Senior writer Chauncey DeVega says Trump rules supreme in the U.S. thanks to the Republican party’s success in building a Soviet-style one-party government in both Congress and the U.S. courts. But the leaders of single-party systems achieve prominence through machinery, not intelligence — and international governments are noting the drop in White House standards.
“With the power he has managed to grab from a compliant Supreme Court and a Republican Congress, against an ineffective Democratic opposition and cowed media, Trump now has nearly all the tools to impose personalist rule over all areas of American life. But internationally, he has to face other leaders who, with strong wills, personalities and national interests of their own, will not capitulate so easily,” writes DeVega.
DeVega said the limits of Trump’s power on the international stage were highlighted by the assembly of roughly 20 countries at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Tianjin, China, earlier this week. Trump was not invited.
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Trump likely took this personally, given his admiration for strong-man leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un. Trump admitted he thought China’s massive military parade was “a beautiful ceremony” held in the hope that “I was watching — and I was watching.”
He also assured reporters that “my relationship with all of them is very good.”
But while Trump gazes longingly upon the authoritarian big boys club, DeVega reports that Trump “has shown little desire to unite or lead the free world in the way that American presidents in the Cold War did.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tells DeVega that Trump is “weakening American military alliances, and gutting the international economic institutions, including … the World Trade Organization, that used to facilitate trade and investment between capitalist economies in the Cold War.”
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And while Trump’s indifference drives “small d” democratic nations to look elsewhere for allies, University of Chicago associate professor Paul Poast says Trump “could even be waking up to the limits of his international influence.”
“I don’t think Trump is going to swoon Putin. Moreover, as he indicated in a Truth Social post, I think he recognizes as much,” Poast said.
The Lincoln Project chief of staff Ryan Wiggins says the U.S. would not be the first empire brought down by an ignoramus.
“Trump has a child’s understanding of the world and is driven by ego and whatever impulses come into his weak mind,” Wiggins told Salon. “It’s causing the U.S. economy to burn as he pursues trade and economic policies that are completely unworkable and destroys U.S. leadership on the global stage. And he’s doing a lot of it to distract from the Epstein files.”
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And the GOP’s role in aiding and abetting the loss of American prestige and power on the world stage should not be ignored, added Wiggins.
Read the full Salon report at this link.