The stunning implications of Trump’s nihilism at the G-7 can’t be overstated. Everything was on display in this performance, which may well be remembered as the worst by a US President in our diplomatic history. Unprepared, disinterested, confrontational yet disengaged from actual discussions, our “master negotiator” shamed the country apathetic and uninformed enough to entrust him with the world’s most powerful office. And while his embarrassing conduct was nothing new, the venom his aides spewed spinning it afterward was.
Larry Kudlow, Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor, carved out a media career based on the myth he was consequential in the Reagan Administration. Whatever the gravitas Associate Director of Economic Planning for David Stockman’s OMB actually carried, it was more than enough for Kudlow to claim himself both a Republican political insider, as well as an economic expert. Now defunct Bear Sterns made him their chief economist in 87’, and when Christine Todd Wittman grabbed New Jersey’s Governorship in 1993, Kudlow was her economic advisor. All this as he was developing a ferocious alcohol and coke habit that would compromise his ambitions. He eventually landed, as many conservative refugees end up, on a Fox/AM perch, holding forth with decreasing responsibility to facts.
Where Kudlow went from mainstream to the outer edges to maintain relevance, Peter Navarro has been a back bencher from the beginning. Aside from being a perennial Democratic election loser in both local and national contests in the San Diego area, Navarro made a name as a fierce critic of US trade with China and Germany. In fact, stripped of the essentials, Navarro seems mostly a proponent of thoroughly debunked import-substitution approaches to economic growth. In other words, the US has little need for trading partners, only raw materials we can transform within our own manufacturing kingdom. This “who needs em” attitude has been on vivid display since previous Trump Economic Chief Gary Cohn, a free trader increasingly marginalized by protectionists Navarro and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, resigned earlier this year, replaced by the more pliant Kudlow. With Cohn gone, Navarro has enjoyed enhanced access to go full Rasputin, beguiling Trump about the horrors of being an American dairy farmer… forget price supports.
And so the “let Trump be Trump” hombres tag teamed the Sunday news shows and kicked some Canadian ass! It’s hard to imagine what Trump and his team expected Trudeau to say in response to steel and aluminum tariffs assigned under obscure national security provisions, presumably meant for adversaries not friends. No matter, the Prime Minister’s otherwise modest and restrained statement might as well have been delivered with the middle finger to hear the MAGA twins tell it.
The US was “stabbed in the back,” declared a strung out looking Kudlow, accusing Trudeau of pandering to domestic politics as he betrayed his earnest patron, the Donald. A regular Iago, this smooth Trudeau hustler turned out to be, and on the eve of the Singapore Summit! What kind of an opportunist doesn’t abase himself and country to the West’s dealmaker extrordinaire at such a time?! How is Der Trump supposed to feel and touch his way to a deal with Kim after such treachery?!
Fear not, glowered Navarro to those patriots wanting Trudeau on a spit, “a special place in hell” awaits the Montreal ingrate. The fact that no foreign leader had been subject to such White House sanctioned vitriol since Saddam Hussein couldn’t have meant less to Navarro. For Trudeau to exert such uppity consternation – even after Trump signed off on the group’s “socialist” communique – was the lowest of low. He’s going to pay!
It bears repeating that Navarro does not believe in trading partners. Trade is unnecessary for a country as big and militarily dominant as the US. We take what we need for our own manufacturing base to convert for our domestic market. If other coloni…er, countries want to buy from us, fine, but we run no trade deficits…period. There’s a word for solving problems intransigent “trade partners” cause us….War!
Whether G7 countries and other Western allies will opt to try and ride out Trump, praying America comes to her senses, is of course up to them. Trump took his ball home, but they can certainly find another game to play, leaving us the loser. We need them at least as much as they need us; George Marshall fully understood this when he helped create the global trade system we have been prospering from since WWII, and Trump and his whacked lackies are unconcerned about destroying. Yet Navarro gets one thing right; we are a preeminent military power. How that power is deployed, more importantly whether it’s mission is corrupted in pursuit of facsi-nationalist economic aspirations should weigh very heavily on anyone paying attention to Trump’s new messaging. Sauron, himself couldn’t portend more darkness on our horizon. BC