Trump prefers strongmen. But democracy is not weakness

Extract from The Guardian

Donald Trump

Opinion

Jonathan Freedland

The US president praises Xi and Kim and disparages western politicians. But I’d far rather live in a nation where leaders are held to account

@Freedland

Sat 16 Jun 2018 00.42 AEST Last modified on Sat 16 Jun 2018 07.00 AEST

‘It doesn’t take a professor of gender studies to spot the male insecurity that might underlie Trump’s obsession with strength.’ Photograph: China News Service/VCG via Getty

In the lexicon of Donald Trump, the insult of choice is “weak”. He hurled it at Justin Trudeau last weekend, though not to his face: Trump waited till he was safely on Air Force One, having made an early exit from the G7 summit hosted by the Canadian prime minister, to tweet that Trudeau was “dishonest and weak” on the matter of trade. Thus Trudeau joined a long list – one that includes multiple Democratic politicians, former Republican rivals and Trump’s own attorney general – of those branded weak by the would-be strongman in the White House.
It doesn’t take a professor of gender studies to spot the male insecurity that might underlie Trump’s obsession with strength. He seems to specialise in projection, attributing to his opponents the very quality he most fears in himself. (Recall his insistence that Hillary Clinton was a Russian “puppet”.) As one former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau put it, noting the way Trump waited until he was in the air before dishing out the insults: “Can’t do it in person, and knows it, which makes him feel weak. So he projects these feelings on to Trudeau and then lashes out at him. You don’t need to be Freud. He’s a pathetic little man-child.”

But psychology only takes you so far. There’s politics in this too. For Trump’s insults to an elected Canadian prime minister were followed 48 hours later by a gushing torrent of praise for the hereditary dictator of North Korea. Kim Jong-un was not just “very talented”, blessed with a “great personality and very smart”, he was also, crucially, a “tough guy”. As Trump explained to Fox News: “Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father … if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 could do that.” As a man who had also gone into his father’s business, Donald seemed to relate. “I think we understand each other,” he said, adding his admiration for the “fervour” with which North Koreans greet their leader, apparently unaware that adulation of Kim in that country is not exactly voluntary.
This preference for Kim – a man who murders his rivals and maintains an archipelago of labour camps – over Trudeau is hardly a one-off. The same Trump who becomes irritable and impatient with elected western allies can’t get enough of China’s unchallenged ruler, Xi Jinping, whom he calls a “very special person”. Trump still glows when talking about the welcome he got from the dynastic dictators of Saudi Arabia, the barbaric regime currently pummelling Yemen in a long, cruel war. When faced with Trudeau, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, Trump’s arms remain folded. Yet when, by contrast, he meets a North Korean general, linchpin of a lethal junta, he does not hesitate to raise his arm in salute. (Those Republicans who condemned Barack Obama for bowing his head when he met the Japanese emperor have become much more forgiving these last 18 months.)

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What explains this preference for tyrants over elected leaders? There is a direct, selfish explanation distilled by the Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman. Clocking Beijing’s recent granting of 13 trademarks to Ivanka Trump, a move that won’t hurt its efforts to curry favour with her father’s White House, Krugman drew the contrast with the European Union, which can make no equivalent gesture, given that it approves trademarks only through a long, cumbersome process governed by rules: “Brussels can’t buy Trump off with de facto bribes, the way China can, because the EU has, wait for it, rule of law. So the corruption of the Trump administration inherently biases its policies toward authoritarian regimes.”
Put another way, Trump sees geopolitics as business, with every exchange a transaction to be judged on how much it helps him and his family. Democratic leaders, such as those Trump clashed with at the G7, make flawed business partners because they operate under constraints. They are obliged to consider international rules and alliances, longstanding norms, multiple domestic constituencies and competing interests – balancing all those against any demands Trump might make. Trudeau can’t simply give Trump what he wants; the Canadian leader has to think of, say, the dairy farmers back home, whose votes he needs. That is not a pressure that weighs on the likes of Xi or Kim.
And so the US president sees the leaders of China or North Korea, Russia or Saudi Arabia as strong and tough because they can make instant decisions, issuing edicts that brook no compromise – like a mafia boss or, say, the chief executive of a family-owned company. Not for them any of that limp-wristed business of compromise. Their will is sovereign.
In other words, it is not any personal failing of Merkel, Trudeau or Macron that leads Trump to see each of them as weak. It is rather the very fact that they are leaders of democratic nations. For him, democracy itself is weakness.
Troublingly, this view is not confined to Trump . It has seeped, however subtly, into the way plenty of democracies see themselves – Britain in the age of Brexit provides an admittedly extreme example. Theresa May is regularly branded as weak, and no wonder. As she sought this week to walk a tightrope between warring members of her own party, standing mute while Boris Johnson chuckled over his call for Trump to take over the Brexit talks, she looked like political weakness in human form: stuttering, uncertain and at the mercy of her own cabinet and party.

It’s easy to attribute all this to her personal limitations, which are numerous. That is the logic of those Tory MPs who seek to replace her. But the truth is, even a political titan would be flailing in May’s situation: forced to implement a policy that splits both government and opposition, and which she knows will damage the country. Her problem is that there is no Brexit that can command a majority in the House of Commons. That forces her to make compromises – she has no other option. True, she is to blame for some of the constraints that now hem her in, including that lost Commons majority. But the key point is that she is in a desperately weak position.
And that is less a function of personality than of the fact that May operates in a democracy, her room for manoeuvre limited by a hung parliament and a referendum vote. These are constraints that Kim, Xi and the other supposed strongmen Trump so admires will never know. No one pretends it’s a pretty sight. The Brexit mess looks appalling, Britain visibly enfeebled by this act of self-harm. But if the choice is democratic weakness or a tyrant’s strength, I choose weakness every time.


• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist