The Trump administration acts less like a presidential administration and more like a royal family in medieval Europe — a kind of American “neoroyalism,” Joshua Keating tells Vox.
“Signs of neoroyalism [include] the degree to which the administration mixes private enterprise and diplomacy,” said Keating. It’s also clear in Trump’s habit of handling negotiations through family members and old business partners rather than the traditional bureaucracy.
Political scientists Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman say Trump resorts to a “clique composed of family members (primarily his children), fierce loyalists (Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem), and elite hyper-capitalists (often tech elites like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen).” The clique tends to mix private interest and national interests in an open and unashamed way that’s totally alien to modern state bureaucracies.
Other countries take advantage of this, like Russian representatives getting cushy deals by bypassing the more intelligent U.S. national security apparatus and convincing an administration of real estate salesmen (Steve Witkoff) to view Russia not as a military threat but as a “land of bountiful opportunity” involving energy, rare earth deals and even space exploration.
“It’s misleading if you think of it just as corruption or just a degenerate category of neoliberalism,” said Newman, a political scientist at Georgetown University. “It’s an entirely different system of how actors distribute power amongst themselves.”
It’s nothing new in nations low on political freedoms. In today’s Persian Gulf, royal families still blur the lines between private business interests and national affairs. Saudi Arabia is a country named after the Saud family, after all. And like the Saud family, Trump mixes his family’s business interests and American foreign policy in an unprecedented way, like when Vietnam circumvented its own laws to approve a Trump golf course during trade talks or Trump’s sons’ real estate deals in the Middle East.
“Foreign leaders seem to be accommodating themselves to the new pecking order (or at least the more explicitly defined pecking order), most explicitly and hilariously when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referred to Trump as ‘daddy’ at a meeting last June,” said Keating.
Then there are the literal gifts from countries seeking the “king’s” favor,’ Keating added. The crown from South Korea, a gold bar and a Rolex from Switzerland, and a jet from Qatar.
“While these lavish gifts have raised ethics concerns, Trump often appears not even to understand why they would be an issue, telling reporters that he would have to be ‘stupid’ to turn down such an expensive plane,” Keating said.
But Trump’s effort to revert the U.S. to his private property “might be hard to roll back,” said Keating. Consider how, under Trump, the U.S. has taken a partial ownership stake in Intel and is taking a cut of NVIDIA’s sales of AI chips to China.
“It starts as a series of practices, you know, people might not even take it very seriously,” said Goddard. “But over time, it becomes not only the norm, but you get infrastructures that are built up over this. You know, you can’t easily move the data centers from Saudi Arabia. You can’t get the F-35s back, right? The chips are already in the UAE, right? These types of things are much stickier.”
If this isn’t rolled back, where does it all lead? Possibly to calamity, said Newman.
“In these types of orders, succession is always a point of incredible instability,” Newman reports. “Some people may think [when Trump leaves] then it will just be over, but our bet is that it will not be over. It will be a moment of international crisis.”
Read the Vox report at this link.
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