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Suppose you wake up tomorrow morning, and find that, worse than Gregor Samsa, your consciousness has been transmigrated into the skull of The Donald. Further, the divine agency enacting this alteration has placed an aegis upon you, such that you cannot blow your brains out in horror; for your many sins, you have been given the penance of wielding great power to Make Things Better.
What do you do? What does "better" look like, and how do you steer things to get there? Assume that, like Trump, you are not particularly bound by norms or even your own prior positions, that you have a great deal of sway over ~50% of the American public, and that you have more-or-less full control of the dominant political party which currently has tenuous control over all three branches of Government. What would the plan be?
I don't want my country to rule China. I certainly don't want to be ruled by them, but I stubbornly believe it's possible to step back from what I perceive to be a long-metastasizing American global empire and to move toward a world where we get our own country working and simply leave other people alone. I'm open to the idea that Trump is a swinish idiot and I am as well, but what does actual wisdom look like? Was it a good idea to help build China into the unrivaled manufacturing and arguably economic colossus that it currently seems to be? I'm pretty sure it wasn't a good idea to try to invade and destroy multiple other countries in the name of "spreading democracy", but maybe you disagree? Was Biden on the right track? Obama? Bush? Or if the string of presidents preceding Trump were all cold, merciless imperial manipulators and Trump is a moronic rampaging swine, can it really be that both of these things are perfectly equally awful, or is one in some way preferable to the other?
There's a thing you wrote one time, about how your people and mine could never be friends, that our relationship would always be conducted across gunsights. Maybe so. But I, at least, have zero desire to actually start shooting, and I perceive the people on my side who want to start shooting, who believe the conflict to be innate and existential, as the enemy that is innate and existential to me. Maybe this is naive. Maybe the perspective I perceive from you is correct, that everything is doomed and the evil always win, and no matter how things change they always change for the worse.
A year ago, the narrative was that Trump could not win, and that if he did win nothing would actually change. Now the narrative is that he's changing everything for the worse. Maybe so! I'm waiting to see what the next updates say, though.
There are so many things wrong with what Trump is doing that I find it silly to write a serious response. Literally an LLM would manage. For one thing, accept Von Der Leyen's offer of mutual tariff drop, that's enough of a “win” for your base and an actual economic boon! Apologize to Denmark and negotiate expanded military presence in Greenland under the existing framework. Offer China a mutual reduction in tariffs for sectors where you actually cannot back up your confidence. Tell Bukele to send back the wantonly arrested innocents for a fair trial. Stop gutting STEM research institutions. Crush or pay off the longshoremen, abolish Jones act. Buy a shitton of equipment for manufacturing drones. Put a few bombers on Guam instead of in Afghanistan, send a garrison onto Taiwan. It's not really complicated, he's done too many errors.
Many questions. Was it a good idea to help build China? Probably not, but was it a bad idea to exploit their growth for salvaging your own one? I guess not again. Invasions? I think that was dumb. Biden? Yes, I think that Biden, or rather the system behind his limp body, was highly effective in reaching at least some subset of relevant goals of the Empire, it was going pretty smoothly. I am surprised to see them so thoroughly vanquished so fast.
How to deescalate? Oh, that's a big one. I think it's psychologically impossible, the US isn't willing to be #2, even if that carries none or minimal material demerits. Neither is Xi willing to give up on his system, or on Taiwan. History will decide.
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What were “his people” and “your people”, in this context?
Russians and Anglos, IIRC. His framing, not mine, but the point seemed reasonable. Given our history, particularly post-USSR, I do not expect Russians to assume Anglos are pursuing cooperation with them in good faith.
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