There are a lot of smart people who think Trump has a plan. For example, that he’s deliberately reducing America to a regional power to avoid full Imperial collapse. Or that he’s using tariffs to rebuild American industry.
No.
Trump isn’t the type, he doesn’t have a master plan. Trump is driven by the idea that other countries are taking advantage of America: by a sense of grievance. He wants good deals, by which he always means that the US gets more than it gives, and he’s willing to end a deal if he thinks it isn’t good.
Trump has virtues (not all virtues are moral virtues.) Yeah, he started rich, thanks to Daddy, but he shits into a gold toilet, got a lot of good looking women, and became the President of the United States. He has a weird sort of charisma and tons of energy, as long as what he’s doing gets him attention of the right kind.
But he’s not a deep thinker. He doesn’t know much about the political economy, and he doesn’t make and execute policy plans. His purge of the “deep state” is driven by grievance: they went after him during Biden’s reign, so he’s going after them.
His tariffs are driven by looking at trade balances and feeling they’re unfair: Europe has about a 235 billion trade surplus with America, for example. That, to Trump is unfair. (The balance of payments is about 40 to 60 billion, which is far less.) Canada has a trade surplus, so that’s Canada taking advantage of the US to Trump, never mind that the US actually sells more goods to Canada than vice-versa and the surplus is essentially all energy trade.
If his tariffs were part of a master plan to re-industrialize he wouldn’t have gutted Biden’s industrial policy, which was actually working, and he wouldn’t be waffling back and forth on them. He’d institute them. (The smartest way would be to set a goal, and increase the tariffs by 1% every month or two to give companies time to reshore.)
Likewise his attack on NATO is primarily driven by this sense of grievance: the US is paying much more than everyone else and other NATO nations haven’t met their promise of spending 2% of GDP. (Which is fair enough, they did say they would, and they haven’t.) In the case of Europe there’s something there: the Euros are terrified of Russia and if they think Russia is really a threat (I don’t) they should be willing to spend on their military.
There are certainly people in Trump’s administration or outside planners with influence who do have master plans related to tariffs, reindustrialization, and ending the America Empire, but Trump? No. He’s too undisciplined a thinker and trying to work thru him must be endlessly frustrating to them.
Trump is also self-defeating in his fickleness. It’s impossible to make a deal with him, because you can’t be sure he’ll stick to it. Take his pressure on Egypt (which has massive fiscal issues caused by the Houthi blockade and Ukrainian war, since they got much of their grain from Ukraine, and thus is in a bad position to resist pressure) to take Palestinian refugees. To make it worthwhile he needs to not just offer the stick (we’ll end subsidies) but also a carrot—increased subsidies.
But Sisi has to figure that Trump might cut those subsidies off in a few months or a year or too, after he’s got 700K Palestinians refugees in his territory.
Now, even without a plan, Trump may wind up reducing America to a regional power. I’d say he probably will as a result of what he’s doing. But that he’s deliberately doing as part of a master plan based on a sound understanding of global political economics?
Seems unlikely.
And that matters, because there are smart ways to do things, and stupid ones, and stumbling into the end of America as the global hegemon will have some fairly serious costs like a crash on American arms sales, countries likely refusing to enforce American copyright and patents, national ownership laws taking much of America’s overseas ownership of land and industry, and so on. Plus, if you want to reindustrialize, the clumsy attack on universities and research is exactly the wrong thing to do when China is ahead in 80% of fields. (To be clear, American research needs to be fixed, but you don’t do it by defunding it massively all at once: you slowly change how funding is done so that there aren’t mass layoffs of scientists who then leave the US or stop being scientists.)
Trump isn’t some great statesman who has looked carefully at America’s position and come up with a brilliant master plan, he’s a deeply flawed man whose primary skill is self-promotion and who is driven by a negative sum view of the world based on the idea that if he’s winning someone else has to be losing, a deep sense of grievance at the idea anyone is taking advantage of him (because he takes advantage of others all the time) and who needs attention, adulation and ass kissing.
Too many people are reading into Trump want they want to see, not seeing what is actually there—and not there.
The shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will massively hurt low and middle income earners. The postal service changes will lead to many rural Americans having no mail service. Trump’s budget requires massive cuts to Medicaid, which disproportionately helps Red State Republicans.