I came across a quote recently from an interview Donald Trump gave to Playboy magazine in 1990, at a time when he was a cause of chaos and corruption merely in the world of New York real estate, rather than the world at large.
In the interview, Trump was asked whether he was ever satisfied with what he had accomplished in business; his answer was a resounding “No”, an answer framed not by a sense of vision or purpose, but by something like its opposite. “I’m never self-satisfied,” he says. “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. You know, it’s all a rather sad situation.” When the interviewer asks him whether it is life or death he finds to be the sad situation, he says: “Both. We’re here and we live our 60, or 70 or 80 years and we’re gone. You win, you win, you win and in the end, it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot. But it is something to do – to keep you interested.”
It hardly seems necessary to point out that Trump is ill-suited to being the most powerful politician on the planet, and we certainly don’t need to go riffling through musty old copies of Playboy to substantiate this claim. I personally find it difficult to imagine anyone being suited to such a role, and, if I could, it probably wouldn’t be someone who wanted it. I am thinking here of the science fiction writer Douglas Adams’s indelible formulation that “those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it”, and that “anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job”.
Trump is surely the most extreme test case of this proposition in our time. The nihilism evinced in that interview answer – the idea that all that counts is winning for its own sake, and that in the end even that doesn’t matter – seems to me to pretty inarguable evidence.
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Trump’s answer also provides a way of visualising the total void of meaning at the heart of his understanding of political power, and a way of thinking about, if not explaining, the current war in the Middle East. Like a lot of people, my initial response to the Trump administration’s recent turn toward full-spectrum international aggression was to read it as a return of 19th-century-style imperialism. The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela; the by now seemingly forgotten Greenland annexation crisis; the decision to attack Iran without apparent provocation or explanation: all of these things seem, at first glance, straight out of the playbook of old-school imperial dominance.
But classic imperialism, as the historian Daniel Immerwahr recently put it, “sought to bind disparate places together under a vast administrative structure, animated by a civilising mission. It’s not hard to pin the ‘empire’ charge on Trump’s predecessors, who have jealously guarded US custody of the world system. But what’s striking about Trump is his shrugging indifference to overseas outcomes. You could call this regime-change nihilism; you can’t call it imperialism.”
Regime-change nihilism is a pretty snappy phrase, though I’m not sure we even need the “regime-change” qualifier in the case of Iran. Regime change is a complicated aim to achieve, necessitating a likely long and deadly ground conflict, and the inevitable deaths of many US soldiers. Trump seems, for now at least, to have no appetite for such a thing. The US’s Israeli partners would presumably be fine with total state collapse – and all the bloody and chaotic consequences that entails – if it meant a less threatening Iran.
In any case, Immerwahr is right to identify the shrugging indifference as the important dimension of Trump’s response to the chaos he has unleashed in the Middle East. (If any great-power interest is being served by America’s illegal war of aggression against Iran, it is that of China, which will increasingly look like the sensible and stable power to align with, and sell oil to.)
Power is, for Trump, almost entirely an end in itself. He doesn’t seek it or wield it in order to fulfil some larger vision, nefarious or otherwise. There may be distinct fascistic elements within the broader Maga movement, and certainly within the coterie of ideologues who have surrounded him in his second term, but Trump himself has no particular theory of power other than that he should be the one in possession of it, and that he should do whatever he feels like with it.
His recent remarks about Cuba, which is undergoing a severe economic and humanitarian crisis as a result of the recent US fuel blockade against the island, are particularly stark in this regard: “I believe I will have the honour of taking Cuba,” he said. “I mean, whether I free it, take it – I think I could do anything I want.” (These remarks, incidentally, were revisited during our own Taoiseach’s visit to the White House on St Patrick’s Day; our country’s leader sat in silence – either servile or diplomatic, depending on your point of view – while Trump and his secretary of state Marco Rubio discussed the need to put “new people in charge” of Cuba.)
This language of total permissiveness, of being able to do whatever he wants with a weakened state, is reminiscent of nothing so much as the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood recording, leaked in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump revealed his total lack of sexual morality or boundaries: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Trump seems largely not to care what results from his doing whatever he wants. The point is that he can do it, and in so doing, that he can keep himself interested in a life he views as, in the end, meaningless. But if there is one thing that seems to complicate (though not mitigate) his bottomless nihilism, it is the market. The immediate and entirely predictable result of the stupid and reckless decision to go to war with Iran was a violent lurch in oil prices, and, in the near future, a very real prospect of rapid inflation and economic chaos.
And so, faced with these consequences – far graver, from his point of view, than mass death, collapsed states, and other such comparatively frivolous effects of war – Trump started making reassuring noises about the conflict being “complete, pretty much”. The markets were, as intended, briefly appeased, and the price of oil came down.
Trump at least believes in something: the economy is, in the end, the only authority he recognises. But such appeasement can’t last for long; the economy can’t survive the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resulting risks and costs attendant on shipping and supply.
Who knows what chaos will in time be unleashed by the gods of the market, and what the consequences of their vengeance might be?
