Americans have a five-letter summary of their best selves: can do. Their tragedy is that Donald Trump has added a suffix to it: can do anything.
Trump is excited by the challenge of infinite licence. His fetish is seeing how far he can go and how much he can get away with. As he puts it on the notorious Pussygate tape from 2005, “I just start kissing them ... Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.” Twenty years on, for kiss (or grab) read tariff. Don’t wait, don’t ask, just do whatever you want and assume they’ll let you do it.
It would be overstating it to say that the great tariff debacle that sent stock and bond markets into a spin was an old man’s substitute for sexual predation, Trump’s late-life way of getting his kicks from exerting dominance over all the pussies of the world. But only slightly.
Just listen to him last week, shortly before he backed off: “These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are: ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir!‘”
That echo of “do anything” from the 2005 tape is not random. In Trump’s mind, the global economy was a woman over whom he had complete power. All she could do to avoid his wrath was to offer whatever sexual favours he desired – anything, sir! The world was his bitch.
You don’t have to be Dr Freud, or even Dr Ruth, to recognise this psychosexual dimension to Trump’s attempt to upend the entire regime of international trade. After the markets forced him to retreat, Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, tweeted: “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.” Actually, what we had been watching was a fantasy of domination and submission playing in garish but grainy colours in the grindhouse cinema of the American president’s fetid imagination.
If this suggestion seems outlandish, it’s because reality itself is preposterous. It is Trump himself who chose to perform his own psychodrama before the cameras, acting out the scenario in which all the countries of the earth were prostrate before him, rising only to kiss his behind and surrender unconditionally to his demands and desires.
This, indeed, is what is so compelling about Trump: it’s all out there. His sycophants retrofit every disaster into “master strategy” – like God, he may work in mysterious ways but we must have faith that behind the plagues and the earthquakes there is a secret plan.
The secret is that there is no secret. Trump’s fans are not wrong to see him as more authentic than other politicians. Ordinary politicians obsessively control their public utterances. Trump makes a pyrotechnic display of the firing of random neurons deep in his grey matter.
His speeches often seem to bypass conscious thought altogether: “So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question, and [a guy who makes boats in South Carolina] said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question,’ and it must be because of MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], my relationship to MIT – very smart. He goes, I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?‘”
Why does he indulge in this logorrhoea? Because he can. It is another expression of power. For thousands of years, orators have held audiences in thrall through the power of their beautifully wrought rhetoric. How do you trump them all? By holding your audiences in thrall with whatever nonsense comes into your head. Only losers have to make sense.
But the nonsense that’s in Trump’s head isn’t just sharks and batteries or (to take other recent examples from his speeches) the greatness of Hannibal Lecter or the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis or the evil of shower heads that limit the flow of water. It’s tariffs and trade and obsessions from 40 years ago about the way America is being (as he put it in his Liberation Day speech in another page for Dr Freud’s casebook) “raped” by everyone.
The idiocy of the oligarchs who boosted Trump back into the White House is that they failed to see that all this nonsense comes as a package. They thought they could have the harmless gobbledegook – the sharks and the penises – without the dangerous gibberish – wild tariffs and the thrill of imagining the nations of the earth begging at his feet.
But that’s not a deal you can make with an autocrat of Trump’s temperament. He loves all the mad children of his teeming brain equally. They exist for him on the same level of reality. In the middle of the crisis over tariffs, he was issuing an executive order decreeing that (and this is the official text of the White House statement) “No longer will showerheads be weak and worthless”.
When they bought into Trump (literally so in many cases) the tech bros were purchasing his whole grotesquely inflated persona – every whim, every craze, every caprice, every dark fantasy, all of them supercharged with dictatorial power. For this is what the monarchical presidency they thought they wanted really looks like. A king’s quirks are not mere foibles. They are law. When “L’État, c’est moi”, you had better believe that the “moi” is the monarch’s whole self, sadistic kinks and all.
There is a system that was devised and struggled for over thousands of years to prevent this from happening. It is called democracy. Many of the denizens of the American billionaire class got bored with it and decided to ditch it. They deserve what they get – the rest of the world doesn’t.
If it cannot impose limits on Trump’s erratic impulses, the US will find itself friendless. An America that can do anything is one that can be trusted with nothing.
