The key to Trump's rampant corruption is on open display
Events, reports and analysis have converged to underscore Donald Trump’s unique view of how the world should spin.
Beyond the fallout of defending U.S. strikes on suspected drug boats, increasing threats of an undeclared war on Venezuela, the excesses of a mass deportation campaign spiraling out of control , unending tariffs, and flailing attempts to force Ukraine into a bad deal with Russia, we got a new National Security Strategy document that lays out Trump’s values as if they are ours.
Together, they reflect the clear vision of an autocratic, power-minded Trump who wants to dictate to Americans and the rest of the world that they should forego human rights and democracy, recognize a U.S. hemispheric dominance, and kowtow to us because of our national wealth, not our ideals.
As the New York Times concluded in an analysis of the strategic document, “The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money” at the expense of support for dictators and caring about those without wealth.
“Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash,” the Times analysis said.
When combined with fresh debate about killings of shipwreck crewmen on those drug boats and calling immigrants from a growing list of nations “garbage,” we have a remarkable emergent picture of an arrogant, self-interested despot who sees the world as serving him with no questions allowed.
A game for the wealthy
Of course, Trump the Disrupter has little world-view patience for programs that feed the hungry or address global AIDS, which is why he has canceled those positive U.S. contributions. He has declined to stand by longtime friends, instead seeking to kindle close ties even with longtime foes whose power he respects.
You can’t even get into the power-as-money version of international affairs if you’re not wealthy already, either personally or as a nation. And so, the world’s poorest nations are automatically now being shunted into a travel ban to the U.S. and their publicly debased citizens barred from U.S. visas or immigration. Just this week, Trump ordered Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Mario Rubio to move from 19 barred countries to more than 30.
The Saudi Crown Prince is feted at the White House without mention of his role in ordering the murder of a Washington Post journalist or the role Saudis played in 9/11 attacks — there is a tantalizing trillion dollars’ worth of investment in the U.S. at hand. Pressure on Ukraine to fold before Russian aggression continues to assure a U.S. hand in mining operations to “pay back” the U.S. for military and humanitarian aid to defend democracy and international sovereignty,
Even the show-off re-signing of a truce between the Democratic Republic of Congo (among the 19 banned countries) and Rwanda at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute for Peace building was a joke: The fighting renewed the next day, though the signed deal made sure to guarantee U.S. access to rare earth minerals.
How surprised will any of us be if there is a U.S. attack on Venezuela in which oil reserves turn out to be the prize?
The entire arbitrariness of the Trump tariffs is based on a Trump-decided scale of which country needs the worst lashing over U.S. advantages. The would-be campaign to level various economic imbalances is based on expressions of personalized fealty to Trump, and, of course, is paid by U.S. taxpayers as a super sales tax, not by the “penalized” countries.
Hitting Europe
The harshest criticisms in the annual strategic statement are for a Europe that is becoming more non-White through immigration policies that Trump rejects wholesale. Europe is facing “civilization erasure” and becoming “unrecognizable” because of immigration.
The report identifies the specific American strategic recommendation to help Europe “to correct its current trajectory” over the next decades. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence” and pledged U.S. outward support for political parties opposed to immigration.
It’s a direct call to White nationalism of the sort that Trump denies but clearly pursues in this country.
How else to explain a U.S. campaign that arrests and deports the undocumented with such armed force and fervor that shuns adherence to legal rulings, court-ordered procedures and plain humanity involved in splitting families? How else to justify racial profiling and the labeling of whole immigrant groups as “garbage.” How else to explain why it is necessary to demand emergency review by the U.S. Supreme Court of Constitutional “birthright” status for millions of children born in the United States or its territories?
The Trump strategy never addresses what is supposed to happen to the world’s impoverished or to those without a million bucks or five million bucks to buy U.S. entry through a Trump “gold card.” Trump’s acceptance of a made-up FIFA World Peace Prize from a soccer organization with a history of corruption as if it is the Nobel Peace Prize is as ludicrous as it is symbolic that all international transactions have to include personal aggrandizement.
This is a document that offers as international justification the kind of Trump chest-beating and abasement of The Other that Trump shares with his most loyal base of voters, a view of “America First” as America Only.
When paired with the policy-as-profit views and its unquestioning support for absolute power in the hemisphere and in the world, it is a document that serves as outline for personal grift for the Trump family and its inner circle. It presents U.S. foreign policy as a loaded deck that must reward the wealthiest and the personal supporters of an autocratic Trump.
