The method behind Trump's madness

English original of article published this morning in Italian in La Stampa

It is less than three weeks since Donald Trump was inaugurated as America’s 47^th President, but it feels like three years. Tariffs imposed, tariffs suspended; a Gaza ceasefire negotiated and then put in danger; Greenland, Panama and Gaza all desired as potential new US territory; America’s US$40 billion overseas aid budget destroyed; American withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organisation, and sanctions on the International Criminal Court. It has been dizzying and disturbing in equal measure.

During Trump’s first term in the White House it was common to describe his administration as chaotic and unpredictable. We have learned that being unpredictable is a deliberate technique to put opponents off balance. The blizzard of actions and announcements is another deliberate technique, to make it hard for critics to focus on what really matters.

Yet so far it is unclear whether chaotic is going to remain the right word to describe the Trump effect. Wild, it certainly is. But what is happening so far looks like a combination of two much more coherent efforts than before: one is the attempted destruction of many traditional elements of the federal government and of American commitments abroad; the other is the seizure of power to the presidency from Congress and other parts of the American constitutional system.

These two coherent efforts depend partly on Trump’s own instincts but substantially on the ideology of those around him, including Elon Musk as well as many other zealots who have spent the Biden years planning for this moment. It will remain wild for some time, but several patterns are emerging.

For the outside world, the clear pattern of the Trump administration is that “America First”, his campaign slogan, is going to be insufficient to describe the change under way: “America Alone” seems more appropriate. Collaboration in forums and institutions is being dumped, unceremoniously: although the Paris accord and World Health Organisation were predictable victims, the replacement of collaboration by imperialism was not.

So far, it is an imperialism of words, though the sudden swing of policy this week on Gaza comes close to action. The world has been left speculating whether President Trump can really be serious when he says he wants Gaza to become US territory, given his previous resistance to spending American money or risking American lives on conflicts overseas, yet the real implication is something more immediate: almost certainly, this wild move will act as a cover for Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to break the ceasefire and resume his war against Hamas.

That may have been Trump’s intention, or it may just be a consequence. Regardless of the explanation, he has thrown aside any idea of a collaborative effort with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to rebuild and govern Gaza, for those states all demand negotiations for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state to go alongside the ceasefire and reconstruction. The fact that he has countered that demand with his own demand that the 2.1 million Palestinians who were living in Gaza be taken in by Egypt, Jordan and other Arab states means that he has no interest in serious negotiations. Soon, citing evidence that Hamas militias have moved back into Gaza, the Israeli forces are likely to invade again.

A second pattern that emerges from Gaza but also from his threats of import tariffs on Canada and Mexico is that it is wrong to call Trump a “negotiator”, as Giorgia Meloni has done. If he was a negotiator, he would genuinely want to make deals with other countries, just as he did during his first term when his administration agreed a new trade arrangement with America’s two giant neighbours.

Instead, what we have seen is a man who wants “wins”, not deals, and uses his threats not to achieve a sustainable outcome but rather to emphasise and display his own power. That is why he has followed his pressure for a Gaza ceasefire so swiftly with his destabilising claim to Gaza as potential US territory. And it is why he was willing to suspend his tariff threats against Canada and Mexico as soon as both governments offered concessions, even though the concessions they offered were trivial. To Trump, if it can be made to look like a win, it is a win regardless of the truth.

The third pattern is related to this desire to display power. Trump and the zealots around him know that he is currently at the peak of his political power, having won November’s election and having turned the Republican Party in Congress into a largely supine group. Soon, some things are bound to go wrong, reducing his popularity and, crucially, giving Republicans a motive to diverge from him to save their seats in the mid-term congressional elections due in November 2026.

He and the zealots in his team know they must move fast if they want to achieve anything. More crucially, they are also trying to exploit his current political power to increase the practical power of the presidency, to guard against the revival of Congressional opposition. Musk’s destruction of US AID, the development aid agency, is part of this effort: it is a small and weak target, as it mainly employs people overseas, but is a symbolic one, as by succeeding in destroying it he has shown that the US Constitution, under which Congress is supposed to have the final say over such agencies, can be ignored.

This is a genuine constitutional crisis, yet for the time being is one in which the part of the constitution whose powers are being violated, Congress, is doing nothing about it. This will now be tested further, as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, a new body that has no constitutional status, will seek to impose further spending cuts and even to abolish whole federal government departments. Only private lawsuits and the courts are currently standing in their way.

This brings in the final pattern that is emerging. The Trump teams’ mission to establish “America Alone”, to impose trade tariffs on allies to achieve “wins”, and to withdraw from international collaboration is creating an open goal for China. If Beijing wants to strengthen its friendships with the Global South or even with long-time American allies, it now has a huge chance to score.