Healy: That’s how Trump thinks, too. The world is there for the carving.
Gessen: I feel that Trump is more likely to discover this irresistible. From Trump’s personal newly expansionist rhetoric — his calls for for Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, Ukraine’s pure assets — we are able to see that he’s groping for this similar kind of factor. So, sure, for these causes and others, although it’s solely been a month, I feel we’re clearly a realignment of the postwar order. I’m saying this primarily based on what Trump and Putin (and Pete Hegseth, and Putin’s international minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Dugin) have been saying. We have to take heed to them.
Healy: You each are getting at Trump’s core. He’s a transaction-oriented empire-builder who needs to maintain different folks over a barrel. He sees America’s allies largely as moochers or rip-off artists that he must squeeze and get higher offers from — all these mineral rights Bret referred to. Trump doesn’t function primarily based on shared values or historic relationships; he has a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, and thinks Individuals elected him to get a greater deal from different international locations, to not get “shared values.” On this vein, I feel Trump and Putin see Europe as one thing to plunder — Ukraine, Greenland, squeezing NATO for more cash, urgent them to surrender issues in return for superpower benevolence.
Gessen: Patrick, I feel you’re proper. And I additionally assume that Trump’s views, or his sense of himself, have developed during the last eight years. Throughout his first time period, you may actually inform that he felt like an unintended president. This time, he appears to really feel genuinely chosen. There’s a new messianic high quality to his habits. He is not only making offers so he can accumulate wealth whereas he’s president, as he did throughout his first time period. It appears to me that he’s now planning to rule for a very long time (eternally, in his creativeness?), and he needs to wield real energy on the planet.
Stephens: I agree with Masha. The creepiest line in his inaugural speech was, “I used to be saved by God to make America nice once more.” There’s a level of messianism there that befits an Iranian ayatollah or a medieval crusader, not an American president.
I’m additionally undecided the phrase “transactional” fairly matches the president. The artwork of an amazing deal, to adapt a phrase, is that each side are supposed to come back out as winners. However Trump’s “offers” are all the “I win, you lose” selection. His aim is much less to attain strategic or tactical victories and extra to humiliate others, notably these he feels have slighted him or paid inadequate obeisance. And the angle pervades the administration. The ailing grace JD Vance confirmed in refusing even to fulfill with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was flabbergasting however very a lot on-brand. It’s the angle of a dismissive viceroy, not a gracious ally.
