U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One en route to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend a world leaders' summit on ending the Gaza war, amid a U.S.-brokered prisoner-hostage swap and ceasefire deal
President Donald Trump is a walking, talking embodiment of MAGA and its ethos. As such, he is also a clear example of how well MAGA arguments and talking points work when applied to the real world. In short: they apply poorly, says New York Times Columnist David French.
Times columnist and editors Michelle Cottle, Jamelle Bouie, Derek Arthur and French spent a portion of Saturday detangling Trump’s puzzling, not-at-all-a-war in Iran — where he has failed to name either a main goal or an end-game. He’s also enraged U.S. allies by running up the price of their oil and hurting their markets, and then demanded they step up and clean his mess in the Strait of Hormuz, even though few U.S. allies appear to have been alerted to Trump’s plan to strike Iran and is now planning a potential ground invasion.
But striking first and thinking later is the essence of MAGA, said French. As is bluster, muscle flexing and neglecting to turn in your report at the end of all the posturing.
“I don’t think people appreciate how much it is core to the ethos and worldview of MAGA that — on problem after problem after problem that we faced as Americans — the actual underlying mistake of previous administrations is that we were just never tough enough; that we just didn’t fight the war with the gloves off enough, or we haven’t been punitive enough, or we haven’t tried to bully people enough,” French told the Times panel podcast. “… [T]here’s this phrase you see on MAGA that says, ‘You can just do things.’ And what they mean by that is that you could just exercise power and you can change the world.”
French said MAGA proponents were thrilled that Trump’s kidnapping and detainment of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro went as well as it did, and they laud that event as “their most successful version” of the “gloves off” MAGA ethos. But French said swinging your fists doesn’t work so well most times in a world with formidable opponents who are capable of thinking for themselves.
“You see the same pattern: ‘We have to pummel people harder.’ And that works with Republican members of Congress, for example, but it doesn’t tend to work with other sovereign nations,” said French. “Other sovereign nations don’t like to be pummeled. … [T]hey’ll find a way to stop or prevent the pummeling, and it’s not always the way you want. So, for example, if you’re trying to torment Canada, well, you can’t go crying if Canada says, ‘We’re going to forge a closer economic relationship with China and Europe than with the U.S., because we have self-preservation interests.’”
But French said pummeling sometimes “has the exact opposite effect,” and “alienates” allies. Plus, it’s the dumbest, most outdated tool in the toolbox.
“It’s not as if nobody thought ‘well, why not use force?’ before. I mean, that’s the oldest story in the book. That’s Vladimir Putin to the core. Again, sometimes that is appropriate, but as a universal way of dealing with the world, it is extraordinarily dangerous and counterproductive.”