Trump Does Have a Plan. It's North Korea.

What is bad for a country can be good for its leader

If you told me in 2021 that Vladimir Putin could launch an invasion under false pretenses that resulted in hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties, I would’ve thought that this would have caused him some political difficulties and weakened his grip on power. The war in Ukraine has had no such effect, and if anything has strengthened his position. War means censorship, a population that rallies around its leader, and a central government with more control over the economy. Conflict can bring leaders down too, but the impact on a head of state’s prospects for survival can go in either direction.

You can see this discrepancy between what is good for a nation and an individual leader throughout history. Has the Kim dynasty been a success? It depends on what you mean by the question. One family maintaining absolute power over a nation for three generations is an amazing accomplishment. They’ve been able to indulge in every earthly desire imaginable. If you care about the well-being of Koreans, in contrast, the Kims have built the worst regime on the planet.

There’s been a debate about whether the Trump administration has a plan with these tariffs. Officials say contradictory things, and Trump makes impossible demands, like not having a trade deficit with any country in the world while also having low trade barriers. Most smart people believe Trump is just winging it and acting based on instinct, with predictably disastrous results.

Yet to assert Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan misses the essence of this man and what is happening. From the perspective of making the country better off, he obviously doesn’t have one and doesn’t care. But if you imagine Trump as someone who wants to maximize his own personal power and the number of people paying him deference, then massive tariffs do not seem like a bad way to go about achieving his goals.

Last night, Trump gave a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, in which he gave the game away. As economic indicators were crashing, the president bragged, “These countries are calling us up. Kissing my ass.” Trump has always believed in tariffs, but something that he appears to have discovered is that they are an excellent way to aggrandize his own power and sense of importance. Countries and businesses want exceptions, and you get them by deferring to and praising Trump. Politicians who are subject to pressures from private sector interests also must go hat in hand to the president.

Power seeking is easy enough to understand, but what makes Trump unique is its combination with his childlike need for approval. Officials within the administration and its defenders now go around bragging about how seventy nations are trying to get in touch to talk about tariffs. By wrecking the global economy, he’s become the belle of the ball.

This is not to say Trump has ever thought all of this out. Rather, the man has an instinctual understanding of how to manipulate and control others. I’ve previously written about how the stolen election narrative helped ensure that Trump would be the 2024 nominee

After losing reelection, Trump used his status within the party for one main cause, which was to make everyone afraid to say that Biden was legitimately elected. This was the key issue that determined who Trump endorsed in the midterms.

Many Republican politicians, including DeSantis, made the calculation that there was no harm in going along with the narrative about 2020. If people were angry about how the last presidential election was handled, DeSantis would simply show Republicans he understood their concerns by going ahead and cracking down on voter fraud. Trump was the guy who complained about Democratic shenanigans, while DeSantis would sell himself as the leader who went and did something about them.

The problem is that making voter fraud a main issue for the party just because Trump was mad about losing in 2020 simply worked to cement his psychological dominance over the conservative movement. It’s extremely difficult to spend years saying that Trump was the legitimate winner of the last presidential election, make loyalty to Trump a central commitment of the party, and then say we should move on from Trump.

At a deep level, Trump seemed to realize that his being able to dictate the nature of reality and make every other ambitious Republican submit to the needs of his ego was good for him politically. It may not have been good for the country or conservatism, but Trump ended up avoiding jail time and back in the White House.

The trajectory of the Trump movement towards loyalty to one man explains why no one in the administration is going to stop him. The Washington Post reports that there was remarkably little dissent within the administration over the tariff policy, singling out JD Vance and Stephen Miller as making clear that they would do whatever Trump wanted. Vance on his recent trip to Greenland probably revealed more than he intended when he said “we cannot just ignore the president’s desires.” It’s moments like this that explain why he was chosen as Trump’s running mate in the first place. Rubio has also sold his soul, but he occasionally grimaces or makes a gesture that indicates that he is dismayed by what is happening around him. Vance never does, and Trump sensed that he was the right choice by his selection criterion of shameless loyalty regardless of how bad things get. Even the linguistic norms of the right side of the political spectrum have been remade in the direction of showing proper respect to Trump. When a tech entrepreneur wants to criticize the new tariffs, he begins by reminding everyone of Trump’s personal greatness, which we might at this point call the land acknowledgment of the right.

My fear in all this is that the right is now such a cult of personality that none of this matters. Trump’s approval rating at this moment is 46%. Nate Silver argues that it is falling in a way that is typical by historical standards. But it’s hard to think of comparable situations where a president adopted a policy that proved so obviously disastrous this clearly and quickly. If you can single-handedly wreck the global economy – meaning you just wake up one morning and decide to cause a covid-style crash of the stock market for no good reason – and only experience a historically “normal” decline in your approval ratings, that is quite a worrying sign. It makes me suspect that Trump’s floor might be high enough to make whatever he wants to do indefinitely sustainable.

There aren’t really equivalent circumstances that come to mind involving other similarly developed countries. That’s why we have to go to Russia or North Korea to have a framework for understanding what is happening here. In well functioning democracies, there are checks on a leader’s power, which hopefully forces him to take into account the concerns of the broader public, or at least a significant portion of it. But the modern GOP has replicated North Korean style norms within one of our major political parties. There’s a difference between regular media or partisan bias, and a full on cult of personality.

There is no good way I see out of this other than Republicans being thoroughly defeated in the midterms, and ultimately the 2028 election. There isn’t going to be resistance from within the administration. Congress eventually acting is not impossible to imagine, and there is already talk of a discharge petition in the House. Trump could of course veto any resulting legislation, but forcing him to do so would at least show bipartisan opposition to what he is doing and give him further ownership over the policy.

The problem with the idea of Trump not having a plan is that it underestimates the danger we are now facing. If the president was just going off instinct and doing things at random, we might hope that he accidentally ends up adopting the right policy. But if it’s all about ego and power, we might expect tariffs to have long-term staying power, and also for him to find new ways to wreck the country for his own personal gain.

The Kim family doesn’t want openness, even if it would be good for the economy, because it has the potential to threaten its own grip on power. Arguably, an ideal situation for Trump is for him to be the center of attention and have all political debates focus on himself, which polarizes the country and allows him to maintain complete dominance over his own slice of it. If every question comes down to “are you loyal to Trump?” he’s learned that he has the winning hand and can eliminate any internal competition. This is similar to how the Kim family maintains control by building society around the idea of confrontation against external enemies. Some observers tried to warn there was something deeply telling about Trump’s personal affection for Kim Jung Un, but the rest of us unfortunately didn’t take the warning signs seriously enough.

When one party has unified control of government and has become a cult of personality, there are no good immediate options before us. Democrats just have to win. Protests, resistance within the courts and bureaucracy, and persuasion are all necessary. They are going to have to be the ones to begin to check Trump’s power two years from now, and eventually regain the White House so they can begin the process of rebuilding what is going to be a very broken country.