This is not a repeat of his first term. This is not, I repeat, a repeat.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s first go-around featured a lot of sound and fury. It was a scary roller coaster ride, but it mostly didn’t go off the rails. His administration was of necessity staffed with pre-Trump Republicans, who often thwarted the President’s whims and wishes. To Mr. Trump’s great frustration, his first term was nowhere near as revolutionary as advertised.
That was Trump chained. The sequel is Trump unchained. It’s the 200-proof version. We’re going to be doing shots for the next four years.
The second Trump administration is staffed with true believers, plus some reluctant
conversos – those who still hold to different faiths but know to keep it to themselves. All are eager enablers. All make regular public showings of being 110 per cent with the program. Those who once embraced heresy are especially prone to enthusiastic professions of fealty – notably Vice-President JD Vance, a Trump critic turned chief hype man.
Nearly every Republican in Congress is cut from one these moulds: all-in for MAGA or afraid of accusations of not being all-in. The President sets the agenda, and no matter how it changes, they defend it to the hilt.
But what is the agenda? And more importantly, why?
Those are not easy questions to answer, as Canadian leaders trying to fend off tariffs have repeatedly learned. It’s difficult, or impossible, to pin down what the Trump administration wants, or why.
As the head of the Canada Border Services Agency told The Globe’s Nathan VanderKlippe, giving voice to what everyone has long known, Canada never found out what, if anything, the U.S. was asking for in return for dropping the tariffs scheduled to come into force on Tuesday. Asked on Sunday if she has received any indication of what the U.S. might request in order to avoid tariffs,
Erin O’Gorman said simply: “No.”
Officially, the U.S. position is that those tariffs are about pushing Canada to crack down on a flood of fentanyl allegedly pouring into the U.S. But we all know that’s nonsense. The imaginary flood doesn’t exist. Hence the very odd nonnegotiation. Canada has spent months trying to satisfy a U.S. demand, but the Trump administration has never specified exactly what it’s demanding.
That’s because, as always suspected, tariffs were not a threat made to extract other concessions. Fentanyl is a pretext. Tariffs are MAGA’s real addiction.
And as for Make America Great Again, it means whatever Mr. Trump wants it to mean, on trade or anything else. What happens with the March 4 tariffs – or those for steel and aluminum that could take effect on March 12, or the so-called retaliatory tariffs pencilled in for April 2 – comes down to him, his gut and his whims.
Ukraine similarly faces insistent yet imprecise demands, with nothing offered in return, all delivered with a rising tone of menace. The NATO alliance is in the same boat.
Mr. Trump claims to be all about the art of the deal, but Trump 2.0 hasn’t been doing deals with allies, or trying to do deals. The former real estate developer is like a buyer who keeps badgering a potential seller to make alternations to his property, all while refusing to make an offer or even name a price. It’s been the art of deal breaking, and relationship ending.
Mr. Trump got elected by embracing and opposing many of the same things as most Americans. Most don’t like inflation. Most weren’t happy with the spike in border-crossings under the previous president. Affirmative action and DEI are widely unpopular, whereas race-blind hiring, promotion and college admissions are widely supported. It’s true that government is often bureaucratic and inefficient, that some countries aren’t fair traders and that the U.S. spends a lot more on defence than its allies. And all else equal it would be better if the Ukraine war ended, which will involve talking to Russia.
It’s not hard to imagine a reasonable plan for governing based on the above, which is what a lot of swing voters imagined they’d get from Mr. Trump. But though Americans so far only dimly perceive it, it’s not at all what he’s delivering.
The free world was American-made. It was built by Americans and for – but not only for – Americans. But America is now run by a man who never bought into all that. He wants a going-out-of-business sale.
He’s hostile to free trade. He sympathizes with strongmen. He distrusts democratic allies. He sees weakness – and the allies are obviously weaker than the largest economy in the world – as opportunity for extortion.
The scene last Friday in the Oval Octagon, when Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump tag teamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and tried to slam him as a threat to Americans, is a portent of things to come.
Canada, get ready to be Zelenskyed. Come to think of it, we already have been.
