President Donald Trump’s administration has now been defined by his paranoid worldview that sees enemies everywhere, said Rory Stewart, former diplomat and member of the British Parliament.
Writing for The iPaper, Stewart, who is also the host of the "The Rest is Politics" podcast, agreed with critics who've bashed the president for destroying norms, guardrails, and institutions, but he said that Trump has now destroyed morality itself.
He explained that Trump's deep fear of exposure has led him to seek to dominate all criticism. And it has traveled across the ocean to poison Europe and the House of Lords, Stewart said.
Everywhere there appears to be an assault on democratic norms and institutions. It makes sense in the U.S., as they are the ones who stood in the way of his demands during the first Trump administration. They were the staff saying "that's illegal" or "the Supreme Court will shoot it down." Any judge who gets in his way is "disloyal," explained Stewart.
Any reporter who dares to catch him in mistakes, hypocrisy or inconsistencies is "fake news." Anyone who dares to criticize him faces threats of prosecutors, fines, or, at the very least, the public encouragement of his supporters, conditioned to turn Trump's vendetta into their own violence.
Stewart ties Trump’s mindset to a broader populist tactic: weaponizing grievance to rally his MAGA loyalists against imagined elites that he secretly pals around with. However, everything has backfired, as Trump's chaotic leadership and pivoting politics have alienated even his loyalists, who expected results on immigration, the economy and foreign policy. Instead, what they got were tariffs spiking prices, another Middle East war and unfulfilled promises of a better life they deserve.
Stewart warns that Trump’s paranoid style has manifested a corrosive to political discourse and civic life. Every minor disagreement is an existential betrayal. Any attempt at bipartisan compromise has given way to a "my way or the highway" way of governing. He normalizes hostility, leaving little room for the shared reality democracy requires. The cost has become a fractured nation where morality, truth and decency became collateral damage.
The solution, Stewart asserts, is to "reframe these institutions" around a "shared moral space." It may have once been religious, but even secular views focus on humanity and morality. It cannot simply be a new person that half of the country views as a savior. He argued that it's about a new society that prizes ethics, embraces "better electoral systems, tighter social media rules, much tougher financing rules, citizens assemblies" and reforms governing the lawmakers themselves.
"Our laws, institutions and processes exist to balance and protect these, allowing us ultimately to tolerate and even sometimes compromise with people who disagree with us profoundly and even sometimes disagreeably," Stewart closed.