Donald Trump’s presidential win is a vivid refutation of two adages: cheaters never prosper, and might doesn’t make right.
These are not just comforting words that parents say to their bullied children. They are, or at least ought to be, the letter of the law. From community ordinances all the way up to international agreements, the law is built around compliance (against cheating) and constraints on powerful actors (against bullying). So are many rule-based activities like professional sports. Just ask rule-breakers like the disgraced bicyclist Lance Armstrong or bullies like soccer player David Pratt who was kicked out of a game at the three-second mark for lunging at another player.
But politics is a different matter. Bullies and rule-breakers are in charge of many countries today, including Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
And now Donald Trump has broken laws and punched down all the way to the White House.
American voters either ignored or celebrated Trump’s behavior of macho misconduct. There’s a long American tradition of honoring outlaws that dates back at least to the days of Billy the Kid. On top of that, many voters relished the prospect of putting a bully back in the White House to strong-arm Russia and Ukraine to reach an agreement or twist the arm of Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. Never mind that the United States doesn’t have that kind of power any more or that Trump doesn’t have that kind of influence.
There was also a belief among the electorate that Trump could play the bully on the immigration issue, deporting all or a large number of undocumented immigrants. Voters also seemed to like his promise to throw his weight around on trade, by applying across-the-board tariffs. And Trump himself loved to talk about how he browbeat NATO members into spending more on their own defense (which NATO chief Mark Rutte cited approvingly in his comments on Trump’s electoral victory).
Not all voters were determined to put a bully in the Oval Office. Many just wanted the price of meat to go down (though how that will happen when Trump deports a good number of slaughterhouse workers is difficult to fathom). Still, it’s hard not to see a preference for bullying in the misogyny and racism that pushed many voters away from Kamala Harris and toward Trump.
Whatever the inclinations of U.S. voters, Trump will obviously play the bully when he’s once again president. That’s just his nature. But there is also a method in his machismo. He will follow the game plans of other bullies—like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega—in destroying the lives of rivals, targeting civil society opposition, limiting a free press, and rejiggering the rules of democracy to ensure Republican rule for the foreseeable future.
Because America is the most powerful country in the world, Trump’s bullying tendencies will have an additional quality. Trump will flex his muscles in ways that the leaders of small countries simply can’t do. He will try to use his bully pulpit to assert U.S. geopolitical, economic, and even cultural dominance beyond even what conventional presidents have done.
Don’t fall for that nonsense about his supposed isolationism. Trump has his own brand of internationalism (or, at least, his craftier associates do). Like Putin and Orban, he’s all about spreading illiberalism to every corner of the globe—not so much because he has grand ideological aspirations but because he’s all about promoting his latest brand. His failure to support human rights and the rule of law—remember his fawning over Mohammed bin Salman after the Saudi leader ordered the brazen murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi?—will perhaps have even more influence than any direct support for illiberal leaders or ideologies.
As soon as Trump was voted out of office in 2020—after he’d already pulled out of the Paris climate accord, destroyed the Iran nuclear agreement, and fumbled the COVID response, among other disasters—the international community attempted to repair at least some of the damage. It was like repairing your house on a hurricane-ravaged coastline. Just when you hammer the last nail into the new roof, the sky darkens and you have to prepare for the next big storm.
This time around, in the wake of Putin and Netanyahu launching their own assaults on a rule-based order with their respective invasions, can international law survive a second onslaught by Trump and his fellow bullies?
Knives Out
Trump, a billionaire backed by billionaires, nevertheless spoke for all those left behind by economic policies that benefitted globalizers, neoliberal economists, and coastal elites. Although most union leaders lined up behind the Democrats, a solid chunk of the rank-and-file supported the more populist candidate.
The economically distressed will suffer the most from Trump’s economic policies, regardless of what he promised during the campaign. That’s certainly what Sean McGarvey, the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, discovered after a meeting with Trump right after he was inaugurated in 2017. The president, he now reports,
never did anything he said he was going to do. He never did infrastructure. His National Labor Relations Board was laden with anti-labor ideologues. He never did pensions. Pretty much you name it. That first meeting was all the things he was going to do. And then we had four years of a knife fight in a phone booth.
For all those who bemoaned inflation, Trump’s proposed tariffs will raise the prices across the board for electronics, Mexico-grown vegetables, Canadian natural gas, and much else. The last time around, Trump’s tariffs cost Americans on the order of $230 billion. This time, manufacturers are already planning to increase prices in advance of the tariffs.
The economic hurt will extend beyond U.S. borders, particularly if other countries begin imposing retaliatory tariffs. Free trade obviously has many drawbacks, but trade wars are not the answer. “The neoliberal elite understand very clearly that we could be in for a tragedy,” finance professor Luigi Zingales points out. “Having the biggest guy on the block start to play the bully isn’t a good thing.”
Even more damaging will be Trump’s disdain for renewable energy—wind power is “bullshit,” he has said, among other things—and his love of fossil fuels. Trump will attempt to cancel the clean energy incentives in Biden-era legislation. He will greenlight all “to the last drop” fossil fuel extraction projects. And he will set off a renewed effort worldwide to cling to oil and natural gas (an even more dangerous addiction than clinging to guns and religion).
Behind all of the economic maneuvering is a simple goal: maintain the dominance of the dollar and undercut the alternatives (euro, yuan). As Trump said on the campaign trail, the dollar
is currently under major siege. Many countries are leaving the dollar. They’re not going to leave the dollar with me. I’ll say, “You leave the dollar, you’re not doing business with the United States, because we’re going to put 100% tariff on your goods.”
The supremacy of the U.S. currency helps prevent the country from going into receivership because of all its debt. Yet, Trump’s tax cuts and deportation plans will only put the United States deeper into debt—by as much as $15 trillion—and thus make it even more likely that other countries will jettison the dollar in favor of a more stable currency.
Allies and Adversaries
Trump had far more of an impact bullying allies than adversaries in his first term. His pressure on allies like NATO and South Korea to shoulder more of the security burden succeeded in extracting pledges to increase their military spending. With Israel, meanwhile, there was no bullying at all because he gave Netanyahu everything the Israeli leader wanted.
The bullying failed spectacularly with adversaries. Trump shouted at and denigrated North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, which didn’t do anything except put the entire world on edge. He then tried talking with Kim, and that didn’t accomplish anything either.
Trump slapped tariffs on China, which didn’t change its policies. He developed a full-court press on Iran and succeeded only in ushering in a more hardline government in Tehran. Despite all sorts of threatening language, he buckled in negotiations with the Taliban and prepared the ground for the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. personnel from Afghanistan under Biden. Both Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela were unmoved by Trump’s threats.
Will Trump the born-again peacemaker suddenly settle the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza? If these wars end in ceasefires, it won’t be because of anything Trump does. Both Putin and Netanyahu will likely be emboldened by Trump’s victory to push for their maximalist goals. The nightmare scenario is that they will even move the goalposts, with Putin targeting Moldova after its recent pro-European vote and Netanyahu fully annexing the West Bank.
The only peace that Trump can imagine is one that rewards the bully.
It’s of course galling that Trump won’t go to jail for his own misdeeds. Beyond that, however, is the message that Trump’s victory sends to bullies and would-be bullies around the world: rules are for losers.