The so-called ‘peace process’ is the worst of it, a terrible tragedy for Ukraine and Europe, and even America when they eventually emerge from underneath the MAGA cult, as they will one day. We are surely headed for a painful breakup very shortly.
But I want to get back to internal US politics for a moment after reading a piece by Steve Benen on the blog of Rachel Maddow, a virulently anti-Trump host on MSNBC. Benen is the producer of Maddow's show.
Trump is churning out executive orders like confetti thrown around by a lunatic, many of which are being blocked by the courts (112 legal challenges so far). His best-mate-for-the-moment Elon Musk is careering around firing federal employees left, right and centre, only for judges to order their reinstatement or for Musk himself to discover he’s fired some by mistake and has to try and rehire them. It is bedlam. Goodness knows how departments of state are coping.
Mr Benen concentrates on the tariffs being applied, or not, as the case may be, on Mexico, Canada, China, and other trading partners in the near future. Trying to keep track of what they are and when they're coming in is totally bewildering (as I write the ones on Canada and Mexico are suspended but it's early morning still and who knows what might happen later).
But as Mr says:
"By any fair measure, this entire policy — I’m using the word loosely — is utterly incoherent. Worse, it’s a moving target that seems to change by the day, creating new layers of chaos and uncertainty and leaving whole industries with a sense of whiplash."
And here is the key point:
"What’s more, there’s no actual governing taking place. Only an erratic president doling out favors to some of the people who manage to get him on the phone.
"No one seems able to say what the policy is, what the policy will be, why Trump is doing this or what he hopes to achieve. Other than that, though, it’s a great plan."
I took the trouble to look back at Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for government that Trump denied all knowledge of but seems to be virtually identical to Agenda47, the closest thing we have to Trump’s manifesto.
Scanning through it, you can see the focus is almost entirely on the WHO and HOW of government functions, the cutting of bureaucracy, and reducing costs and taxes. There is very little on the concrete WHAT or the WHY, something I hadn’t really noticed last year.
Mr Benen is spot on. There appears to be no policy goal beyond reducing the size and the scope of government accompanied by a vague and crude hope that this will simply spur people and the economy on to great things. Everybody is now distracted by the theatre of it all and being pounded by the daily shocks emanating from the administration, where turmoil is the watchword.
If you look at Agenda47, each of the 'policies' are based on short extracts from a Trump speech, which as we know are nothing more than garbled nonsense, airy-fairy promises to Make America Great Again or utterly contradictory and now long-forgotten pledges.
For example, on higher education, he has promised to revolutionise the sector by shifting "excessively large endowments" from universities "plagued by antisemitism" into something called the American Academy. But he's just about to scrap the entire Department of Education, so it's not clear who will actually enact the policy, and AFAIK nobody has even mentioned the American Academy after his speech in November 2023 anyway.
As I said at the beginning, governing is a serious business but it has been reduced to an episode of The Apprentice, with Trump where he likes to be, at the epicenter dispensing sound-bites that have no real-world consequences. Unfortunately, his actions do have consequences.
Across America, federal employees are losing their jobs or they're in fear of it. Leases on offices are being canceled, willy-nilly. Entire agencies are being shut-down overnight. Trump signs Executive Orders but I would bet he doesn't read them or understand what's behind them or gives a thought to what the outcome will be. It gives the impression of a man doing things, getting on with things, making America great again.
But he doing the exact opposite. The truth is that nobody is actually governing in the strict sense of the word.
Andrew Neil has a column in The Daily Mail where he says: Donald Trump is an unprincipled, narcissistic charlatan who doesn't give a damn about democracy:
"What fools we were not to take him at his own estimation but to think he could amount to something better. We have no right to be surprised that the man who tried to overturn democracy in his own country doesn't give a damn if it's now snuffed out in Ukraine."
Err, no. We knew precisely what he was. It was only men like Neil who didn't.
