American conservative leaders thought they would easily take over an isolated and inexperienced President. Yet today, they are domesticated, only a few months away from elections before which they feel obliged to give their supporters guarantees of Trumpism. They find comfort in telling themselves that, after all, this President, however disreputable he may be, chose ultra-conservative judges and voted for a tax reform according to their wishes.
So far, there seems to be some kind of rationale behind an election that recalls others in times of crisis, when voters were suspicious of their elites and institutions, and were tempted by the adventure of rebellion.
Ending on such a note would, however, be to forget the very character of D. Trump, who brings irrationality, unpredictability and chaos into the picture. Nothing would be more wrong than to imagine a Machiavelli who calculates, analyzes and, finally, acts. Trump doesn’t read anything, to the point where his close friends think he is dyslexic. He spends hours in front of the television, prioritarily in front of the conservative channel Fox News, where commentators who believe in conspiracy theories and who indulge in all types of approximations, exaggerations and imprecations get carried away. In any case, his pathological narcissism leads him to evolve in his own cognitive sphere where, when facts don’t suit him, he invents others. The newspapers note his "lies", which are many - yet this word is not adequate because he believes in the untruths he asserts to his interlocutors, even when these are heads of state. These are not sophisticated arguments, but simple sentences that he repeats over and over again in interviews, in which he does not answer questions but rather listens to himself speak. They include statements regarding foreign policy, which express some obsessions that he is not ready to give up. He is a protectionist, and views international trade as a zero-sum game in which only industry counts. He is an isolationist, and takes advantage of a military instrument intended to deter rather than to act. He is hostile to alliances and indifferent to human rights, he only believes in the crudest form of power relations, he hates international organizations to which he opposes the only reality that matters to him, i.e. the nation-state, and he appreciates authoritarian leaders with whom he thinks he can reach agreements more easily. "America first" he claims, yet in practice, it really is ''America alone''. That being said, Trump follows Obama's footsteps who had also understood the American people’s lassitude towards foreign commitments, and who drew the necessary consequences, as in Syria or Ukraine. Style is important, and his successor’s is brutal, unilateral and uncooperative. Yet the content remains the same, i.e. the United States’ relative and probably irreversible withdrawal from the international scene.
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