We are all ‘shithole countries’ now

Look beyond tariffs to a mindset that boasts, ‘these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass.”

Watching the unfolding tragedy of Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine and our values then trying to take in the enormity of a world turned upside down is both intellectually hard and emotionally disheartening. Today’s analysis becomes obsolete in a Trump post – perhaps best left to rolling news – and sometimes it’s the details of how he generally behaves that reveal something bigger.

For instance, when Trump met El Salvador’s authoritarian leader, Bukele Ortez, at the White House it was not just the content that jarred – which God knows was bad enough – but the jocular tone of it all. As they joshed each other about deporting alleged gang members to a hellhole masquerading as a prison you could see they were having fun.

It brought to mind the guiding feature of this administration. A casual, careless, cruelty and indifference, which is toxifying so many of those it touches.

In his State of the Union ramble in March, Trump once more declared his ambition to annex Greenland, and ended by saying, “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” What was once a casual remark is now policy even if still delivered in a throwaway style that hid its importance.

And when he said it, the detail that struck me most is that some of the audience – America’s elected representatives – laughed.

Think on that. The President of the United States threatens, in breach of all international law, to annex ‘one way or the other’ part of another nation, which also happens to be a democratic NATO partner. And the response of his side of the house is to laugh. Not shock, not embarrassment, not disagreement, but to titter at their boy’s performance.

Another small detail. In the same speech he went on to grotesquely distort how USAID money was wasted in Lesotho, adding as a throwaway it was a country, “Which nobody has ever heard of.”

Again, they laughed.

Oh, how funny, such wit, the world’s biggest bully from the world’s most powerful nation casually demeans and insults one of the world’s poorest countries to add some spice to his stand-up routine, and all his followers can do his laugh.

For me, the significance of that detail is what it says about how Trump has dragged so many Americans down to his level. Once upon a time such crassness, such nastiness, such sheer bloody rudeness was beneath any nation that pretended to decency.

Now it’s just a joke. Associate with a bad crowd long enough and it rubs off, and when you look at Trump’s crowd they’re a bad lot, all taking their cue from him, competing with each other to obey their master’s every brain fart and praise his supposed brilliance.

And it has had real world effects. Somebody in his cult had actually heard of Lesotho – enough to slap 50% tariffs on them, which were also the highest of any country on the chart he presented with his tariffs’ announcement. As with everyone else, they are now on a 90 day pause in sentencing, but of course the guillotine is still hanging over them at the dear leader’s whim.

In his ridiculous chart Trump’s team claimed, as with everyone else’s, they were purely reciprocal tariffs because of Lesotho’s supposed 99% tariffs on US imports. Gosh, those tricky Lesotho types (known as the Basotho) joining with all those others who have, in Trump’s words, been “ripping us off” and “stolen our jobs, (as) foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once-beautiful American Dream."

So, what did they do to deserve the highest tariffs on the list? Firstly, we need to recall how Trump’s supposedly reciprocal tariffs were arrived at.

Amidst much (justified) scepticism about their origins, the White House finally issued an incomprehensible briefing document supported by an impenetrable formula filled with Greek symbols that was not only inaccurate in its own terms but actually disguised something very simple both in its formula and its idiocy.

Firstly, the tariffs are not reciprocal or anything like it. Basically, the White House took the trade deficit for the US in goods with a particular country, divided it by the total goods imported from that country and then divided that by two. So, in the case of Lesotho it exported $237m of goods to the US and imported $2.8m. This produces a trade deficit of $234.2m, divide that by $237m, and that equals assuming Lesotho had imposed tariffs of 98.8% on US imports. This was then halved to produce the US tariff on Lesotho of 50%.

As others have pointed out, a trade imbalance does not mean another country is trading unfairly or imposing tariffs, it just means one country wants, and therefore buys, more of the other country’s goods than it is selling to them.

Yet Trump is assuming that unless the US is exporting as much to each and every other country as it is importing from them then it must be unfair.

This is nonsense. The idea that the only fair trade is one where imports and exports match each other is beyond absurd.

Lesotho – the country no-one has heard of – is a good example of this nonsense. Its GDP per capita (a country's Gross Domestic Product divided by its population) indicates average annual income per person of about $1,100, whereas those poor, ‘ripped off’ Americans struggle by on the world’s 6^th highest GDP per capita of a mere $89,680. Given this disparity, what precisely does Trump think those ‘cheating’ Basotho’s should be buying from the ‘ransacked’ US – Tesla’s?

And there’s a further, and ironic, kicker. What accounts for Lesotho’s $237m of exports to the US? Mostly clothing, and that clothing industry was hugely boosted by the African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA) a US created and funded initiative designed to help the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, part of which included duty-free entry into the US.

So, Lesotho is now faced being potentially whacked by massive tariffs because of exports from a garment industry that was largely created by the US itself. Go figure.

Whether AGOA, congressionally mandated since 2000 but needing renewal this year, continues is obviously open to doubt. Add to that the impact of the destruction of USAID support to a country with one of the continent’s highest HIV/AIDs rates. Lesotho has a hard road ahead.

But hey, who gives a stuff – it’s just another ‘shithole country’ no-one’s ever heard of, so let’s smile and titter at the ‘master strategist’s’ wit and move on eh?

In case anyone’s unsure of where the ‘shithole countries’ reference comes from, it was a remark Trump made in a private meeting in 2018 about stopping immigrants entering the US from various African and Latin American countries. Inevitably it leaked and his denial of saying it persuaded no-one.

At least he felt the need to deny it then. Nowadays he doesn’t feel the need to deny his contempt and disdain for us all. So, at a Republican dinner on April 9 he was recorded saying about his tariffs, “These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are dying to make a deal.”

Trump then put on a pleading tone, adding, “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir.”

And of course, the audience laughed, enjoying his mockery of the rest of the world.

That’s us, that’s you. We’re the ones being mocked by Trump and laughed at by his ever-so respectable audience of well-heeled Republicans.

And again, look beyond the tariffs, and look at what all this reveals.

Because it’s about more than getting a better deal for America, but a reflection of his personality – his bottomless narcissism and desire for dominance and subservience in a zero-sum world where only he can win. And that personality has now brought out the worst in his supporters and enablers – the Ugly American in full bloom.

So as that expensively dressed audience who laughed at us, climbed into their giant SUVs, ‘trucks’, or chauffeur-driven limos to head back to their fancy homes, they will doubtless have said how glad they were to have a president who was stopping them being (in Trump’s words) ‘looted, pillaged, raped and plundered’ by the vanilla-growers of Madagascar, or clothing makers of Lesotho.

So, it’s more than money, more than tariffs, and we need to recognise this. Trump doesn’t just want a deal, but for it to be recognition of his power – he wants us to kiss his ass.

So, never forget – he’s enjoying this. Chaos? Whatever – as if he cares. There he is, with the whole world focussed on his every utterance – living the ultimate, unbeatable narcissist’s wet dream. He calls for the head of the Federal Bank to be sacked, the market’s slide – he says a day or so later he won’t sack him, and the market’s rise. For Trump narcissistic heaven is just a social media post away.

The best-known quote from F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ catches an element of this well, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Like the malignant narcissist he is, Trump has a vast carelessness, while he and his billionaire bros can retreat back into their money, backslapping each other in their bubble.

And, to return to Trump’s meeting at the White House with El Salvador’s Bukele Ortez, beyond that carelessness about the deportations to El Salvador there’s also the indifference and a cruelty that goes with it.

As they basked in and enjoyed their shared infliction of cruelty, Trump was asked about sending American citizens convicted of crime to the same place and he basically said, ‘why not’, joking with Ortez about having to build another five prisons. Was he serious? With Trump you never know, some jokes become policy, others just disappear as part of that day’s entertainment.

But more to the point, the very idea of deporting US citizens, is serious, not a jokey aside flashing across what passes for Trump’s thinking process. It’s serious how unserious he and his cohort are.

We also all know that the whole process of deportations to El Salvador is a con, based on a blatant abuse of the Alien Enemies Act, claiming Venezuelan gang members are not just criminals but some kind of invading army. Really? Who do they think they are kidding? Probably no-one, but with pseudo-straight faces they say it anyway, enjoying the joke.

What is serious too, is what happens to these deportees. Some at least will be the unpleasant Venezuelan gang members they are claimed to be, but regardless are we really meant to enjoy the scene as, bent-double they are frog-marched off planes, then with heads shaved crammed into mass cells?

Because that’s what Trump is inviting us to do – to participate, laugh and enjoy this uncivilised theatre of cruelty. And many do.

So, we see Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security, Secretary posing in ballcap, tight t-shirt and fancy watch against a backdrop of caged inmates, exulting in their humiliation, and threatening more of the same to others. And it’s catching – other Republican ‘lawmakers’ have visited to get their selfie with misery as the backdrop, just like some tourist standing in front of a Venetian landmark or somesuch.

All of us have unworthy thoughts, but isn’t a mark of a civilised person and country to rise above it, to in Lincoln’s words encourage the better angels of our nature – not indulge the worst demons?

And such casual cruelty extends beyond proper treatment of supposed gangsters. As is well known, the casually incompetent dragnet of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) illegally picked up Abrego Garcia and deported him to El Salvador. Having admitted it was a mistake (and sacked the lawyer who had the temerity to admit it) they then added further lies and tried to pretend it was impossible to get him back, saying it was up to El Salvador. In front of Trump, El Salvador’s President then said with a smirk he couldn’t do that. Smiles all round. Oh, what a joke. Wrong guy banged up in a El Salvadorean hellhole, ha bloody ha.

Why am I banging on about this – because, beyond the actions the nature of this administration is the catalyst.

Back in 2018, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote a brilliant article headlined, ‘The Cruelty Is the Point’, subtitled, ‘President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.’[i] It’s not just what Trump does but the nature of what drives him.

It’s also what both attracts and then toxifies all those who associate with him. In 2019, the former FBI Director, James Comey, wrote an editorial in the New York Times[ii] addressing why basically good people ended up colluding in bad actions. As someone who was in that circle he suggested, “Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring…. But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing.”

He goes on to highlight how Trump “makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us.” Eventually you end up making so many compromises that, as he concludes, “And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.”

And in his second iteration Trump 2.0 has brought in people whose soul was mostly already eaten.

A variety of toadies, hucksters, incompetents, the morally dubious, conspiracy theorists and opportunists, all content to echo and ape the dear leader, indulging his every whim – to use his phrase all ‘kissing his ass’.

Behind it all, there is a darker, more sinister group, content to promote him to the MAGA crowd as an American monarch, then, while he plays golf, work to dismantle American democracy through a serious of lengthy Executive Orders signed by Trump but highly unlikely to have been read by him.

The hallmark of his administration for us is capricious, careless, casual and cruel and dragging America down to his level so the unacceptable becomes not just acceptable and normal, but also mocking and bullying – the superpower revelling in its power.

What does this mean for us?

Simple but hard to grasp or implement. Nothing his administration says or does can be trusted to last, nor can it be placed in some coherent construct or process. It’s entirely a function of his profoundly damaged personality and liable to pivot on a whim, and that capriciousness is entirely amoral.

Whether it is throwing entire countries like Ukraine under the bus in cahoots with Putin - his kind of dictator – or creating a system where individuals are plucked off the street into arbitrary detention, it’s all the same to him. This is a loathsome man, surrounded by loathsome backers, creating a loathsome system to routinely do loathsome things.

The US is too big to ignore, but we should focus on disentangling ourselves as much as possible, and nor should we assume it’s ever going back to anything approaching normal. Four years of Trump and his dark enablers will change the US forever.

Remember, the bottom line is he doesn’t care about us, and that won’t change whether we kiss his ass or not.

---

[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/william-barr-testimony.html