The True Catastrophe of Trump, as seen from north of the border

A view from our neighbor

Friends,

Some of the most useful insights into what’s happening to America are coming from political analysts outside the United States. Here’s a particularly lucid essay by Andrew Coyne that appeared in the December 5 edition of Canada’s The Globe and Mail.

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Donald Trump — and American democracy — is getting exponentially worse

Andrew Coyne

I wish I could say I told you so. A point I have tried to make over the last year or so is that Donald Trump can only get worse: that however corrupt or incompetent or dictatorial or treasonous or insane he may appear at any given moment, it will inevitably come to be seen as a relative golden age beside what is to come.

There is a reason for this. It is that he can only stir the media and establishment outrage on which both he and his supporters thrive if he behaves even worse than we are accustomed to him behaving. It is not enough to say or do some appalling thing, even if it would have ended the career of any previous politician. He does that, quite literally, several times a day. Rather, he must exceed expectations of his grotesquerie. His critics’ dilemma — how to sustain outrage in the face of the constant, numbing, normalizing stream of objectively outrageous conduct — is also, in a way, his.

I was right about this, up to a point. Certainly his behaviour has grown worse over time. It is far worse now than it was at the start of his term, which was worse than during the unspeakable campaign that preceded it, which was worse than anything we had seen from him before that, even his terrifying first presidency — which was itself worse than even his worst critics had anticipated.

What I had not anticipated was the second derivative. After a time, that is, people come to expect, not just bad behaviour, but steadily worsening behaviour. So to keep feeding his outrage addiction, Mr. Trump’s behaviour not only has to keep getting worse, but to do so at an ever accelerating rate. And, I suppose, the rate of acceleration must also increase, and the rate of acceleration of the rate of acceleration, and so on. We are in a kind of hyperinflation of presidential derangement, an exponential curve asymptotically approaching Nero.

Do you doubt it? Consider the evidence. On a most basic level, Mr. Trump’s mental and physical state has noticeably deteriorated. He now openly sleeps through cabinet meetings and public gatherings. He posts on social media at a hysterical pace, in increasingly agitated tones, on ever more lunatic themes. He boasts of having “aced” a cognitive test that is only administered when there are real doubts about a patient’s acuity, and cannot explain why he was given an MRI — or even what body part was screened.

All of which might be cause for sympathy, even pity — as, in a way, does his vast insecurity, his desperate need for praise and affirmation, symptoms of a childhood deprived, it seems, of everything but money — were it not for the consequences. His multiple emotional and psychological issues — the malignant narcissism, the pathological lying, the utter, sociopathic absence of empathy, and yet also an almost childlike manipulability — would be disturbing enough in an unemployed drifter. Manifested by the most powerful man on Earth, they amount to a global emergency.

Everything else stems from that. It is critical to understand that the consistent observable trend in Mr. Trump’s behaviour — that in any situation he will always, without fail, say and do, not just the wrong thing, but the worst possible thing; that he will always, without fail, say and do the opposite of what is right, or lawful, or conventional, or logical, or even rationally self-interested — is not accidental. It all comes from the same insatiable desire, or desires: to dominate, to be the centre of attention, to indulge his appetites, and of course, to offend and annoy anyone he has ever felt insecure around or who has humiliated him in the past.

And, like flypaper, he has attracted to his side a coterie of retainers who fit the same psychological profile: warped fanatics like Stephen Miller or Robert Kennedy Jr., conscienceless grifters like J.D. Vance, without exaggeration some of the very worst people in America. His followers, likewise, the 30-plus per cent of Americans who still, after the unceasing chaos of the last year, tell pollsters they approve of his “performance,” share many of the same traits. To them, he represents revenge on the people who have been looking down on them all their lives, as he does liberation from all restraints, legal, ethical or customary.

The result is not a breach of this or that norm, the undermining of one institution or another, the betrayal of any particular ally or sacrifice of America’s national interest for the sake of a specific hostile power. It is not some isolated article or articles of the Constitution he has trampled, whether filed under the separation of powers or the Bill of Rights, nor has he contented himself with embracing one singularly indefensible economic policy, or abandoning a certain tenet of conservatism. It is everything, everywhere, all the time.

The destruction is total, omnidirectional and indiscriminate, absolute and unbending. Go down the list. Corruption? The Trump administration is operating at a level of corruption, from the President on down, that the journalist David Frum says can only be compared to post-Soviet Russia or post-colonial Africa — failed or broken states, not the world’s richest and most powerful democracy. The New Yorker reported in August that the Trump family’s net worth had increased by more than US$3-billion since his return to office, notably through the sale of crypto coins in his name — unregistered and untraceable “donations” to his personal cause — but also through a kind of open auction of state favours to the highest corporate or personal bidders.

The corruption has not only been pecuniary. The Justice Department has been turned upside down and inside out, no longer pursuing “justice for all” but complementary injustices, dropping all proceedings against those accused of having broken the law, if they are among Mr. Trump’s friends, and firing or even prosecuting those who tried to defend it if they are on his enemies list. Mr. Trump himself has personally pardoned more than 1,700 people in the 10 months since he took office, a rogue’s gallery of fraud artists, drug pushers and Jan. 6 rioters.

Incompetence? The list is endless. There’s the chaotic DOGE exercise of the early months, under Elon Musk’s tutelage, which promised to cut “trillions” of dollars out of the federal budget but which appears to have yielded savings ranging from negligible to non-existent. The catastrophic mess that has been made of the U.S. air traffic control system, with consequent deterioration of air safety, is another. The Signalgate fiasco, wherein senior members of the Trump administration discussed sensitive national security matters over an unsecured line, is yet another.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday it has paused all immigration applications, including green card and U.S. citizenship processing, filed by immigrants from 19 non-European countries, citing concerns over national security and public safety.

Policy illiteracy? Economists are famously supposed to disagree, but in fact agree on most of the basics. The only point they would disagree on is which of the policies the Trump administration has pursued most deserves the title “worst possible.” Is it setting off a trade war with the whole world, via a series of exorbitant tariffs whose justification is as uncertain as their duration? Is it driving the deficit to peacetime highs — 6 per cent of GDP, even today, on the brink of a recession, with no relief in sight? Is it threatening the independence of the Federal Reserve, with the obvious aim of forcing it to monetize the debt? Or is it the subsidies, nationalizations and other heavy-handed interventions in which it has engaged, reminiscent more of 1970s France than Republican conservatism?

Extremism? Mr. Trump’s own ideological views are indecipherable, beyond his decades-long obsession with tariffs. But his delight in offending expert opinion, mixed with his endless flatterability, bottomless ignorance and cluster of ancient prejudices, have made him the preferred instrument for peddlers of an array of hideous and backward ideologies, from Christian nationalism to feudalism, from white supremacy to fascism to out-and-out, stiff-arm-and-all Nazism.

Authoritarianism? The Congress has been all but neutered as a check and balance on the presidency, with the enthusiastic participation of Republican Senators and Representatives, allowing Mr. Trump to raise taxes (“tariffs”) and start wars without the slightest hindrance. Obvious disasters like Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence were nevertheless confirmed, whatever meagre Republican opposition their nominations aroused collapsing, predictably, when they came to a vote. The courts are next. The Trump administration has already arguably ignored several lower court rulings, papering over their refusal with ludicrous legal disclaimers. The day is not far off when it will do the same to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile the National Guard fills the streets of major American cities, over the objections of their local state governors. The hastily recruited legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs have thus far busied themselves with violently kidnapping immigrants, but everyone can see what is coming: their use as Mr. Trump’s personal security force, for use against protest or dissent of any kind: perhaps over the midterm elections that Mr. Trump is in the process of rigging. Meanwhile Mr. Trump’s critics, in the media and elsewhere, face spurious prosecutions and arbitrary regulatory rulings, chilling speech across the board.

In the circumstances, the order to shoot the survivors of the illegal attacks Mr. Trump has ordered on small boats in the Caribbean — no evidence has ever been produced that these are drug smugglers, but it wouldn’t make it one whit more legal if they were — is at least consistent: murder in cold blood, followed by murder in colder blood.

Treason? It is difficult to know what else to call Mr. Trump’s constant deference to the wishes of both Vladimir Putin and, less conspicuously, Xi Jinping, dictators working to expand their influence across the globe, at the expense of both democracy and the rule of law: core American interests both. The latest example: the 28-point “peace plan” that Mr. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff adopted as America’s proposal to end the war in Ukraine. It isn’t a peace plan, of course: it’s a surrender demand, in which Ukraine would be obliged, inter alia, to yield territory it had not lost in battle, cut its troop levels in half, and forever forswear membership in NATO. It isn’t America’s plan: it was literally written in the Kremlin. And it wasn’t some personal whim of Mr. Witkoff’s to endorse it. Mr. Trump is every bit as much in thrall to Mr. Putin as the obviously starry-eyed Mr. Witkoff.

Whatever the reason — some sort of kompromat; Mr. Trump’s man-crush on Mr. Putin; or the opportunities for corrupt gain Mr. Trump and his circle have been offered, as the Wall Street Journal has lately reported — the point must surely be clear by now. Mr. Trump is not merely an unreliable mediator, a naif who has been repeatedly duped by Mr. Putin’s promises. He is on his side. In the short term, the “peace plan” buys time for Mr. Putin, as so many similar bad-faith efforts have previously, staving off yet another round of sanctions, delaying yet another delivery of weaponry for Ukraine. In the longer term, if it were adopted in anything like its current form, it would offer up Ukraine to him on the instalment plan, allowing Russia to regroup and recover before attacking again.

I say again: Mr. Trump is on his side — as he is on the side of dictators generally. It is what he hopes himself to become, and he is a good way down the road to achieving it.

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PS: Next week, on December 27th, we’ll be having a special holiday episode of “The Coffee Klatch” where Heather and I will be answering questions from all of you. If you have something you’d like us to talk about, or ask us, please let us know in the comments below.