Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party. You can read more from him at gwforeignpolicy.substack.com.
As I write, Trump appears to have climbed down on Greenland, giving Davos a taste of self-pitying aggression: “I could use force on Greenland, but I won’t.”
What he ‘could have been?’ he will be wondering to himself: the man who expanded American territory, who brought that huge bit of the Mercator projection into the United States, who made America great again in a physical sense.
He feels the sense of failure, that he never managed what all those guys like Stephen Miller who told him, after Maduro was seized, that he could do anything, if only he, the Greatest President America Ever had, put his mind to it. If he shouted down opposition, used the power of the United States against his weak and craven opponents, he would get his way. He would show them — the foreign policy elite, the markets, the “international community” who was in charge.
They wouldn’t laugh at him any more.
He was stopped. Stopped by an alliance of the US military, Republican Senators, European diplomats, the Danish military sending troops to Greenland to defend it, by the markets. And by his own people, resolutely opposed to this absurd adventure by mad king Don.
I say mad quite deliberately, because Trump isn’t running a machine of efficient calculating evil.
His disorder is not of the psychopath who lacks all empathy but of the person who has all too much, but only for himself. He’s a man who never had love, tried to compensate for it through money and power, but who still knows deep down that what he was buying or taking wasn’t freely given, and so wasn’t affection. Normally this leads the patient into bouts of self-loathing; spirals of gloom from which bombast is a means of escape. The extraversion, the charm, the acting ability, for Trump had all these, at least when he was younger, is how he survives this depression and prepares himself to face the world again.
Somehow, Susie Wiles, his chief of staff is one of the few people able to turn him around in these moments.
Rich men, and powerful men all the more so are surrounded by flatterers. Foolish men, like Trump have even less of an ability to distinguish flattery from legitimate praise than most of us. This is why he published those screenshots of Macron and Rutte’s messages: see, he wanted to tell the world, here are men, leaders of proper countries, and of NATO, saying nice things about me. The world doesn’t hate me. That they were of course just doing their jobs, flattering him not for his personal qualities, but because of his office (he’s president of the most powerful country in the world, after all) was not what he wanted to believe.
Trump however is not our wayward friend or uncle, someone to be cared for and treated for his psychiatric problems. He’s the holder of a public office that not only worsens his condition by causing him to receive the fake love given to the powerful, but one whose actions have terrible consequences for people in the United States and across the world. His tantrum over Greenland brought the transatlantic alliance, of all things, to the brink of what would have been in spirit a civil war; his assault on Minneapolis threatens the same at home. He’s not only a danger to himself and his family — though he undoubtedly is that too — but to his country and the world.
The West has some experience of a similarly deluded ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who pushed the world to the brink of war during the Agadir Crisis of 1911. The German institutions and international diplomacy of the time were only just able to contain him, as the American ones are struggling to do. Compounded by other powers’ miscalculations, the Kaiser’s erratic mind would help plunge Europe into the First World War.
Trump generates an Agadir crisis every month or so, to which are added innumerable domestic crises of his own making. He keeps everyone off balance through sheer activity, but doesn’t care about their coherence or their overall effect on the national interest, which would slow him down.
Until now the crises have been dealt with by “babysitting”: the world’s responsible leaders find ways to talk him off the ledge onto which he has got himself, and something approaching normality resumes until events — or Vladimir Putin stoke his narcissistic injury again. It’s not clear how much longer this can go on.
The orthodox constitutional solution would be for a few Republican congressmen to impeach him, and for the Senate to remove him from office, but his backing down this time means this is unlikely to happen, at least until the mid-terms, which are shaping up to produce a democratic wave in the House and an uncomfortable outcome for Republicans in the Senate.
This is my last column at Cosnervativehome. I want to pay tribute to my three editors Tim Montgomerie, Paul Goodman and Giles Dilnot who have been unfailingly supportive over the years. To keep up with my writing on world affairs, subscribe at gwforeignpolicy.substack.com