Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The mafia movie is one of America’s great contributions to world culture. People everywhere can hum the theme tune for The Godfather or repeat lines from Goodfellas or The Sopranos.
But it is still a surprise to see the mob’s methods imported into the Oval Office. There is a distinct whiff of Don Corleone in Donald Trump’s approach to trade and diplomacy.
Like a movie mob boss, Trump knows how to switch between menace and magnanimity. Treat him with respect and he might invite you to his house, where you can mingle with his family. But the menace never disappears. As Trump once explained to Bob Woodward, he believes that “real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.”
Back in the Oval Office, Trump has employed fear and threats as a tactic for shaking down some of America’s top law firms and Ivy League universities. Like respectable members of the professional classes, unexpectedly threatened by the mob, Trump’s targets paid up quickly in the hope that all the unpleasantness would swiftly go away. Law firms like Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps agreed to do pro bono work for the administration to avoid being targeted by Trump’s executive orders.
But the tariff war that Trump has unleashed is revealing the weakness of the mafia boss approach to the world economy. Trump’s assumption seems to have been that if he punched America’s trade partners hard enough, they would have no option but to make a deal.
His son, Eric, urged targeted countries to see sense and to quickly buy off his dad. “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote. “The first to negotiate will win — the last will absolutely lose,” he continued. “I have seen this movie my entire life.”
But the real world and the global economy turn out to be much more complex than the movies that Eric Trump was brought up on. The White House has started a trade war with every major trading nation simultaneously. It has also taken an axe to the supply chains of many of the world’s leading multinationals.
There are simply too many actors involved for Trump’s mob boss tactics to work. There are all the investors who have rushed to sell their shares, causing stock markets to tank. There are the manufacturers who simply cannot do business under the conditions created by Trump — and who are shutting down production lines. And, as for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s mob, they have decided to fire back rather than buckle. This is getting extremely messy.
Trump’s epic misunderstanding of how the global economy works reminds me of an episode of The Sopranos, where two of Tony’s crew try to force the local Starbucks to pay them protection money. They are brushed off by the store manager who tells them: “I can’t authorise anything like that, it would have to go through corporate in Seattle.”
For Trump, the global markets and international business are turning out to be the equivalent of “corporate in Seattle”. Faceless stiffs, he will never get to meet or threaten in person — but who may nonetheless thwart his plans.
The failings of the mob boss approach to trade are now dramatically visible on the markets. The results are likely to be just as disastrous in geopolitics — although they will not become evident so quickly.
Trump’s approach to America’s allies is to treat them like errant members of a protection racket. Some of them have fallen behind on their payments to Nato? They better fix that fast or, says Trump, he will encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want”. As for Ukraine, the president has no interest in highfalutin rhetoric about the defence of freedom. But he is interested in grabbing some of the valuable minerals there.
Trump treats Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as if they are the heads of rival mafia families. There will be times when the families clash. Some foot soldiers and bystanders might get hurt. But, in the end, the goal is to reach a deal so that everybody can go back to making money.
Geopolitical theorists might rationalise a carve-up like this as the division of the world into rival spheres of influence. But, it also resembles an agreement between different mafia families, to give each other a free hand on their own turf. The local godfather is then free to push around the smaller players in the neighbourhood — such as Taiwan, Ukraine or Canada — without comment from the rivals. That would be bad manners.
This approach might work in the movies. But, in international politics, it is a recipe for war, lawlessness and misery.
Trump is now 78 years old and cannot abandon mores and methods that he learnt early in his career. His mentor, Roy Cohn, was also a lawyer for the Gambino and Genovese crime families. He taught Trump never to show weakness and never to back down.
So, faced with plummeting global markets, Trump is putting on a show of bravado. But he is clearly completely out of his depth. In the movies, we know how this ends. We are about to discover what happens in real life.
Source link
