Trump 2.0. Purely incompetent? Or intent on taking down US democracy?
COMMENT/NEWS/US
The full details of the scandal are only beginning to emerge.
But what we know so far is that earlier this month Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, JD Vance, the Vice President, and more than a dozen other top Trump security officials drew up plans to bomb Yemen in an informal exchange on an unclassified chat app.
Steve Witkoff, the billionaire real estate developer who has been appointed the US presidential envoy to President Putin and the Middle East, was added to the chat group while travelling in Moscow.
The only reason we know about any of this is that Mike Waltz, Trump’s National Security Advisor, also added a journalist to the group by mistake, Jeffrey Goldberg, a veteran reporter and editor of The Atlantic.
At first the journalist, who is a critic of the Trump administration, thought he was being duped. It was only when bombs began to fall on Yemen a few hours later that he realised the significance of the conversation he had been privy to.
The leak has given us a rare insight into the inner workings of the top levels of the Trump administration. But it is the tone of the conversation, as much as the cavalier attitude to national security, that shocks.
In one message leading officials term their European allies 'PATHETIC'. In another they use emojis of American flags, a fist and an explosion.
It all comes across as something more akin to an exchange by frat boys out on the town than a considered weighing of military operations ahead of a major strike.
Were it not for the loss of 32 lives, including those of children, as a result of the bombing, the entire episode might be comedic. But increasingly, it seems, such reckless US governance is not an exception, but the norm.
Instances of incompetence from this administration now come so frequently that they barely raise an eyebrow.
Consider the case of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency announcing it had cut an $8 billion federal program - only for it to be revealed that the actual figure was $8 million.
Or the claim that the US had ended a $50 million grant to the Gaza Strip providing ‘bomb-making’ condoms when, in reality, the funds were to combat the spread of AIDS in Gaza, Mozambique.
It all comes across as something more akin to an exchange by frat boys out on the town than a considered weighing of military operations ahead of a major strike.
Chronicling the cack-handedness of the new Trump administration is as exhausting, and probably thankless, as fact-checking the president’s stream of half-truths, exaggerations and falsehoods.
Take, for instance, Trump's much-vaunted effort to end the war in Ukraine.
In negotiations with Russia, American translators regularly miss key details, according to Fiona Hill, a leading Russia analyst, and advisor to the White House during Trump 1.0.
Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, has little knowledge of Russia or Ukraine.
In an interview with the American right-wing chat show host Tucker Carlson earlier this week he couldn't name the four provinces in Ukraine that Russia had annexed.
He also claimed that those living in occupied Ukraine 'wanted to be Russian' as evidenced, apparently, by a referendum held by Moscow at gunpoint after the area was occupied.
Sometimes, reportedly, he arrives for meetings with Russian leaders without a competent note-taker, while Moscow fields an elite, experienced team that have worked together for a decade and know the subject of discussion inside out.
Then there is the bewildering and erratic zigzagging of Trump’s tariff policies.
Trump has turned on then off then on again massive tariffs on imports from Canada, China, the EU and elsewhere. But the reasons he gives for them changes from day to day.
Sometimes he quotes fentanyl smuggling (statistics suggest more fentanyl goes from the US to Canada than vice versa), at other times trade deficits and, more and more, his desire to turn the US into a manufacturing powerhouse.
This, analysts say, is not only impossible but undesirable given that the service industry produces better jobs that pay higher wages. The only advanced economy that ever tried such a strategy, Japan, has seen decades of economic stagnation.
In an interview with the American right-wing chat show host Tucker Carlson earlier this week Witkoff couldn't name the four provinces in Ukraine that Russia had annexed.
So why didn't all this happen in 2016 when Trump was first elected?
Mostly because of the people around him. During Trump’s first term, his more erratic ideas were tempered by establishment figures, many of them generals, with experience and competence.
They served as dampeners to his worst impulses and translated his whims into the most coherent policy they could.
But now the personnel surrounding the president are dismally inexperienced. As has been noted, most were chosen for their unwavering loyalty - not for their qualifications, or commitment to the nation, or even Republican values.
Is that, then, why they are making such a mess of things? Or is the real reason more sinister: that the chaos and destruction, at least for some in the Trump camp, is actually part of the plan?
Trump has aligned himself with two of the most influential and radical billionaires of our time: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Musk embraces an extreme form of libertarianism that seeks to strip government to its barest core.
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, holds views that are arguably even more extreme, and seems to believe that democracy is an obstacle to the ongoing technological revolution.
For now, Trump is a useful frontman for the billionaires. He boasts a winning patter, an unparalleled ability to deflect scandal, and a loyal base.
In an age where social media has become a dominant societal force, he is also, significantly, a belligerent advocate for relaxing almost all regulation on Big Tech.
He has threatened the UK and the EU with retaliation if they attempt to tax or regulate American tech companies such as Meta, Google and the emerging giants of AI.
But the marriage between MAGA populism - the other mainstay of Trump's support - and the tech elite is inherently unstable.
MAGA diehards want to halt immigration, seal the borders, and return to a simpler, more insular America where skilled workers earned decent wages.
The tech elite, by contrast, are globalists with ambitions that extend beyond America’s borders. Musk, in particular, wields his financial influence like a cudgel, threatening consequences for anyone who dares to challenge his radical ideals.
Is that, then, why they are making such a mess of things? Or is the real reason more sinister: that the chaos and destruction, at least for some in the Trump camp, is actually part of the plan?
If one were to seek an analogy, there are worse places to look than Afghanistan at the turn of this century.
By the late 1990s the Taliban in Afghanistan had allied themselves with al Qa'eda, an Islamist terrorist group largely made up of Gulf Arabs. But the two groups were in fact very different.
The Taliban were deeply rooted in Pashtun conservative culture and resisted modernity. Al-Qaeda were an internationalist, revolutionary terror group that aimed to dismantle power structures across the region and build new states modelled on fundamentalist ideals.
The marriage of MAGA and the tech billionaires has strange echoes of that alliance. Of course circumstances are very different and the struggle is being played out on the internet not in the caves of eastern Afghanistan.
Nor are MAGA and the tech billionaires primarily violent in their methods - though the storming of the Capitol on 6th Jan 2021 showed that MAGA has a violent fringe.
The tools of the struggle, meanwhile, are phones and laptops not suicide belts.
For the time being the American populist right is united in its war against liberalism.
But, once that battle is won, the two factions are likely to squabble. The early skirmishes - such as the very public rift between Musk and MAGA champion Steve Bannon - are just a preview of the coming fight.
Vance acknowledged this split when he gave a speech at a technology conference earlier this month.
“I’d like to speak to these tensions as a proud member of both tribes,” he said. “While this is a well-intentioned concern, I think it’s based on a faulty premise. This idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to loggerheads is wrong.”
But the mere fact he addressed the issue so publicly is indicative that behind the scenes tensions are rising.
Will US democracy, then, survive the next four years intact? Perhaps. But with Musk, Thiel, and others committed to tearing down much of the state, now unfettered - and figures like Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg proving servile to Trump - it is not a given.
In a decade, Trump will presumably be gone. But Vance, Thiel’s man at the top, is still young and showing signs of ever greater ambition. The wilful destruction of the America we know by the tech billionaires and their allies may have only just begun.
If that is true, the Trump administration's casual incompetence might be the least of our problems.
Hi Philip. Sorry to be slow in responding. Yes, Fiona Hill gives interesting stories about the Trump negotiations. (She has been blacklisted by Trump 2.0 for her efforts.) It would all be a bit of a joke were the consequences not so serious...
I looked for what Fiona Hill has said about interpreters and interpretation and found the following in her recent interview with “Foreign Affairs”.’ As a Russian speaker she can follow the Russian and the interpretation given by the Russian (and not the American) interpreters working into English and not doing a very good job of conveying Putin’s irony and sarcasm, according to this extract from the interview.
“The very first time I was in one of the phone calls with Putin, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don’t always capture everything. They don’t capture the nuances. And particularly when it’s the Russian interpreter, who’s translating into a language that’s also not their native language, all kinds of things are missing. And Trump said, “What a great conversation.” I thought, actually, not really. There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said. He chooses words very carefully.
Many times when Putin and Trump are interacting, Putin’s actually making fun of him. It’s just completely lost in the translation. I can give lots of episodes of this. Or he’s goading him and urging him onto something because he’s trying to see how he will react. And the translation smooths over all of that. That context is absolutely missing. And he doesn’t do a readout afterwards. And we heard, for example, that Witkoff spent several hours one-on-one with Putin. Was anyone translating? Was Witkoff making notes in real time? Or was he trying to remember what was said afterwards? All of this is amateur hour because it means that you’re not really fully cognizant of what it is that the Russians have said beyond what you’ve taken on board from their talking points”
Some very perceptive comments from someone who knows both Putin and Trump, and showing just how international diplomacy can depend on fully understanding or not, what the other person is saying. It is clear from this that neither Trump nor his acolytes have a full idea of what Putin says, and one wonders how meaningful negotiations can be carried out at all in these conditions.