–Analysis–
PARIS — Are we doomed to be mere commentators on Donald Trump‘s declarations, tweets, decisions? The President of the United States dominates the media on a daily basis, and his speeches are all part of a political strategy laid out long ago by his former advisor Steve Bannon. He’s setting a permanent trap for us that’s very hard not to fall into.
Like everyone else, I guess, I wake up in the morning wondering what Trump said or did while I was asleep… And I’m rarely disappointed, there’s always something more.
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The simple fact of wondering here how not to fall into the trap of Trump’s performative speech says it all about its effective power. Trump is the first to govern with a social network. That’s where he declares war and peace: one day he pats Iran on the back, the next he demonizes it; where he hurls insults at his political opponents: the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is a “crazy communist;” where he mistreats his allies: Macron “always gets it wrong”— as well as his adversaries.
And he even uses his tweets as weapons of war — The Wall Street Journal recounted how Trump deliberately tweeted that he was favoring a diplomatic approach with Iran to keep Teheran’s vigilance at bay, when he knew that Israel would attack the next day.
New political reality
No matter how much we lament that a president shouldn’t be doing or saying any of this; no matter how appallingly poor his vocabulary is, or his contradictions from one day to the next: the fact is that this is our political reality. Especially as the Trump system is largely a one-man show: the president behaves like the monarch some of his supporters dream of, like blogger Curtis Yarvin, who told the media Le Grand Continent that he prefers a monarchy to a “failed experiment” democracy.
Without ignoring this verbal deluge, we shouldn’t lose sight of the essential point: Trump’s attempt to overturn the international order.
And as Trump is the head of the world’s leading power, his most trivial declarations have an impact on reality, even on the other side of the world: it’s hard to ignore them.
Still in the face of this verbal deluge, we shouldn’t lose sight of the essential point: Trump’s attempt to overturn the international order created in the wake of World War II, yet shaped and directed by the United States, in favor of a hegemony based on force; a strategy coupled with a weakening of America’s democratic safeguards.
Confusion with a purpose
Donald Trump doesn’t say it like that, but that’s exactly what he’s doing, undermining America’s historic alliances and blatantly ignoring the multilateralism that was — in theory — at the heart of American policy until very recently.
This rupture is obviously more important than that of the style of language or the use of “Truth Social,” which is his own global network. But Trump doesn’t give commentators enough time to dissect his latest declaration before he’s already thrown another “grenade” into the global agora.
The avalanche of tweets hardly conceals the predatory strategy at work.
And in this purposely-created confusion, he benefits from the complacency of the “new” social media, which operate outside the professional rules of the “mainstream” media, a word that now designates the “enemy.”
This makes for several “battles” at once: that of rule of law v. brute force, journalism v. confusion, decency v. the monopolization of wealth and power.
The avalanche of tweets hardly conceals the predatory strategy at work: so let’s read the tweets, but let’s not lose sight of the Trumpian project that must be opposed: one that is fundamental, global.
