President Donald Trump has the lowest ratings of any president at this stage of his term. Photo /Getty Images)
President Donald Trump has the lowest ratings of any president at this stage of his term. Photo /Getty Images)
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
What was he saying: that he voted for misogyny, racism andclimate catastrophe, but not the tariffs? Imperialist threats to Greenland, Gaza and Canada are fine, but keep your hands off my shares?
Tomorrow will be the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States. What he’s done in that time is frightening enough, but the response of Trump enablers and apologists to the reality of the tariffs has been unbelievable.
People like Ackman are supposed to be smart. Tariffs are exactly what they voted for. Trump said he would do it, and he has.
And let’s not forget who Ackman and his ilk serve, as they go about reinforcing their power as billionaires. They manage institutional investments, which means the retirement savings of hundreds of millions of ordinary folk. Their gung-ho stupidity about Trump has direct real-world consequences for everyone.
Everywhere you look, the response to Trump is disturbing. The Republican Party has sworn total obeisance: many of them are scared and the rest are gleeful.
The Democrats have some honourable fighters in their ranks, including Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but as a party they are in disarray.
Polls show Trump has the lowest ratings of any president at this stage of his term, but even if most Americans are dismayed, they also show the symptoms of a person bashed repeatedly with a brick wrapped in a sock.
Elsewhere, dictators and other authoritarians are emboldened: Nigel Farage in Britain, Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in France, and honestly there’s at least a dozen more.
And that’s before we even get to Vladimir Putin, who must pinch himself every day in wonder that it’s so easy to get Trump to do his bidding.
Misogyny, antisemitism, white supremacism, nativism, homophobia have become more “acceptable”. And several of our own politicians are enthusiastically lobbing the hand grenades of Trump’s culture war into the body politic.
Steve Bannon, convicted of fraud and jailed for contempt of Congress, the man CNN called a “MAGA enforcer”, is a useful guide to the methods of TrumpWorld.
Steve Bannon "waves" to a CPAC crowd (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Washington this year. Photo / via X
He coined the phrases “flood the zone” and “muzzle velocity” to describe the way a constant barrage of new shocks is designed to disarm and confuse opponents.
“If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one,” he has said.
And there’s this. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh**.”
In an interview last week, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters stepped it up a notch when he told RNZ’s Corin Dann he was “a disgrace to the mainstream media”.
“The fact is, you’re paid for by the taxpayer and sooner or later we’re going to cut that water off too,” he said.
Never mind that Peters appeared to be making a threat that far exceeds his authority and the ethical standards he is supposedly guided by.
The Herald has already reported “Beehive whispers” that RNZ will have its funding cut in next month’s Budget.
In my view, this was Peters signalling the whispers are true and positioning himself to take the credit for it.
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters at Parliament. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The Centrist website provides another example. This site was started by Jim Grenon, the Canadian billionaire who is orchestrating a boardroom coup against NZME, owners of the Herald, although Grenon says he is not formally associated with the site now.
“Centrist is not ‘balance’,” it says. “It’s what you read to get balance back. So if the bulk of mainstream media contains a considerably far left narrative, then Centrist material has to be right-leaning to be a counterweight.”
Grenon says the Herald’s mandate is different from the Centrist’s. But if the Centrist thinks the Herald is dominated by “a considerably far left narrative”, that’s quite a stretch.
Yes, the opinion columnists of this newspaper include Shane Te Pou and me, both of us on the left. But we are well outnumbered by Matthew Hooton, Bruce Cotterill, Steven Joyce, Richard Prebble, Ryan Bridge and Heather du Plessis-Allan.
All, in my view, are firmly on the right. I imagine they would cheerily agree.
It’s instructive to think how extremely right-wing someone’s politics would have to be to think the Herald leans into a “far left narrative”.
Trump’s attacks on the media are a critical part of what some observers seem to think is a reckless disregard for consequences. But after just 100 days of this new presidency, it’s become clear the first time round was a warm-up. A trial run.
Now they know what they’re doing and they’re serious.
The chaos that comes when you start a tariff war, destroy the administrative apparatus of government, strip away democratic rights and, above all, keep flooding the zone, is not an accident.
Trump is trying to tear it all down.
His director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, says: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”
Why are they doing this? Because chaos breeds opportunity, if you’re ruthless enough.
“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE,” Trump posted in early April, as the US sharemarket endured its fourth-worst two-day fall in history.
Not a great time, perhaps, for corporates that relied on the rules-based international order Trump has been wrecking. But it’s boomtime for oligarchs, especially the Silicon Valley variety epitomised by Elon Musk. Chaos, say authors George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison in their book The Invisible Doctrine, is “the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the billionaires thrive”.
Tesla sales have tanked in America, but Tesla owner Elon Musk has many ways of making money from the chaos he has helped foment. Photo / Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty
And yet beneath all this, there’s the thing no one can discount: Trump is genuinely popular with a great many Americans. And some New Zealanders.
The writer T.J. Clark suggests this appeal is based on the feeling of a loss of power, which he calls “the anxious provisional imaginary power that the sociologists once called ‘status’”.
“Imaginary power is a dreadful thing to lose,” Clark says.
“Their aggrievedness – my aggrievedness – at having had it taken away is endless: it’s MAGA’s reason for being.”
And, therefore, TrumpWorld is rolling back social progress. Some of its shock troops are virulent.
“The goal is to get us off of multiculturalism,” says Vought.
That is to restore America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender, which some call the “Great Resegregation”.
Darren Beattie, Trump’s public affairs director in the State Department, says: “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralising competent white men.”
It’s a peculiar observation to make in a country unable to elect a woman as president. A country where the Cabinet has been stocked, surely deliberately, with white men whose rank incompetence has not demoralised them in the slightest.
Musk even called one of them “dumber than a sack of bricks”. But there he is, trade adviser Peter Navarro, licensed to trash the global economy.
A recent Cabinet meeting opened with a prayer from the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner. “Thank you, God,” he said, “for President Trump.”
You’ve heard of The Handmaid’s Tale, right?
In Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale and the TV series it inspired, the women of Gilead, formerly a large part of America, are brutally suppressed. Photo / Youtube
What is Trump’s America becoming? Don’t think of it in terms of Brownshirts – thugs rampaging through the streets – although there has been some of that. Don’t think of it as concentration camps, although on the Mexican border and in El Salvador there has been some of that too.
Think of it, as others have noted, as the exclusion of the unwanteds: everyone from immigrants to public servants in charge of tax collection, schools, emergency response, aid programmes, public health, environmental safeguards, the list is very long, so that the institutions of civil society fail.
Globally, think of it as an old-fashioned, might-is-right, resource-stripping empire.
Think of it as money and social media and perhaps one day mainstream media, enabling all this by subverting and replacing the once-valued institutions of information.
Could that happen here?
In my view, Trump has another goal even bigger than this, because it always has to be about him: He wants to be the most impactful figure in the history of the modern world.
It’s staggering how many people are letting him try.
But let’s not end on a bleak note. Gung-ho stupidity could yet be their undoing.
Recently, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that Pentagon files be scrubbed of evidence of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hires. According to an AP report, 26,000 photographs of “DEI” contributors to American defence were marked for deletion.
Among them were photos of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That plane was named by the pilot, Paul Tibbets, after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.
The Pentagon’s AI program apparently decided it was a gay plane.
