Expert explains why Trump makes an terrible 'Manchurian candidate'

16 May

U.S. President Donald Trump walks to board Air Force One, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, May 16, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Christopher R. Browning, author of ‘The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942’, asked what if “the president of the United States was a ‘Manchurian candidate.’”

By ‘Manchurian candidate’ Browning means an embedded foreign agent driven to deliver maximum damage to a nation, but “limited … by the need not to act so outrageously and preposterously as to blow his cover.”

“What would be the limit of the self-inflicted wounds that he would dare to attempt?” asked Browning, a Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “In foreign affairs he might hesitate to openly undermine the world order established by the U.S. after World War II, of which it has been the major beneficiary.”

A Manchurian candidate probably wouldn’t blow his cover by declaring Canada, a valuable U.S. ally and trading partner, a threat to national security and “target it for absorption through economic extortion as our fifty-first state.”

A good Manchurian candidate also would not openly gun for the dissolution of the EU, or rake NATO allies and threaten Denmark with the military seizure of its territory of Greenland. He would also not divulge his political role models by denigrating the leadership of U.S. democratic allies as weak and stupid “while praising authoritarian rivals as smart and tough.”

Likewise, he would not be so obvious as to “cut off aid to Ukraine—which without the loss of a single American service member’s life has so taxed the military strength of Russia that it had to abandon a dictator it supported in Syria and has depleted its military stockpile to the extent that it is taking Cold War–era tanks out of mothballs—all to save a minuscule percentage of our defense budget.”

A good Manchurian candidate also would probably not seize the Panama Canal and swaddle it in an American reoccupation zone from which one homemade rocket could “effectively close the canal to all traffic, thereby inflicting immense economic and strategic damage on the US.” A proper Manchurian candidate also does not make himself obvious by espousing ethnic cleansing in Gaza, a clear violation of international law at Nuremberg.

Browning asks how far would a successful Manchurian candidate go to wreck American prosperity and squander “America’s leadership in the world economy” with sloppy, arbitrary tariffs that come and go on a daily or weekly personal whim? Would he so obviously coax systemic corruption by demanding countries bargain for personal tariff waivers, or try to sink the U.S. dollar’s status “as the reserve currency of the world economy”?

Furthermore, would a properly functioning Manchurian candidate disrupt world health and economics by aggravating the “existential threat of a rapidly heating world” by declaring all efforts to slow climate change a “hoax perpetrated by elite, radical left Democrats/Communists.” Would he also dismantle the public health system after Covid-19 roundhouse kicked his first administration—and with the bird flu virus in the wings, “rapidly mutating and infecting other animal species” on its slow creep toward humanity?

And what kind of serious Manchurian candidate proposes “performing a lobotomy on the country’s capacity to produce and disseminate knowledge” by attacking “medical, scientific, and academic professions and institutions, precisely when our country’s competitiveness in the knowledge economy is crucial?”

Browning goes on to ask if an earnest Manchurian candidate would so blatantly “dispense with the rule of law and due process” in open defiance of Supreme Court decisions, or follow the model of the Third Reich’s “protective custody” decree and allow the U.S. government to “arrest and incarcerate anyone indefinitely without indictment, trial, and sentence.”

And then there’s the matter of cabinet appointments, says Browning. Why would a convincing Manchurian candidate, who’s job at undermining things surely requires talented experts, “appoint to his cabinet and other important positions people so clearly unfit for them that he had to exert considerable political pressure on his Senate majority just to get them confirmed and then face immediate blowback from their incompetence?” Exhibit 1 would be Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “using insecure communications to reveal military attack plans to his wife, his brother, and a journalist.”

No, says Browning: “… [I]n a democracy that has survived for 240 years, no foreign embedded Manchurian candidate would dare risk exposing himself by dropping such a cluster bomb of obviously and predictably damaging actions and policies all at once.”

But “what if our Manchurian candidate president was not in fact an agent of an enemy power at all but acting entirely for his own reasons?” Browning asks. “And what if his base and his party continued to support him, no matter how disastrous his presidency was proving to be?”

“Then we would be in very big trouble indeed.”

Read the full article at The New York Review.

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