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Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
The film’s reputation has waned a little over the decades but one scene in Citizen Kane still works. The protagonist, a tycoon who owns a newspaper, wants to stir up war in Cuba. His man on the ground regrets to report that all is tranquil there but offers to write stylishly about the landscape instead. “You provide the prose poems,” replies his boss, with sinister confidence. “I’ll provide the war.”
Over-powerful businessmen at home, military adventures abroad: these two themes have marked American history almost since the nation industrialised. They are also two things that Donald Trump ran against in 2016. Only he could stand up to private sector interests in the “swamp”, he said. Only an outsider to politics could resist the bipartisan enthusiasm for foreign interventions. What Orson Welles merely satirised, Trump promised to stop.
Of course, most governments renege on their plans to some extent. But few end up doing the outright opposite of them. Trump is now a prolific and proud interventionist. Either side of the new year, he launched air strikes against alleged Isis militants in Nigeria and captured the president of Venezuela. He has also resumed his threats against Greenland and by extension Denmark. This follows previous attacks on Syria and Iran. The range of apparent motives for these actions — securing oil, protecting Christians — is as wide as the geographic spread of them.
As for business, the administration now regards the interests of Silicon Valley as identical to those of the republic, so that an EU fine against Elon Musk’s X is “an attack on . . . the American people”. This time last year, tech magnates were seated ahead of cabinet nominees at Trump’s second inauguration. He plans to usher the oil majors into Venezuela. Whatever “populism” is, it isn’t this. The media will have to find a different -ism for what Trump now represents.
How about “Republicanism”? Trump has become much more of a conventional GOP president than his supporters can ever have anticipated or wished. (More on them later.) Ronald Reagan had the same intimacy with the corporate world and showed the same unilateral belligerence in the western hemisphere. When news came through of the Venezuela mission last week, readers of a certain age will have murmured “Grenada, 1983” to themselves. George W Bush, another intensely controversial president who is misremembered as somehow cuddly, was accused of being more mindful of Halliburton than of international public law.
Trump does not have his predecessors’ philosophical commitment to the “free world”. Ethically, too, he is incomparable. But if the test is what a president does with power, the story of Trump’s second term is one of partial regression to the Republican mean.
How did this happen? Perhaps Trump never meant a word of what he said in 2016. More likely, the office of US president imposes its own logic on whoever occupies it. If you have the mightiest armed forces in the world at your disposal, it takes supernatural restraint not to use them. (Even Barack Obama struck Libya.) If a country has extreme concentrations of private wealth, the state cannot help but be captured in the end. If anything, we should be reassured that even an individual as peculiar as Trump ends up reverting to a certain template.
The larger question is why no one in Maga world seems to mind. As recently as 2023, JD Vance, seemingly a sincere non-interventionist, was citing Trump’s caution abroad as the best reason to endorse him. He is now tongue-tied as his boss’s foreign adventures multiply, any one of which could run out of control. (The US never envisaged a full-scale land war in Vietnam, remember. Small actions developed their own momentum.) For the likes of Steve Bannon, economic populism was the point of Trump. The free market did not just create material inequalities, it brought about cultural change that was harder on the Little Guy than on the hyper-educated. A decade on, Trump is more hand in glove with big business than any president since the Gilded Age but his supporters are majestically relaxed.
Why? One theory is that Trump has been faithful on enough other issues to excuse these apostasies. He is as hostile to trade as he promised in 2016, for instance, and to immigration too. But I doubt this is the answer. Ask yourself: if Trump cut all tariffs to zero tomorrow, would he lose his base?
There isn’t the slightest chance. The truth is that, for most people in his movement, ideas ceased to matter long ago. The movement itself is the point. As the NFL regular season gives way to the playoffs, this might be the time to dust off an old but fitting analogy. Modern politics is a team sport. You choose a team for rational reasons — it is local, or it is winning, or it plays with style — but after that, the attachment becomes self-reinforcing. Almost no turn of events can break it.
I don’t doubt that, in 2016, lots of people chose Trump for his opposition to foreign wars or to the carnival of lobbying that is Washington, or for some other contingent reason. But once they were in, they were in. Point out to them how far he has veered from those ideas over the past decade, and the response is a shrug, as though only a pedant would care. Pity future historians, who will have to get their heads around how simultaneously empty and dangerous our times were.