predicting Trump’s moves

What explains Trump’s specific choices? For instance, why impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico instead of, say, Japan? Why is USAID such a prominent target?

Tyler Cowen offers a theory. To paraphrase …

  1. Trump is interested in the discourse, the chatter. All his choices are about how he’ll look on Fox News and social media and how he’ll affect those conversations. Choosing Canada as a target for tariffs “is a symbol of strength and Trump’s apparent ability to ignore and contradict mainstream opinion.” Besides, Cowen says, Americans know and have opinions about Canada–negative opinions on the hard right. If Trump had chosen a less familiar country, people “would not know how to debate” his decision to pick a fight with it.

The chatter is highly heterogeneous and segmented. Right now, CBS News’ homepage leads with Trump’s threat to annex Gaza, but a “massive asteroid” gets about as much attention, and CBS offers a prominent story about an orphaned wolf pup who bonded with a shelter dog. Fox News blares a headline about the “panicked” Iranian regime facing off with Trump. Fox buries the Gaza story. The US edition of The Guardian leads with: “Trump’s declaration US will ‘take over’ Gaza Strip sparks global condemnation.” ‘

In short, Trump is driving several distinct conversations in different ways. MAGA is delighted, progressives are furious and flummoxed, and many Americans are oblivious. All of that is probably fine with Trump.

I would add five more explanations of Trump’s choices:

  1. He is pretty canny about his own interests. Big tariffs would damage the economy. Massive deportations would raise prices. So Trump threatens tariffs and then withdraws them and deports people at the same rate as Obama but with much more fanfare. He doesn’t always manage the fallout; for instance, his new Chinese tariffs could raise prices. But it is notable that they are set at 10% (so that any effects will be difficult to assess), not at 60% or higher, as he had threatened. If something would hurt Trump, he is unlikely to do it.
  2. He picks on the most vulnerable: government employees and contractors, people without US citizenship, trans people, and recipients of US aid. These choices are on-brand for him. They are also safer than tangling with anyone who has more clout.
  3. He doesn’t care about outcomes. A threat to impose tariffs grabs headlines. It doesn’t matter if there is no actual tariff. If a federal judge rules against the administration, the policy might be halted, but Trump still gets the fight that he wanted in the first place.
  4. Breaking norms and even laws is useful, because it forces Republicans to support Trump against their own expressed principles–thus increasing their dependence on him–and provokes people like me to defend the norms, which were never very popular to start with. It’s also possible that Trump will win some cases–or get away with ignoring court decisions–and then he’ll have even more power.
  5. Trump provides cover for hundreds of committed right-wing ideologues who are busy making decisions about funding, personnel, and policy that don’t rise to the level of his attention or influence the chatter much. Those efforts will continue.

Applying these guidelines, I doubt very much that Trump would order an invasion of Gaza and begin a long, costly (as well as deeply immoral) imperialistic counter-insurgency war. Since his supporters don’t hold him accountable, he can drop his threats whenever he wants to. His performance yesterday dominated a news cycle, which was the primary goal. Refraining from invading Gaza might also help to legitimize Israeli land annexations.

I could see Trump sending US troops to Greenland to provoke legal and diplomatic challenges, monopolize attention, and demonstrate that he is unfettered by treaties and congressional oversight. The endgame would not be a permanent takeover of Greenland but more domestic power (or at least perceived power) for Trump.

See also: strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy (Nov. 6), in which I ventured some predictions. I’m recalibrating my theories, as I think we should.

Frontiers of Democracy 2025: Listening and Leading

Please hold the dates (June 19-21, 2025) and consider proposing one or more sessions for this conference by April 18. Be sure to register and take advantage of the “early bird” discounted rate, available until March 29.

Tisch College is launching an initiative on Generous Listening and Dialogue (GLADi), led by Jonathan Tirrell. As part of this effort, the special theme of Frontiers in 2025 is “Listening and Leading,” focused on how to characterize, navigate, and overcome challenges associated with division and polarization in our world. Join us for robust conversations (and constructive disagreements) about the role of and approaches to listening and dialogue (perhaps especially across difference) for a thriving democracy.?

This theme is not exclusive; we welcome sessions on other topics related to Tisch College’s “North Star:” building robust, inclusive democracy for an increasingly multiracial society. As always, we are eager to continue past conversations, such as about violence and nonviolence, and religious pluralism and democracy. We welcome proposals in these areas, regardless of whether they relate to listening and dialogue.

Although we will consider proposals for presentations or panels of presentations, we generally prefer proposals for other formats, such as moderated discussions, meetings devoted to strategy or design, trainings and workshops, case study discussions, debates, and other creative formats.

Learn more and register here.

radical change needs institutional innovation

In The Civil War in France (1871), Karl Marx interprets the Paris Commune as “essentially a working class government.” The bourgeoisie and capitalism had been overthrown; the workers ruled. For Marx, the deep structure of a society was its class structure, and therefore everything about the Commune must be fundamentally new. It would be a mistake to interpret any of its offices, bodies, or laws that might seem familiar as if they replicated those of the previous regime. “It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.”

A counterpoint–not to this passage, but to major interpretations of Marx–comes from the radical Brazilian theorist and activist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. To paraphrase loosely, Unger might say that once the workers own the government and major enterprises, it becomes possible for people to distribute both the fruits of their labor and the rewarding productive activities more fairly and to collaborative more than compete. However, a revolution does not automatically resolve problems of organization and management. It remains challenging to coordinate individuals’ behavior, to identify and reward diligence, to apply expertise without letting the experts dominate, and so on. Thus the revolution should be judged on whether it yields new forms of self-government, which is not inevitable but depends on the participants.

In False Necessity (2004), Unger writes:

The radical left has generally found in the assumptions of deep-structure social analysis an excuse for the poverty of its institutional ideas. With few exceptions (such as the Yugoslav innovations) it has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of the soviet or conciliar type of organization: that is to say, direct territorial and enterprise democracy. But this conception has never been and probably never can be worked into detailed institutional arrangements capable of solving the practical problems of and administrative and economic management in large countries, torn by internal divisions, beleaguered by foreign enemies, and excited by rising expectations. Thus, the conciliar model of popular organization has quickly given way to forms of despotic governnment that seem the sole feasible alternatives to the overthrown bourgeois regimes (pp. 24-5).

Unger is making an empirical claim that may be overstated. It has been 150+ years since the Paris Commune, and there have been many experiments under state socialism (of various types) and in capitalist economies–from mini-communes to, for instance, Mondragon, which has 75,000 employees/owners today. But I do think his theoretical insight is valid: the fundamental task is to redesign specific institutions.

Source: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False necessity: anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy: from Politics, a work in constructive social theory. London: Verso, 2004. See also: the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and needed: pragmatists for utopian experiments

Victorians warn us about AI

In the fictional dialogue entitled Impressions of Theophrastus Such (first edition, 1879), George Eliot’s first-person narrator envisions the development of machines that can think, affect the physical world, and reproduce themselves. Humans suffer as a result, devolving into passivity and ultimately becoming extinct:

Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight. Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest—i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who—if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.

In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill had not forecast such a future as explicitly as Eliot would do, but he used it as a thought-experiment to demonstrate that the point of life is to develop one’s own capacities, not to accomplish any practical ends. A life in which important matters are handled by other minds–or by machines–is a life devoid of value:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

The possibility that AI will render us extinct remains speculative, 150 years after Eliot posited it. But there is an urgent, present threat that AI tools will “guide” us along “some good path” and thereby block “the free development of individuality,” which “is one of the leading essentials of well-being.”

See also: the difference between human and artificial intelligence: relationships; artificial intelligence and problems of collective action; what I would advise students about ChatGPT; the human coordination involved in AI; the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human etc. I owe the reference to Eliot to Harry Law.