Trying to understand Donald Trump

While it can be hard to explain why bullies do what they do, it’s safe to assume that if a bully fears condemnation, or downright scolding, or getting kicked out of school, he or she would not become one in the first place.

Is Donald Trump’s America bullying Venezuela? Much of the world and a lot in the United States itself seem to say “Yes.” This is apparently based on the assumption that most bullies know beforehand their actions will be denounced, that others will hate them, but they just don’t care.

Many analysts think Trump is that bully who couldn’t care less. They only disagree on when he started thinking “Screw it, I’m done with being a nice guy”. Some say he has always been like that. Others think desperation calls for desperate measures, and his motherland’s desperation has just kicked in.

The “It’s in his blood” school gives less importance to the changing global situations than the other camp, which places much more emphasis on the rise of China, the speed with which America has lost its awe, and the dwindling supplies of energy and other natural resources, important to not just the US economy, but also the country’s military powers.

To this latter school, the anti-Trump western media have been half-hearted. They dutifully criticise the president but do not throw the kitchen sink at him despite the fact that the Venezuela saga has given them the best opportunity to date. This school theorises that attacking the US leader too much would play more into China’s hands, after all the gifts he had given Beijing already.

This school also thinks that as deplorable as Trump is, he is not the only “bad guys” in America. Moreover, at least he is “openly bad”, not pretending to be holy while secretly harbouring an evil agenda, it is said.

The first school argues that Kamala Harris would not have abducted a foreign leader, openly threatened Greenland and Canada and driven the US-Europe ties to the brink. The other side, of course, insists that the only thing separating the Democrat and Republican parties over America’s foreign policies is “sooner or later”.

In other words, their ultimate goals of hegemony are the same. Only Trump is rushing boldly and imprudently to get there.

The president, this second school maintains, has been caught in extremely-pressing global circumstances never before experienced by any other leader in American history. National debts are unprecedentedly massive. BRICS is waiting ever closer in the wings, and its influences in Latin America are fast expanding. All Europe does is getting helps from America when needed and criticising the country for fun when it has to.

So, “Enough with being nice!” Trump is probably thinking that if America can’t maintain the respect and has to rule through fears, then so be it. He may be thinking “Why not say straightforwardly that I want the oil. We have tried to be polite before, haven’t we? We floated ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and nobody believed us.”

He began with the tariffs and then ramped up the audacity.

To some, it’s chaotic diplomacy sprinkled with large-scale hypocrisies and direct economic or military threats. To others, we are seeing a well-calculated Trump movement, and expected fears it’s generating have been misinterpreted as mistakes unexpectedly backfiring.

Even pro-US yet anti-Trump western media might be reviewing the pros and cons of people respecting you and people fearing you instead. The CNN, normally a very vocal critic of Trump, is nowhere near as critical as many would have liked. England’s BBC is more or less the same, although some could point at its legal trouble with Trump in explaining why the network’s Venezuela coverage has not exactly matched the magnitude of the world-changing event.

Trump is taking full advantage of that. He is following up on Venezuela with strong, jaw-dropping signals. Several countries have received obvious or less apparent threats. UN and private organisations that America used to sufficiently and actively supported have been abandoned in one swipe of his pen.

World analysts attempting to explain the departure from 66 organisations and treaties that normally leaned on solid American backing have come up with assumptions consistent with the “No more nice guy” theory. They feel that the conventional stands on climate change, human rights, refugees, world poverty and scientific researches go against US interest as Trump sees it.

The analysts are talking about a major shift in Trump’s America’s perceptions of national interest, the priorities of US budget spending, and the moral-preaching diplomacy. Trump may be believing that the conventional budget spending overseas is not worth it, especially at a time when America is close to collapsing under the weight of its own debts, that holier-than-thou policies coming out of those US-supported entities only limit his country’s options.

To critics of America, Trump is not an ordinary bully after all. He may have just ended a long-standing illusion that was so deep-rooted but has shown cracks of late. As some say, the illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion, but when the illusion becomes too expensive, the scenery will be taken down.

And, as illusional as it is, the US-generated scenery is so massive and beautiful that it requires a mad, couldn’t-care-less man to end its existence.