What would another Trump presidency mean for the US, beyond an endorsement of a man who attempted to overthrow the constitution? Obviously, the answer would depend partly on the balance in Congress. Yet it would be wrong to draw additional comfort from how he behaved last time. Then he relied on quite traditional figures from the military and business. Next time will be different. “Maga” is now a cult with a sizeable number of believers.
A crucial domestic plan of Trump’s is to replace the career civil service with loyal servants of the president. The excuse is the alleged existence of a “deep state”, by which critics mean knowledgeable career civil servants whose loyalty is to the law and the state, not to the person in power. One reason this is objectionable is that modern government cannot run without such people. The bigger reason is that if the intelligence, homeland security and internal revenue services, the military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are subservient to the whims of the head of state, one has autocracy. Yes, it’s that simple. With a vengeful head of state, abuses of power could be pervasive. This would not be the US we have known. It might be more like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or even Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
What might this mean for the world?
Most obviously, embrace by the US of a man and a party that have openly repudiated the central norm of liberal democracy would dishearten those who believe in it and encourage despots and their lackeys everywhere. It is hard to exaggerate the effect of such a betrayal by the US.
The mixture of this despair with Trump’s avowedly transactional approach would weaken, if not destroy, the trust on which current US alliances are based. Americans are right to decry the freeriding of most allies. There is no doubt, above all, that Europeans (among which the UK is included) must do more. But the alliance needs a leader. For the foreseeable future, the US has to be that leader. With Russia threatening Europe, and China a peer competitor, alliances are going to be more important than ever — not just for its allies, but for the US, too. Trump neither understands nor cares about this.
Then there are the implications for the world economy. Trump is proposing to introduce a 10 per cent across-the-board tariff on all imports. This would be a contemporary (albeit milder) version of the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. It would surely lead to retaliation. It would also do huge damage to the World Trade Organisation, by repudiating US commitments to lower tariff barriers over many decades.
As important is likely to be the impact on efforts to tackle climate change. The US itself would presumably reverse many measures in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. As significant might be a likely US withdrawal from efforts to promote investment in clean energy in emerging and developing countries.
Prospective relations with China must also be in question. Here the changes might not be that dramatic, because hostility to China’s rise is bipartisan. But the opposition to China would be less about ideology under Trump, who cares not a whit about such differences between autocracies and democracies. He rather prefers the former. It would become just a contest over power, with Trump trying to keep the US number one. How differently that would turn out is unclear. Trump might seek to turn Russia against China, as Nixon did China against the Soviet Union. Abandonment of Ukraine might be his bait.
A second Trump presidency might not ruin the US forever. But both it and the rest of the world would lose their innocence. We would have to adapt to the reality that the US had re-elected a man who had openly tried to subvert its democracy. It is possible that the indictments against Trump will save the day. But that fragile hope highlights today’s threat to democracy.
Written by: Martin Wolf
© Financial Times
