Trump's biggest deal ever: Global chaos and disaster

Trump’s biggest deal ever: Global chaos and disaster
Donald Trump's tariff policies reveal a coherent theory of global power: F**k everybody else

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published August 3, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) It’s become conventional to describe Donald Trump’s foreign policy as incoherent or contradictory — hell, I’ve almost certainly done it myself. One could argue that those labels fit all too well at the end of a week when Trump has “unleashed global chaos” (to quote a Friday report in the Guardian) with a long list of varying tariff rates inflicted on virtually every country in the world.

But that conventional explanation is basically wrong, and leaves the curators of mainstream foreign-policy wisdom flopping back and forth trying to untangle the Trump decisions they like from the ones they hate. Trump’s apparent pivot from Russia to Ukraine, after a full decade as the dog at the end of Vladimir Putin’s chain, has aligned him (for now) with liberal-democratic elite opinion. But that’s literally an accident, or a case of stopped-clock syndrome; the same commentators who shower praise on Trump for his suddenly adult views of the Ukraine war are of course shocked and saddened by his brazen effort to use extortionate tariffs to punish Brazil for prosecuting his good buddy Jair Bolsonaro over some, y’know, minor and petty infractions involving an attempted military coup.

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My point here is that Trump does indeed possess a coherent theory of power, or at least one that makes sense to an awful lot of people, including those who don’t necessarily love him or support all his so-called policies. His theory of power could be called a lot of things, such as fascist, authoritarian, monarchic or quasi-religious. Those are all somewhere in the ballpark, but their hifalutin poli-sci flavor fails to capture the gooey, delicious nougat center of Trumpian power relations. In the MAGA worldview, power is personal and individual, flowing outward from the great man (so great but so flawed — LOL!) through his lieutenants and followers, imposing his will on the world for the greater good of — well, no, not literally everybody, but you know what I mean.

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As boring and abstract as the details of international trade agreements may be — agreements enforced through a combination of whimsy and extortion, in this case — this arena is where the Trumpist fantasy of power is most likely to crash headlong into reality. We can already see the economic damage inflicted by Trump’s endless array of personal beefs with other nations and their leaders represented in declining employment numbers and jagged, unpredictable spikes in financial markets, and it’s going to get a lot worse than just higher prices at Albertson’s or on Amazon. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/03/trumps-biggest-deal-ever-global-chaos-and-disaster/