The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government. Soldiers fighting for democracy have been abandoned to die in the field. The U.S. president vows to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Long-established alliances are suddenly teetering. Economic bungling has pushed the country toward recession. The only beneficiaries of this bizarre series of MAGA outrages have been America’s geopolitical enemies.
Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why. We attend conferences, join television programs, and meet foreign reporters. And when we do, we find ourselves confronted with what I call the opioid dispenser.
The opioid dispenser might be a politician, a business leader, or an academic. Whatever their basis of authority, the opioid dispenser offers a message of reassurance:
Yes, these recent actions are very provocative. But they are driven by serious strategic purposes. [Insert an imagined rationale here.] We should focus on the signal, not the noise. It’s a wake-up call, not the end of the world. We must take Trump seriously, but not literally. [Multiply clichés until the allotted time is exhausted.]
I compare these bromides to opioids because they soothe immediate pain, but only at the risk of severe long-term harm. Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, these calming messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind.
At a conference on European security, the opioid dispenser may tell you that Trump is hostile to the European allies because they do not spend enough on defense.
If that were true, then you’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain (though he denied it). This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. (France had already committed, in 2023, to a near doubling of its defense spending over the subsequent seven years.) Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.
Justifying Trump’s abject support of Russia, another opioid dispenser will explain the pro-Russia tilt as actually a grand strategy to counter China.
That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not actually standing up to China at all forcefully. During his latest campaign, Trump dismissed Taiwan as undeserving of U.S. protection because it “doesn’t give us anything.” Trump’s ravaging of U.S. foreign-aid programs concedes major influence to China, especially in Africa. Musk is significantly vulnerable to Chinese economic pressure on his large business in that country. Trump himself has taken a huge sum from a Chinese investor for his crypto operations.
Trump’s enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin—and avidity for Russian money—dates back 20 years. At a time of economic desperation, Trump earned $54 million on the flip of a Palm Beach property. His former lawyer Michael Cohen told MSNBC that Trump regarded the profit to be the result of Putin’s personal influence. Whatever explains the Trump-Putin bond, acclaiming it as a brilliant, Kissinger-like diplomatic pivot doesn’t pass the laugh test.
An opioid dispenser may try to explain Trump’s anti-Canada economic warfare as an anti-drug policy, a response to the flow of fentanyl south across the Canadian border.
Yet the fentanyl claim was almost immediately exposed as fiction. And if stopping a narcotics flow was the goal, why would the president demand annexation of Canada or parts of Canada? Trump aides have spoken of ejecting Canada from intelligence-sharing agreements, which again is not what you’d do if your goal were to improve cross-border drug enforcement. Maybe Trump’s 51st-state talk is not to be taken literally, but if taken seriously, as the opioid dispensers advise, the message is unmistakable: These are expressions motivated by animus against Canadian sovereignty, not a wish for improved U.S.-Canada cooperation.
To survive a dangerous environment requires accurate assessments of the predators on the prowl.
Inventing an alternative Trump—one more rational and less malignant than the actual Trump—may assuage anxiety. But only temporarily. The invention soon collapses under the burden of its own untruth, wasting time in which the victims of its fiction could have taken more effective action to protect themselves.
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