The Trump Show: Does it have a plot?

How abnormal are these lawless times? And is the US no better than Russia now?

We are living through abnormal times – or through changes that lack norms. Making sense of it all is made difficult as President Trump follows the maxim “flood the zone”: bamboozle the opposition, clog the courts with law-suits, and challenge constitutional and international norms.

His supporters may not be keeping up either, but they can feel satisfied that things are being shaken up, even though many of the actions now being taken by the Trump administration were not announced in his election campaign.

Trump’s international strategy is to weaken alliances and embolden adversaries. Sounds perverse, but…

Weakening alliances means doing things like threatening to impose trade tariffs on neighbours Canada and Mexico, or to acquire Greenland regardless of what Greenlanders and Danes think. Another example is telling Ukraine to pay for future “aid” from America with its rare metals reserves. They’ve even managed to upset New Zealand!

Emboldening adversaries means doing things like proposing to take control of Gaza, expel its inhabitants and redevelop it as a seaside resort. This emboldens Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, and China in its designs on Taiwan.

Trump is implicitly saying that the competing Great Powers can each have their way by force. Territory is there for the taking, regardless of what its inhabitants believe.

Trump’s Gaza proposal also threatens the ceasefire that’s presently in place: why would Hamas stick to the deal if the intended outcome is now to expel all Palestinians from the enclave? They might as well fight on under such conditions.

All of this is lawless. But Trump isn’t the only offender and it pays to assume that there’s rationality behind it. For example, Putin may be bad, but he isn’t mad. Or, if you assume that he must be mad, then you won’t see the reasons for his bad actions. Better to assume he’s rational, as then you can begin to deal with him. (Having watched them both, I’d judge Putin to be more intelligent than Trump.)

So, why would Trump weaken alliances? To extract more concessions and resources from his allies.

For example, he’s making Canada and Mexico commit more resources to controlling their sides of the borders.

Blaming allies for immigration, drug trafficking and job losses also helps to displace blame for America’s domestic problems such as licit opioid addiction, gross inequality and over-priced, ineffective healthcare.

And why would Trump embolden his adversaries? To define the rules and the limits of Great Power competition.

By breaking the rules of the international order, Trump implicitly adopts another set of “rules”.

A case in point is Trump’s return to sanctioning officials of the International Criminal Court. The US and Israel never signed up to the treaty that constituted the court which sits in The Hague – and neither did China and Russia. By frustrating any investigations of American or Israeli military or political leaders, the US sanctions weaken the effectiveness and even the legitimacy of the ICC. The implicit message is that Trump intends to implement rules that meet his objectives.

Putin and Xi are watching, and presumably feeling vindicated, because Trump plays it the way that they like.

The war in Ukraine is partly about who owns and controls mines and wheatfields. China’s designs on Taiwan are in part about the world’s biggest semiconductor industry. The gloves are off and the heavyweights are going to duke it out over these strategically vital resources. The maxim seems to be: “screw the rules, let’s just get down to it”.

Trump must realise, however, that a hot war with China over Taiwan is (to say the least) bad for business. He must also realise that, even with his assistance, Ukraine is unable to expel Russian forces. A deal needs to be struck, not all of which would necessarily be lawful.

Donald Trump's Pax Americana

As an aside on Ukraine, elections there have been postponed under martial law due to the invasion by Russian forces. Putin insists on having an election as a condition of a peace deal, but a free and fair election is hardly possible until peace is established. Putin would no doubt like to see off President Zelensky. And will those Ukrainians who now reside in Russian-occupied territory, and those displaced abroad, be able to vote?

And what do presidents Trump and Zelensky have in common? They’re both former TV stars. Skills honed in the entertainment industry have helped them in their political careers. Zelensky used to have a big fan base in Russia. You can watch him on Netflix in the slap-stick political comedy Servant of the People. It’s not so funny now, but he went from play-acting as president to actually being president. You couldn’t have made it up.

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It’s impossible for one writer to keep up with and respond to it all, so here are some some good listens.

In opposition to Trump’s executive actions, Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind., Vermont) covered many of the issues at stake in the US right now. He warned about the dangers of oligarchy (rule by the mega-rich), authoritarianism and kleptocracy (a government of thieves). These are terms that have frequently been used against Putin’s Russia. Has the US sunk to the level of Russia?

On the other side, you can hear Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon talking to the Wall St Journal about the unitary executive theory, a doctrine that favours presidential decree (rather than rule of law) extending into any corner of the administrative state, including powers to slash spending that’s been approved by Congress. The Constitution’s Article II makes a case for this which is arguable at least. Back in the day, the only noteworthy administrative agency was the Post Office, so the Constitution didn’t anticipate the present situation with complex governmental apparatuses and organisations.

The obscene spectacle of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, proposing to cut off aid to the world’s poorest people could, sadly, be doable under the unitary executive doctrine. We’ll see what the courts say. But, for his part, Musk accused USAID of being a “criminal organisation” and a “radical-left political psy op” (psychological operation).

Musk’s aim is to make federal employees want to resign, sell off assets like the buildings that will be emptied out, replace people with AI, and hence reduce budgets. (Readers in NZ will recognise a similar slash-and-burn in public management.) His teams are using AI tools to examine federal programmes and budgets with an eye to cancelling anything deemed unnecessary on a zero-based analysis. Anything with DEI characteristics will be among the first programmes to go.

According to The Washington Post:

“DOGE [Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency] comes in fast, going around lower-level IT staffers, who typically raise privacy concerns but are overruled by senior leaders who fold to DOGE’s demands. DOGE team members are then given superpowered user accounts enabling them to access and edit reams of government data with little to no oversight, the people said. That allows them to make changes at lightning speed, bypassing typical security protocols and alarming government employees tasked with keeping sensitive data secure.”

On Gaza, for a critical discussion of Trump’s extraordinary announcement, I recommend Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell. I’m sure someone will ridicule them for “pearl-clutching”, however.

President Trump’s intention to get rid of “unwanted populations” goes further, though. He’s directed the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security “to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States”.

He expects there’ll be 30,000 beds for inmates. One would hope that, since they’d be transported from US soil, detainees would continue to be protected by US law, which is better than no law at all. Detainees have begun arriving there, and, according to The Washington Post, are so far being denied access to legal counsel.

While every country has the right to protect its borders, control immigration and deport people, we must not forget that Guantánamo Bay on the island of Cuba is an extra-legal space with a dark history of detention, abuse and torture. It’s effectively a concentration camp.

In case you need to refresh your memory, I wrote the unpublished passages below in 2009 about egregious abuses of human rights under a previous president. Once you’ve read this, you may ask if the Trump Show is all that abnormal.

Guantánamo Bay and the War on Terror

The George W. Bush administration created a ‘state of exception’ in the case of the ‘enemy combatants’ detained indefinitely and without trial at Guantánamo Bay and through ‘extraordinary renditions’ to other secret prisons. After Bush’s refusal to define them either as prisoners of war (under the Geneva Conventions) or as criminals subject to extradition, they were then imprisoned, interrogated and tortured without the norms of international and domestic laws. They were subject solely to the executive decrees of the president, without the consent of Congress. Such decrees would have the effective force of law, but without complying with the norms of the law or the constitution. The detainees occupied an indeterminate space, outside of the laws of the day, but under the force of a ‘law’ that negates the law. Even though the executive recognized that relevant laws exist, they effectively suspended those laws. The president and his advisors asserted a right to use force, based on his executive powers to conduct war by whichever means seem necessary at the time. It was argued that those who committed or permitted inhumane treatment of detainees would be immune from prosecution.

The practice of ‘rendition’ spirited suspects away from their place of capture to secret prisons in countries where there is less concern about human rights and the elimination of torture. The term ‘rendition’ has no specific legal meaning, and the practice was performed without any legally recognised processes of arrest, extradition or deportation. The purpose of such renditions was for interrogation of persons suspected of involvement in terrorist activities, and generally no criminal charges were brought, nor were there any judicial proceedings. Quite a number of states collaborated in these renditions, and/or received captives for detention, interrogation and often torture. Poland and Romania, for example, are reported to have had such secret CIA prisons, and NATO was implicated in secret agreements facilitating over-flight clearances (International Commission of Jurists 2009). Such a captive has been removed from any juridical oversight and is dislocated from the protection of any state or courts. He or she has been made to ‘disappear’. The liminal legal status of so-called ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay was similar. The naval base at Guantánamo Bay is in itself a liminal territory. The communist government in Cuba refuses to acknowledge the US government’s historical leasehold on the base, claiming it is invalid under international law, while the US, unsurprisingly, argues the opposite. Detention there as an enemy representing no state, outside all normative legal jurisdiction, and on contested Cuban land, was a kind of ‘banishment’ into an ambiguous space in which practices that fall outside of the norms of law were practiced by decree.

Furthermore, the CIA has been accused of maintaining secret detention facilities in countries where torture can be performed with impunity. Some member nations of the EU were implicated in the secretive transit of such prisoners to these facilities. Meanwhile, as the US Congress was passing legislation to ban the use of cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in US custody, it also passed an amendment excluding Guantánamo Bay from the jurisdiction of US courts, and preventing detainees there from seeking relief or protection from inhumane treatment and torture. This effectively also permitted the Department of Defence to consider evidence that had been obtained through torture or degrading treatment in order to assess the status of those detainees. Further, in 2008, President Bush vetoed a bill that sought to extend the ban on torture from the military to the CIA. What that meant was that interrogation methods that are otherwise banned by international and by US laws could continue in secret CIA prisons on foreign soil. This was justified by the claim that information gathered in this manner had been effective in preventing planned terrorist attacks, even though no evidence to prove this was produced (Lewis 2008).

One of the victims of such maltreatment, Binyam Mohamed, was released from Guantánamo Bay and arrived in London in February 2009. He and his family had left Ethiopia in 1994 to seek asylum in the UK. He travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and was arrested in Karachi in 2002. He was ‘rendered’ to a prison in Morocco, where he was tortured, including genital mutilation, and was held there for 18 months, allegedly with the collaboration of British intelligence services. He claims that he was also transferred to a CIA prison in Kabul, before being taken to Guantánamo Bay. Confessions to crimes were extracted from him under torture. In 2008, he was charged by the Pentagon with conspiring to commit terrorism and war crimes, but, during his nearly seven years in detention, he was never formally tried, and the charges were later dropped.

This kind of illegal detention and maltreatment is known to have been authorised at the highest levels. Although later withdrawn, most revealing was the now infamous memorandum of 1 August 2002 (from the US Dept of Justice’s Assistant Attorney-General to President Bush’s Counsel, Alberto Gonzales) which sought to redefine ‘torture’ prohibited by criminal law so restrictively that it would include only the most severe and extreme cases. It made a distinction between mental and physical pain, and suggested that the former would need to lead to long-lasting psychological harm, and the latter would have to be of a kind that ‘accompanies severe physical injury such as death or organ failure’. Other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment that do not cross that bar of ‘extreme acts’ could then be directly authorised by the executive powers of the President with immunity from criminal law – or so it was argued at the time – thus giving CIA interrogators carte blanche to use violence in order to extract information (Cole 2007). Perhaps the most controversial method was waterboarding, which involves pouring water over the restrained detainee’s face to induce suffocation. While it leaves no tissue damage, the victim suffers the panic of suffocation, often to the point of death. And this may be repeated many times.

Cole, D. (2007). The Man Behind the Torture. New York Review of Books, LIV(19) 6 December: 38–43.

Danner, M. (2009a). US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. New York Review of Books, 56(6) April 9, online version http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530, paywalled.

Danner, M. (2009b). The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means. New York Review of Books, 56(7) April 30, online version http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614#fn25, paywalled.

ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) (2007). ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody. Confidential report to the CIA, Washington DC.

Lewis, A. (2008). The Terror President. New York Review of Books, LV(7) 1 May: 43.

Detainees upon arrival at Camp X-Ray, January 2002. By Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy - (copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Camp_x-ray_detainees.jpg so that the image can be used on Wikinews.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=774059