It was a dark and stormy Parisian night that he had accurately predicted. Too bad not many had seen the forecast.
Strutting into a bizarre Oval Office appearance with rapper and vaccine conspiracy theorist Nicki Minaj last Thursday, Donald Trump backed down yet again, it seems, this time from his week-long Minnesota maelstrom. He went too far, government agents killed two demonstrators, protests erupted, and he pulled back, tail between his legs.
It’s the democratic process at work, right?
“Twice within a week, Trump is forced to tone down big second-term power grabs,” a headline on CNN said on Wednesday. It’s the latest in a weekly cycle of headlines declaring the same thing, like this from The New York Times at the start of the year: “Trump backs down on insurrection act as Democrats take the offensive”.
For some, this pattern proves that “Trump always chickens out” (TACO). But that implies a thoughtlessness. These cycles of aggression and retreat are intentional.
Trump approaches governing as a series of negotiating positions, like a corporate takeover. He begins with the most bombastic, extreme one, which forces his opponents to react. His ambit claim allows him to name a price first, forcing the conversation back onto his terms.
Every week or two during this presidency we’ve seen Trump pick out a topic – whether a new one or something that earned him applause on the campaign trail – that suits his idea of dominance as power.
For 10 days the White House released relentless statements about its desire to take over Greenland, causing panic in Europe, only to end with a meaningless framework of a deal.
Earlier this term Trump allowed a 43-day US government shutdown, costing millions of Americans their pay cheques and much-needed food assistance.
In Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, and now Minnesota, he has deployed ICE on the streets to trigger protests, which then let him test his authority by sending armed troops to suppress dissent.
Each round of tariffs usually begins with some ridiculous opening position, a number seemingly plucked from the upper reaches of his arithmetic imagination, only to find that number drastically reduced or vanished when confronted.
Last February he proposed a US takeover of the Gaza Strip so that he could turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”. Who knows if his Board of Peace will be as rapidly forgotten?
These aren’t mere distractions, as some describe them. Each time Donald Trump and his administration is pushing for a bit more power – over a foreign opponent, a group of people it’s domestically advantageous to label as the enemy, or the truth itself. Even as they find the limits of their authority, the next time these actions becomes a bit more “normal”. He is prodding to see how soft the underbelly of democratic norms really can be.
If the Trump administration kidnaps the president of Venezuela and flashes some military hardware, the world is happy to settle for some oil grift as long as he doesn’t follow through with the worst of it. As far as tactics go, economic devastation and troops on the streets are powerful starts.
He does not concern himself with the effect of these tactics. He appears to regard the death of civilians on the streets not as a tragedy but an incidental cost of the negotiation. Just the cost of doing business.
We imagine that US presidents are operating with a grand strategy of global governance, that they at least take seriously the idea that their power is constrained by convention, if not constitution. The president has dispensed with that idea.
Trump was open about this strategy in The Art of the Deal, where he advises making a ridiculous first offer, which makes everything else seem acceptable. His treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, describes it as Trump giving “himself maximum negotiating leverage, and just when he achieved the maximum leverage, he’s willing to start talking”.
In Trump’s words, “sometimes it pays to get a little wild”.
In some ways, his lack of respect for the old ways offers a possibility for reimagining them for the 21st century. I often find myself frustratingly close to agreeing with him, or at least understanding the problem to which he is reacting – only to find that he’s taken the reaction too far or used it as an opportunity for grift.
The way that Trump uses the presidency is far narrower and deeper than the traditional game of American power. He is not interested in containing Chinese influence over the global economy or Russian aggression against its neighbours. He is trying to emulate the kind of control that those leaders have over their populations, which requires a process of winnowing away the constraints placed on the American leader.
The danger is not that he will seize absolute power in a day, but that, piece by piece, the country will agree that he already has it.
Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris Administration for three years.
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Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris Administration for three years.
