This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is making the world’s biggest tyrants happy—a fact that Trump not only acknowledges but crows about with pride.
Trump boasts that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin “get along,” as if that alone augured well for the world. (Getting along is a worthy goal in itself for allies and neutrals, but, when it comes to adversaries, understanding is a more productive aim.) He has said the same about Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, adding about Kim, “I like him, and he likes me.” He also touts his friendship with Viktor Orbán, calling him “one of the most respected men”—oblivious or indifferent to the fact that Hungary’s president is in fact the most despised leader in the European Union, an open Putin ally, and the most active obstacle to EU and NATO unity. As for Orbán’s “strongman” style of leadership, Trump agrees: “He’s a tough person, smart.”
The president’s assumption here is that, because these leaders are strong, because he likes them and they like him, and because they get along, they can do deals together. He can get them to do things by dint of their friendship—things that other presidents cannot.
This is Trump’s delusion. First, they are not really friends; he thinks they’re showing him respect, when in fact they’re only pushing his buttons, having learned from his previous four years in the White House that he’ll treat them well, or at least won’t treat them harshly, if they pretend to show him respect. (“I like people who like me,” Trump once said, in effect showing foreign leaders the way to his appeasement.)
Second, he doesn’t understand that most leaders act in accordance with their interests, which are often quite different from—in some cases, antithetical to—U.S. interests. He doesn’t quite grasp this essential fact of international politics because he doesn’t quite grasp what U.S. interests are—except where they coincide with his own business interests.
The fact is, in his first term, Trump’s overtures to dictators yielded no benefits to the United States. At a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump said he trusted the Russian president’s assurances more than his own intelligence analysts when it came to the question of whether the Kremlin tried to influence the U.S. elections—yet, despite that and other instances of kowtowing, he got nothing from Putin, either at the Finland summit or throughout his four years in office. Trump now says that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he’d been president—but Putin did fight a war in Ukraine, starting in 2014 and continuing all through Trump’s first term, with no hesitation. (That war was confined to eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, but it wasn’t a mere border skirmish; more than 14,000 people were killed in the fighting, before the full invasion that began in February 2022.)
In any case, Putin has already rejected, as “nothing of interest,” the outlines of a plan that Trump put forth to end the war in Ukraine. Trump, who said he would make the war stop even before he took the oath of office, is finding that these things are harder to settle than they seem. Will he take revenge on Putin for betraying him? Since Trump seems genuinely reluctant to keep supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, it’s unclear how. Putin doesn’t seem fearful.
In the same way, Trump held two summits with Kim in his first term—beaming about their friendship before, during, and after, even boasting at one rally that the two “fell in love” after an exchange of “love letters”—yet, again, came away with nothing. This was because Kim had no interest in revealing the size and location of his nuclear arsenal, much less pledging to dismantle it. At one point in their meetings, Trump showed Kim a slideshow on how he could turn the North Korean coastline into lucrative beach-resort property—as if Kim had the slightest interest in such a scheme.
At least Trump has no illusion that Xi might accede to fairer trade practices on the basis of some camaraderie. But he does seem to believe that punishing tariffs—or the threat thereof—would force Xi to cave in. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that Xi has readied his own set of responses, mainly involving the rupturing of U.S. and Western supply chains, many of which still involve China. Xi calculates that, given the Chinese Communist Party’s control over his country’s economy (and his own personal control of the CCP), he can hold out longer than Trump in this sort of asymmetric trade war.
Orbán is one authoritarian leader who may be sincere in his desire for warm relations with the new American president. He faces challenges from within the EU. The European leaders know they have to please Trump, at least to some extent, dependent as they are on the U.S. for security (through NATO, which is U.S.-led) and economic stability (through the dollar and the international financial system). So, to appease the American president, Orbán may believe he could pressure the Europeans to ease up on any penalties they might inflict on Hungary. The only problem is that Hungary has very little to offer the United States in exchange, except for deeper association with Europe’s least democratic regime.
It is a mystery to many why Trump behaves so deferentially to tyrants. Some believe that Putin must have a hold on him—money, blackmail, something. Whether or not this is true, Trump would very likely treat Putin the way he’s treated him all these years because, at bottom, Trump respects people with ultimate power. More than that, he envies them.
In a Fox News interview in 2018, Trump said of North Korea’s Kim, just after the two had their first summit, “He’s the head of a country, and I mean he’s the strong head. … He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Similarly, just this past October, right before the election, in an interview with Joe Rogan, Trump called China’s Xi “a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not”—the suggestion being that controlling so many people with an iron fist is an impressive thing, which only a brilliant guy could pull off.
As many have recognized, though Trump has a keen sense of populist politics, he has no deep attachment to democratic institutions. He doesn’t recognize, though he soon may, that this simpatico relationship with tyrannical leaders earns him no favors in return.
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