By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

President Donald Trump’s second term is not quite a second coming, even though he proclaimed divine causality for it in his inaugural address. “My life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” Trump, to the manner born, showed no hint of humility or any offering of thanks for God’s mercy. Indeed, Trump owes nothing to the god he has created for himself as a marketing commodity. While there could be nothing eschatological about Trump’s second coming, what should ring familiar is Yeats’s second coming foreboding from a different era a hundred years ago. The Irish poet’s insight forcefully captures the moment in Trump’s America and the world outside – where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Americans elected Donald Trump as president a second time perhaps more comprehensively, but with only a slender majority. No matter, the whole world has to suffer Trump without having any say in the matter. For his second term, unlike in the first, Trump has been showing glimpses of an illusion that this could be the beginning of a new era of  American expansionism.

Henchman & Hegemon. But who is the boss?

To wit, there were rambling allusions in the inaugural speech to a new United States that “expands our territory … and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons … and … pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” Going one better, or worse, his intellectually perverse and politically sinister Vice President JD Vance representing America at the 61st Munich Security Conference, lectured to the Europeans that they should in effect emulate Trump’s America not only for their own security and safety, but also for the protection of freedom of speech and democracy. He might as well have distributed excerpts from Trump’s Project 2025 to sponsor a new European enlightenment.

 The Hegemon and the Henchman

The outlines of Trump’s America at least for the next years have been splash-dashed in what has been only three weeks of Trump’s second term, but looks an eternity in the age of 24/7 media coverage. For all intents and purposes, America has a hegemon, Donald Trump; and the hegemon has a henchman, Elon Musk. Just who is who – between the hegemon and the henchman – seems to be the question that is deliberately being provoked in political circles, hoping to trigger Trump’s ire against Musk. Inasmuch as Musk appears to be outdoing the president. Time magazine’s cover page placing Musk behind the president’s desk is amusing even as it might be provoking Trump. CNN’s Jack Tapper has started calling Musk, the President’s “First Buddy,” arguably more significant than the traditional First Lady.

For now, Trump seems to be giving Musk the long leash as Musk and his young software interns run amok through federal government departments and their projects, in Washington and elsewhere, including far flung places throughout the world. All in the name of eradicating government ‘waste, fraud and corruption.’ And all discovered in a matter of days by teams of Musk’s X employees, some of them in their teens, and all of them with a worldview that pretty much starts and ends at their laptop and tablet screens. It is as if the old ‘revenge of the nerds’ is being played out for real in the theatre of the American state in Washington DC. With the difference that the nerds roaming Washington have a hegemon to back them up.   

President Trump is all hell bent on demolishing Washington institutions even as he has taken to calling Gaza a “demolition site.” He did that without any touch of irony at a joint White House press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Gaza’s demolitionist-in-chief. Netanyahu had completed Gaza’s demolition before Trump started his second term, and he was rewarded for that with the honour of being the first foreign leader to be invited to the White House for presidential audience.

Trump’s description of Gaza as a demolition site is no accident, but a natural projection of his real estate mind. At the press conference, as a befuddled Netanyahu stood and stared, Trump rambled on about redeveloping Gaza into a Riviera in the Middle East, where the poor Palestinians will be allowed to work to support all the (rich) people of the world gathering for their holidays.

The horror of this scheme is the presumed eviction of the already displaced residents of Gaza to unknown desert tracts in Egypt, Jordan, and any other host country in the Arab world. These countries will have to just receive the displaced Gazans and shelter them just because Donald Trump has said so, even as the Trump Administration is rounding up ostensibly illegal but organically integrated immigrants in America and deporting them in handcuffs by military aircrafts to their home countries. Even as far away as India.

The new Secreatary of State, Marco Rubio, a right wing Cuban American with more blind loyalty to Trump than any gravitas in world affairs, and other similarly inconsequential minions in the Administration, tried vainly to soften their president’s dangerous fantasy about Gaza. But Trump doubled down and summarily said that the Palestinians of Gaza will have to leave, Gaza will be redeveloped for the amusement of the rich under Israeli security, and all enabled under American laws. Whatever those laws are!

While there is little chance that a Riviera will ever be built on the Gaza waterfront, Trump’s outlandish speculations are only going to further aggravate the already turmoiled situation of the Palestinian people and rule out any possibility of a fair and durable resolution of a conflict that is as old as the UN. Trump has even worse contempt for the UN than he has for Gaza.

Imperial Illusions

President Trump’s Gaza musings are also consistent with Trump’s visioning of a new era of American expansionism that would ultimately “launch(ing) American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” But the first step in the flight to Mars is to impose tariffs on earth. All countries of the world, no matter friend/neighbour (Canada, Mexico) or foe (China) or everyone in between (India) must pay an admission fee for the privilege of entering the coveted American market. The revenue generated by import tariffs will be used to support the massive tax cuts that Trump is determined to give the wealthiest in America. The entrepreneurs of the world are welcome to locate their businesses and factories in the US and enjoy the world’s lowest taxes, or stay where they are (that is “your prerogative,” Trump said to a virtual session in Davos) and pay the world’s highest tariffs. All of this seems to be Trump’s new economic gospel, if not philosophy.

Trump is not alone in this American economic thinking, but he is alone among America’s political classes to think that America can do this unilaterally and the rest of the world will fall in line either without political demur or under economic duress. Trump’s external thrust has surprised almost all serious political observers in America. There are overtones of 19^th century imperialism in Trump’s garbled rhetoric. There are also multiple points of contradictions between his new expansionist thrust and his old isolationist insistence. Even the madman theory that he has tried to tout on his own behalf has few followers because crazy unpredictability is second nature to him and unreliability is what his fellow transactors expect of him.

Then there is the peculiarity of Trumpism in configuring the relative positions of America’s traditional allies and adversaries in this expansionary vision. His expansionism provides for the annexation of Canada as America’s 51^st state; renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America; threating the takeover of Greenland; and taking control of the operation of Panama Canal. Turning to Europe, Trump wants to impose tariffs on EU exports to America, has no abiding interest in NATO, and just this week indicated that he would be repudiating all of Biden’s commitments to Ukraine and force Ukraine to negotiate peace with Russia on Putin’s terms.

Not to mention Vice President Vance’s Munich speech exhorting Europeans to follow the lead of Donald Trump, whom Vance himself has once privately described as somewhat of an enigma between “a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

In other words, the Trumpian vision of American expansionism has no place for America’s traditional allies and suggests the annexation of at least one of them, Canada. Trump would rather have America contending for world domination with its traditional adversaries, China and Russia. That would be a contest in which, presumably to his understanding, all the opportunities for maximizing wealth and profit that market capitalism offers can be exploited to the hilt, without any of the inconveniences of state regulations, legal hurdles and overall accountability whether at the national or global level. It will be a system of hegemons and their henchmen carving up the planet as they please.

In such a set up, there is no place for American involvement in the World Health Organization (WHO), or continuing with the Paris Climate Agreement. Trump has  withdrawn America from both using two Executive Orders that were among the very early ones issued following his inauguration. He is keeping America in the UN for now, mostly to exercise the US veto at the Security Council in support of Israel, America’s only ally in the world organization. He has again pulled the US out of UNHRC in Geneva, and already stopped funding to UNRWA, the UN’s relief agency among the Palestinians.    

There remains the rest of the world – excluding the US, the West minus the US, China and Russia – a bloody mass of massive inconvenience to Trump’s inclinations. Trump’s main interaction now with the ‘rest of the world’ countries is in the humiliating deportation of their citizens after apprehending them as illegal aliens in America. A second interaction is through the abrupt closure of the USAID agency and the myriad of programs that the agency has been conducting in hundreds of countries throughout the world.

Many of these programs help in saving lives, improving health, and avoiding starvation. The Trump Administration may legitimately question the policy premises of these programs, but there is nothing wasteful, fraudulent or corrupt about them as alleged by Musk and marauders. Unilaterally closing them has been the most unkindest act so far by the Trump Administration.

Even though Trump is quite triumphant about killing BRICS with his 100% tariff threat, the membership in the organization is bound to swell as Trump tries to reorder the world, and BRICS itself is bound to emerge as a force to reckon with by post-Trump America. Equally, European countries will try to strengthen their economic ties with China to make up for what Trump might deprive them through his reckless tariffs.

Yet there is no country in the world that seems ready to push back on Trump and call his bluff. The world is bereft of leaders of yore – a Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno, Kenyata, Nkrumah, or Allende. Or even a Pierre Trudeau. With every country so much dependent on global trade, no government is prepared to poke the madman in Washington and risk inflicting economic pain on its people. Sit tight for four years.

Columbian President Gustavo Petro tried to protest the forced deportation of Columbian immigrants from the US, but was quickly forced to retreat by Trump’s tariff threat. South Africa has been singled out for harsh treatment mostly for prosecuting Isreal at the International Court of Justice, on charges of genocide in Gaza. In the midst of it all, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Washington, after a stopover in Paris, to cap what had been a tumultuous first three weeks of Trump’s second presidential term.

Both Trump and Modi acknowledge the good chemistry between them, and they used the meeting to highlight their mutual benefits even if the talks were more symbolic than substantive. American media picked on the protocol of Prime Minister Modi meeting with Elon Musk before arriving at the White House. For his part, Trump offered to help India and China resolve their “skirmishes on the border which are quite vicious,” and expressed the hope that “China, India, Russia and US, all of us can get along. It’s very important.” That seems to be Trump’s preferred world order. Each country has its own hegemon, and they all have their henchmen.