interest, enhanced trade, and, ultimately, America's role as the global hegemon (co-hegemon until 1989). Rhetorically, at least, Trump's accession to power marks a break with this order. Describing himself as an America Firster, he has talked scathingly about many of the institutions that have girded the Pax Americana, including NATO, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. He has criticized American military interventions—sometimes, it must be said, with good cause. And he has pledged to renegotiate trade deals, and, if he deems it necessary, to slap heavy tariffs on goods from Mexico, China, and other countries.
Surveying Trump's victory and the rise of xenophobic populism in many other Western countries, Martin Wolf, the Financial Times' senior economics commentator, recently pronounced, "We are, in short, at the end of both an economic period—that of western-led globalisation—and a geopolitical one—the post-cold war ‘unipolar moment’ of a US-led global order."
That judgment could still turn out to be premature. The world economy is so closely integrated these days that it would take huge shocks, or policy changes, to turn the clock back. American multinational companies, like Apple and Facebook and General Motors, are some of globalization’s biggest beneficiaries and supporters. To his Cabinet, Trump has appointed both Rex Tillerson, the former head of ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, and Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, the world's leading investment bank. Trump himself claims to favor trade, but what he terms "fair trade."
In his Inaugural Address, however, Trump made clear that he will at least try to tilt globalization in favor of American manufacturing workers. Reverting to the populist rhetoric that had propelled his campaign, he said, "The wealth of the middle class has been ripped from their homes and redistributed across the world," adding, "From this day forward, it's going to be only America first, America first. Every decision will be made to protect American workers and American families."
On the geopolitical front, it is far less clear what Trump will do, and that's the greatest concern for many people, here and around the world. Despite his claims that America’s armed services have been run down, the United States remains by far the world's biggest military power, the only country able to project its will anywhere on the globe. But how will Trump live up to this responsibility? In his speech, he pledged to "reinforce old alliances and form new ones" and to "eradicate” Islamic terrorism “completely from the face of the earth." But he also sounded some of the neo-isolationist themes that he put forward during the campaign, saying that America had "subsidized the armies of other countries" and "defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own." His language and tone suggested that the days when America viewed itself as the benevolent global leader, willing to make sacrifices to the mutual benefit of all countries, were coming to an end.
These were only words, of course. In this area, as in others, there are enormous uncertainties about what President Trump and his new Administration will actually do. About the best we can hope for is that we have entered the theatre of the absurd. The alternative is much darker.
