Sixty years ago, Bob Dylan chanted that “even the president of the United States/ Sometimes must have to stand naked”. But now there is no “sometimes” about it. The president of the United States is full frontal all the time. Donald Trump has stripped away all the niceties that allowed too many people to remain in denial about his intentions.
The last two months have been a radically revised version of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Emperor’s New Clothes. In the original, the emperor is duped by two swindlers into parading naked and everyone goes along with the illusion until an innocent child cries out “But he hasn’t got anything on”. The new twist is that it is Trump himself who insists on exposing the bare truth of his objectives.
The real shock of recent weeks is that anyone is shocked. Most European leaders seem to be genuinely astounded by Trump’s bullying, boorishness and blatant aggression. They had fooled themselves into believing what they wanted to believe – the emperor has a very fine new suit. As in Andersen’s parable, “Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool”.
Wishful thinking spun three layers of imaginary cover. The first was an idea that comes naturally to professional politicians – that there is a great gap between campaign rhetoric and actual governing. With Trump, there is no such distinction. He is always on the campaign trail. Everything is one big rally. What you see on stage – the freewheeling megalomania, the gleeful malignity – is what you get in the Oval Office.
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The second fig leaf is the literally/seriously dichotomy. This idea started with a column in The Atlantic by Salena Zito: “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” It was a smart thing to say in 2016 but it has long since coagulated into cliche. The purpose of cliche is to save everyone the bother of thinking. Taking Trump seriously but not literally became a way of avoiding the hard task of preparing for his all too literal destructiveness.
Any excuse for clinging on to the illusion that Trump’s supporters do not take him literally vanished on January 6th, 2021, when many of them heard exactly what he was saying and attempted to stage a violent coup on his behalf. Yet much of Europe’s political establishment continued to reassure itself that Trump’s imperialist demands were bluster and braggadocio. He couldn’t really mean that stuff, could he?
What has to be understood about Trump is his use of trial runs. He puts things out there, tests the water, pulls back, goes again. Ideas appear first as half-serious, still wrapped in a coating of deniability. But they become normalised. The unthinkable becomes thinkable and, when he has the power, the thinkable becomes doable.
The literally/seriously cliche obscures this whole process. It sustains the belief that if, for example, Trump demands that Denmark give him Greenland and then goes silent on the subject, he never really meant it in the first place. But he did mean it and he will come back to it.
[ How Greenland got caught in a clash of superpowersOpens in new window ]
The third layer of illusion is that Trump is a supreme dealmaker. This is still the comfort blanket for many of those who want to believe that he can’t truly be as monstrous as he seems. It relates, however, not to a real person but to “Donald Trump”, a fictional mogul created in a book, The Art of the Deal, that he did not write, and a show, The Apprentice, that was as real as reality TV ever is.
The real Trump is a more a breaker than a maker of deals. In power, he is much more interested in flouting bargains than in making them. He despises all existing treaties: the Paris climate accords, the Iran nuclear agreement, the arms control agreements with Russia. A genuine deal is based on mutuality – a concept that Trump does not recognise. For him, there are only the “suckers and losers” being screwed and the superior types who are doing the screwing.
[ Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flowOpens in new window ]
And when he has made deals, they’ve all failed. The Abraham Accords normalising relations between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan was his big success story – but it has, to put it mildly, done nothing to bring peace to the Middle East.
[ Inside Trump’s surprise plan to ‘own’ GazaOpens in new window ]
Trump’s love-hate soap opera with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un was, in the end, a farce. His deal with the Taliban simply handed Afghanistan over to them in return for nothing. His supposedly grand trade deal with China in 2020 produced nothing at all for the US.
When these vestiges of comfort are stripped away, there is for Europeans a starkly obvious reality: Trump hates the European Union and wants to destroy it. There is no mystery about this.
In 2018, while on his way to a cringeworthy fanboy encounter with Vladimir Putin, Trump was asked by CBS News to name his “biggest foe globally right now”: “Well, I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn’t think of the European Union but they’re a foe.”
And yet there was shock last week when Trump said that “the European Union was formed to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it”. Presumably his similar claims in his first term were taken neither seriously nor literally.
Trump really does rank the EU, along with China, as America’s biggest global enemy. He intends to harm it from the outside by imposing tariffs on its exports and by empowering Putin to reassert Russia’s dominance of eastern Europe. And to undermine it from the inside by allying the US to the heirs of the fascist movements it helped to defeat in 1945.
The emperor is parading his naked contempt for European democracies and any child can see it.
