John Feffer
Donald Trump has always presented himself as a master builder, a successful real estate developer who erected office buildings and resorts and curated golf courses all around the world. In reality, Trump was never a good businessman, declaring bankruptcy six times over his career and producing a string of failed enterprises from Trump Airlines to Trump University.
It turns out that Trump’s singular talent is not construction, but destruction. Now in his second term as US president and no longer constrained by the team of “adults” he answered to in 2017, Trump is taking a sledgehammer to everything in sight. He has put into practice the slogan of Silicon Valley, eagerly embraced by his close friend Elon Musk: “move fast and break things”. Yet this is not the “creative destruction” of an evolving capitalism. More often than not, Trump engages in uncreative destruction, breaking things and leaving them broken, as he is currently doing with the US government.
Now, he is threatening to do the same to the rules-based international order, beginning with the transatlantic alliance with Europe the United States has maintained for over 75 years. If Trump gets his way, NATO will lie in ruins, Ukraine and a number of former Soviet states will be once again satellites of Moscow, and the European Union will have come apart at the seams, thanks to Trump’s encouragement of far-right allies like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, and the National Rally in France. The geopolitical gloves are off.
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