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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (329583)	4/4/2025 2:34:01 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 364481

Josh Marshall pegs Noodles and MAGA in an article on TPM that I have linked to. It sims up what they have been saying all along. Here is the heart of it. At a basic level, the entire MAGA movement, and Donald Trump from whom all of it stems, simply doesn’t grasp the nature of American power or its limitations. In their view, the United States is the natural and inherent dominating power in the world. We’re the most powerful and the strongest. And starting from that view they look out onto the world and think if we are in charge why don’t we act like we’re in charge? Instead of acting like we’re in charge, we do a lot of consulting and asking. That’s weak and leads everyone to take advantage of us, protecting their industries while we keep our markets open, letting their defenses atrophy and relying on our protection, etc. It’s lost on them that the U.S. is not actually the inherently dominating power on the planet. U.S. primacy is based yes on a vast military, access to the American domestic market, American wealth. But really it’s based on America’s role as the custodian of a global system that on balance works quite well, at least for the other advanced economies of the world. It provides a general peace, a system of more or less known rules enforced with some consistency, a U.S. primacy that keeps the peace without dominating other middle powers, etc. The U.S. global order is like a trampoline with a bowling ball in the middle; like a giant star, the very fabric of the system is subtly angled in the U.S. direction. But on balance it works. The U.S. is the first among equals more than a dominating power. In other words, precisely what MAGA views as examples of weakness are the bases of American power. Donald Trump wants to hold the rest of the world in subjection. But the U.S. simply isn’t powerful enough to do that. It may have been just after World War II for a while. But it certainly isn’t now. That’s also why the American primacy has so long outlasted the Soviet one, whose satellites tore away from it at the first opportunity, and even before any real opportunity: because the U.S. primacy actually worked quite well for allies in Europe and East Asia. Donald Trump is only able to look at America’s persistent trade deficits. The role of the dollar as the global reserve currency and the massive advantages it brings are lost on him and that’s what makes the trade deficits in some ways inevitable and also sustainable. It also gives the U.S. a whole series of other vast advantages, one of which is being able to borrow and borrow and have it mostly not matter.