The driving psychological force of his administration

Apr 9th, 2025 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Jamelle Bouie asks probing questions about Trump’s hypothetical “reasons” for the tariff war.

…How do you revitalize American manufacturing if manufacturers can’t reasonably import the materials they need to build factories and produce goods? Where is capital supposed to come from? How do you reset the nation’s relationship with its trading partners if those partners are forced to treat you as a bad force that can’t be trusted?…

There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the president’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.

Egzactly. Nothing he does is the product of a rational thought process. It’s all libido, all rage and greed and spite. He’s not a guy who thinks. He’s a guy who erupts. You might as well seek reasons for his belches.

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance.

I suspect that “apparently” was forced on Bouie by the editors – as a hedge against accusations of libel. It weakens the claim.

His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

So what does that tell us about Trump? That basically he sees everyone as a rival and, in fact, an enemy. Literally everyone, his own children included.

Trump’s desire to dominate others is the driving psychological force of his administration. His obsession with territorial conquest — seen in his effort to coerce the Canadian government into relinquishing its sovereignty as well as his calls for the acquisition of Greenland and the Panama Canal — is an obvious product of his predatory approach to human interaction. His authoritarian attempts to cow and coerce key institutions of civil society into compliance with his agenda and obedience to his will are, likewise, a kind of dominance game. They are meant to demonstrate his mastery over his perceived enemies more than they are to achieve any policy aim. He even said as much during an event on Tuesday, when he bragged about the law firms “signing up with Trump” and said that “they give me a lot of money, considering they’ve done nothing wrong.”

That goes a long way to explain what’s so loathsome about him. It’s the emptiness. That’s always been obvious – he’s an empty bladder with a lot to say, all of it wrong and bad and hostile. It’s been obvious but it’s also been elusive, because how does a person like that not jump off a cliff?

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