Trump card, or joker?

Here we go again. Already outrageous that the United States electorate should turn a blind eye to electing a candidate found guilty in a court of law (a man with many convictions and none at all where matters of principle are concerned) but perhaps even more disturbing is the potential for dictatorship in the world’s most important democracy. The once and future president can always argue that the charges against him are trumped-up (excuse the pun) or are just plain “lawfare” in the terminology of ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (proclaimed the new Partido Justicialista chair this week), but the potential for autocracy handed to Donald Trump by over 70 million US voters is beyond any dispute after Tuesday’s clean sweep – a total control of both houses of Congress with two-thirds of the Supreme Court already leaning his conservative way.

A concentration of power only matched in Argentina by Juan Manuel de Rosas almost two centuries ago and certainly not by a President Javier Milei so fervently savouring the Trump triumph with his puny Congress caucuses and scant progress in his uphill struggle to overhaul the Supreme Court. The comparisons between the two men are multiple beyond their shocks of hair (which in turn do not exhaust their capacity to shock) but they stop there. And not only there. Milei is entitled to celebrate the convincing Republican win as a supreme booster for a global trend towards the far right but would be rather less accurate if he hailed it as an advance of his libertarian crusade against the deep state. A highly flawed libertarian although he may be (not least when it comes to aversion to any criticism, especially from the press), Milei not only preaches the creed but also makes partial efforts to put it into practice, mainly via his zealous Deregulation czar Federico Sturzenegger. But while both Milei and Trump may be considered populists, the latter is rather more similar to Fernández de Kirchner in his use and abuse of power, as he is in his ideas on lawfare.

That loosely used term “populism” covers a multitude of sins with Milei and Trump cases in point. Milei is a hamstrung libertarian consistently clinging to fiscal orthodoxy with some results and a popularity sustained almost by default against “the caste.” Trump is a demagogue flogging a protectionist and isolationist populism who is as fiscally as he is politically incorrect. In all probability he will not deliver on all or even most of his threats (although negative and repudiated at its close, his previous 2017-2021 term did not change the United States beyond all recognition) but this makes him unpredictable, which can be equally dangerous.

The jury is still out on whether Trump’s ultra-protectionism (a proposed 60 percent tariff against Chinese imports, with 10 percent for the rest of the world) falls into that syndrome of saying one thing and doing another but at the very least it is in total contradiction to the free trade preached by Milei. Should Trump keep his promise, it would double the inflation so upsetting US voters (even though the annual figure is less than the miraculously low monthly rates in Milei’s Argentina with a frozen money supply) while hitting Argentina’s exports to this country’s third trade partner after China and Brazil. Such US inflation (presumably boosted by tax cuts and deficit financing) would induce the Federal Reserve to jack up interest rates, thus sucking money away from emerging markets and global commodity prices instead of the massive dollar inflows of Milei’s pipe dreams. On the subject of commodity prices, Trump’s cavalier approach to environmental problems could lead to more fracking in the United States at the expense of Vaca Muerta shale.

While the widespread disenchantment of US voters gives a certain air of inevitability to Trump’s triumph, especially in hindsight, it remains hard to comprehend. “It’s the economy, stupid” runs counter to growth of almost three percent, annual inflation below that figure and 4.1 percent unemployment. How an Afro-American woman candidate could underperform US President Joe Biden among black and female voters is a paradox while the surge in Latino support for an anti-immigrant Trump ferociously criminalising them defies belief – perhaps akin to those 2016 Brexit voters of Caribbean and South Asian origins from two or three generations back pulling up the ladder after them. 

At the end of the day, the verdict of a democratic election must always be respected – something Trump has not always done. ​