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The following paragraph is the most reluctantly written paragraph of my career.
Donald Trump is considered a titanic political success. And not because he got elected to the highest office in the world. Someone does this every leap year. This is because he achieved the most difficult thing in a government, that is, binding his successors. He moved the consensus on an important issue – trade – until the next president was unable or unwilling to reverse it. Hence the Bidenomics tariffs and subsidies. Hence the spread of protectionism elsewhere in the world. Most leaders who change the “common sense of the times” require consecutive terms (Reagan) or a crisis (Thatcher) or both (FDR). Trump needed neither to transform apostasy into orthodoxy.
Whatever happens next week, we’ll be living in Trumpland for decades. Yes, I will get there, thank you. Aside from some marginal cuts to restaurant wine lists, it’s strange how an era of global economic fragmentation doesn’t bother a man. But “we” also encompasses the unknown millions who will not rise from low income through trade, as so many Chinese were in the decades before and after the millennium. This also includes the European political class, which must decide whether to align itself with the American fence. Trump could lose on Tuesday while gradually unwinding the West through his protectionist successors.
Instead of moping around, ask yourself how he did it. How does deep and lasting change occur? How to leave a trace?
On YouTube, Trump videos from the 1980s abound. He is measured, even gentle, until the subject of commerce comes up. At this point, a new edge enters the voice and a hint of growl distorts the face. Japan is the main target (“They come here, they sell their cars, their VCRs”) but Kuwait also receives them. And it’s about things like Oprah. In temporal terms, we are almost as far from these images as from D-Day. But he always says the same things on the same subject with the same vehemence.
That’s almost all he cares about. (Immigration comes a distant second.) This is the common thread of his more than four decades of public history: a deep conviction that maintaining a current account deficit with another country is “losing” to it. We can laugh at the primitiveness of economics. We can mourn the wealth that protectionism will destroy, or rather prevent from being produced. But at least we have the outline of an answer to the question above.
The secret to leaving a legacy is monomania. It is the priority of a theme rather than the conscientious management of everything. And the secret to safety is the opposite. If there is an anti-Trump, it is Bill Clinton, a sublime generalist, his own expert on most issues, a clever tinkerer with tax credits here and diplomatic relations there, but also one of the most forgettable two-term presidents. He left office with extremely high ratings, but without any new agreement in public opinion. How is this done? Distraction by scandal? Trump had that. No obvious crisis to resolve? Trump took power in 2017, which wasn’t hell either. In the end, Clinton simply didn’t have an overarching obsession.
Over time, Isaiah Berlin came to regret having written The hedgehog and the fox. Readers have taken too seriously his playful distinction between two types of mind: the rigid and the flexible, the one that dwells on a central idea and the one that is more like (to introduce a third creature) a magpie. Dostoyevsky, who saw things from a particular moral perspective, was a hedgehog, Shakespeare a fox, etc. What was supposed to be a bit of late-night intellectual sport between the All Souls guys has become a taxonomy that moderately informed laypeople can cite.
Well, for one reason. This clarifies a lot of things. Leaders presented as “actors of change” are often boring and only work at one pace: rolling back the State, or joining the European project (Ted Heath was a huge hedgehog) or leaving it. Watch Trump rant about trade in the 1980s and again 40 years later. The narrowness of his concerns would provoke laughter if they had not prevailed.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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