Evan Osnos has pointed out that one element to look for in Trump’s decision-making is exploitation—how he is influenced by those around him who want things like taxpayer money, or contracts, or time with the President, for themselves or their clients.
.. All of this love seems, for Trump, to demand enemies. He told the crowd that he was not against all immigrants, but “they are going to come in legally!”
.. “We have no idea who they are, where they come from, do they love us?” Trump said. “In a lot of cases, nooooo, they don’t love us.” This is the rhetoric that he has used in the past to argue for bans on Muslims or on people from certain parts of the world. It would be a mistake to believe that he has put aside those goals.
.. He walked out, with a smile, and thanked them and Trump “for the confidence you have shown in me.” Then he said, “I look forward to being the civilian leader, so long as Congress gives me the waiver and the Senate votes to consent.” He was referring to the need to work around a law that normally keeps generals from leading the Department of Defense until they have been retired for seven years. (Mattis has been out for three.) Then Mattis left the stage, as Trump returned, nodding approvingly. “Oh, if he didn’t get that waiver there’d be a lot of angry people,” he said. “Such a popular choice.”
.. Trump did not explore one of the reasons that the choice has been popular: the idea that Mattis will be someone he will listen to, and will guard him from the recklessness that others around him, such as retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s designee for national-security adviser and an in-Tower conspiracy theorist, might encourage.
.. Trump went on to say that torture might not yield the information people expected, but, “if it’s so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that.” This was a remarkable admission: that torture might be something worth doing just for the emotionally satisfying spectacle of it.
.. And that is why the rallies are likely to endure: to serve as calibrators of or infomercials for what Trump believes that “the public” wants. One can waste a lot of time delving into the question of Trump’s psychological need for affirmation. What is politically more important is how he might use the set piece of a cheering crowd to brush aside other considerations, particularly those involving the checks on the Presidency, and the willingness of those in other areas of the government, or in the White House itself, to exercise them. Should courts worry about “a lot of angry people”?
The System Didn’t Work
From Italy to the U.K. to Ohio, the populist complaint is about justice, not economics.
The global economy had been teetering on the brink of another Great Depression, but it didn’t fall in... The book was called “The System Worked.” Except it didn’t. The system did more to mask problems than it did to solve them... Government statistics can show a drop in the unemployment rate, but they give scant indication of whether the jobs available now have the status or pay of the jobs available previously. Giving unlimited credit to a panicked patient will always have a narcotic effect; it can also have an addictive one. Near-zero (or sub-zero) interest rates will goose stock markets to the delight of sophisticated investors—and the dismay of savers... Pushing economic management from elected officials into the hands of unelected central bankers and regulators flatters the vanity of the intelligentsia while offending the normal person’s sense that his vote should count toward his own livelihood.In other words, the “system,” with its high-toned rationale and its high-handed maneuvers, struck millions of people as unaccountable and unjust... But Mrs. Clinton’s unforgivable sin was her outsized—and unearned—sense of entitlement.
Trump’s Populism is not just a Western Phenomenon
Since the Arab Spring, nationalism and authoritarianism have been on the rise in both the largest and the freest countries, some of which have voted for more-autocratic leaders, and also in less democratic countries, where strongmen have strengthened their grips: in Egypt, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, Turkey, the Philippines, and China.
.. In France and Germany, the political center is still in power, but nationalist populism is on the march.
.. According to the Wall Street Journal, a new national ad campaign warns people about foreign agents, and at least one school has introduced a weekly play-acting game called Spot the Spy.
The Crisis for Liberalism
has no choice but to start arguing about how it lost its way.
A lot of that argument already revolves around the concept of “identity politics,” used as shorthand for a vision of political liberalism as a coalition of diverse groups — gay and black and Asian and Hispanic and female and Jewish and Muslim and so on — bound together by a common struggle against the creaking hegemony of white Christian America.
.. instead 2016 exposed liberalism’s twofold vulnerability: to white voters embracing an identity politics of their own
.. So where religion atrophies, family weakens and patriotism ebbs, other forms of group identity inevitably assert themselves. It is not a coincidence that identity politics are particularly potent on elite college campuses, the most self-consciously post-religious and post-nationalist of institutions; nor is it a coincidence that recent outpourings of campus protest and activism and speech policing and sexual moralizing so often resemble religious revivalism.
The contemporary college student lives most fully in the Lennonist utopia that post-’60s liberalism sought to build, and often finds it unconsoling: She wants a sense of belonging, a ground for personal morality, and a higher horizon of justice than either a purely procedural or a strictly material politics supplies.
.. Thus it may not be enough for today’s liberalism, confronting both a right-wing nationalism and its own internal contradictions, to deal with identity politics’ political weaknesses by becoming more populist and less politically correct. Both of these would be desirable changes, but they would leave many human needs unmet. For those, a deeper vision than mere liberalism is still required — something like “for God and home and country,” as reactionary as that phrase may sound.
.. it is precisely older, foundational things that today’s liberalism has lost. Until it finds them again, it will face tribalism within its coalition and Trumpism from without, and it will struggle to tame either.