David French, True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind, NYTimes, May 7, 2026.
At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.
The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.
And, in a strange way, they appreciated him for his brazenness. In this cynical view, all politicians are, deep down, just like Trump. They were faking their dedication to principle. As for Trump, he was the honest crook. He was like the mob boss who didn’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be in the sanitation business.
Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.
Nor should we be surprised that such a substantial proportion of the nation’s tech moguls found their way to MAGA. Forget culture, their politics are downstream of commerce, and Trump has promised crypto and A.I. riches to all those who fall in line behind him.
Alas, Trump is wrong about that:
Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.
It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war, shifting strategies, objectives and timelines sometimes by the day. It’s obvious that he thought Iran would be another Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was able to capture the leader and then more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now.
But in Iran, he helped Israel decapitate virtually all of the nation’s senior leadership, and the rest of the regime seems to have become more intransigent and less willing to negotiate. Even worse, he also seems to have enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics.
In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals.
And then:
Ukraine’s zealous defense of its own liberty and independence is heroic and deeply virtuous. So is Denmark’s defense of its own sovereignty in the face of Trump’s bullying. In fact, much of Western Europe was transactional with Trump until they realized the price of dealing with Trump was simply too high to pay.
They thought they could hunker down and weather another Trump term, but he created a crisis so grave that Europe had to stand if it wanted to preserve any shred of dignity and independence.
The pope’s steadfast adherence to Catholic doctrine is yet another example. One gets the sense that he’s almost amused at the idea that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric should have any influence at all on his public professions of Christian faith.
The messiness of American politics:
One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.
Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.
There's more at the link.
No comments:
Post a Comment