My Three Picks of the Week
Trump with Merz, Münchau on Trump and lawfare, and two Swiss commentators on Trump's possible strategy
This week’s three picks are all about Donald Trump. The first is a link to his press conference with the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, while the second and third provide interesting takes on his administration’s policies.
Press conference with Friedrich Merz in the White House (NBC News). Like or loath the American President, it is worth watching how Donald Trump and Friedrich Merz got along and interacted with one another during what turned out to be an extended press conference. And depending on how one feels about Trump, one either finds bits of this press conference funny or awful. Trump is doing Trump things, and Merz is holding up well, because he must have been coached very well. And because he knows he is in no position to dictate terms on the man occupying the White House. The journalists (including those with a marked German accent) are putting their questions almost exclusively to Trump, for obvious reasons.
And what a smart move it was to gift the US-President with the birth certificate of his grandfather, Friedrich Trump. Born in 1869 in Bad-Dürkheim (then part of the Kingdom of Bavaria), Friedrich grew up in Kallstadt, a village tucked away in the lush wine-growing valleys lining the Rhine river to the south of Frankfurt. Will Trump now build a golf course along the Rhine, as he did in Scotland…?
2. Wolfgang Münchau on the use of lawfare against Trump. Münchau is again making a point that you won’t hear from many other journalists, namely, that using the courts against him will most probably not work. He argues that, when it comes to trade policy, Trump has the better legal cards than his opponents. Münchau mentions some of the legal provisions that can be used to support this policy. But he also makes a much more fundamental point about trying to stop an elected American president from using existing trade law to justify his tariff policy: “Behind these serial misjudgements lies a deeper problem. One of the reasons why centrist, liberal democracy is in retreat is its tendency towards lawfare. The German military historian Carl von Clausewitz described war as the continuation of policy with other means. Lawfare is the continuation of policies through the courts. If you don’t win elections, you still have the courts. This is an abuse of the legal system. Democracy is not meant to work that way.” I think Münchau stole that line from the great British jurist Jonathan Sumption, who made exactly this point, in precisely these terms, in his book Trials of the State. But then journalists are allowed to plagiarise with impunity. I have recommended Sumption’s book on previous occasions. It teaches us why conflicts of value are best solved politically, not juridicially, a point that used to be understood by those calling themselves liberal. Tempi passati.
3.My third pick is a thought-provoking essay by Konrad Hummler and Ivan Adamovich on whether the current administration pursues a worked-out strategy. Hummler is an entrepreneur and commentator on financial and political matters, while Adamovich is the CEO of Private Client Bank. The essay has just been published by the Swiss-based Progress Foundation. The authors use economic data to define the scope within which Trump’s administration has to operate. In other words, they start by exploring the challenges that any American President would face, irrespective of his or her political leanings. From such a perspective, Trump’s policy has, like any ideology applied by political actors. They authors see Trump’s strategy as an essentially defensive one by a hegemon who knows it has to change in order to extend his hegemony. Here is a summary of the argument by the authors:
“European discussion of US president Donald Trump, his entourage and his leadership style is principally characterised by attempts to explain matters through the lens of psychology or the political sciences; most submissions take a moralising tone and are correspondingly normative and judgemental, accusing the president of stupidity, malice or both. By contrast, this position paper will attempt to think through the notion of a relatively consistent agenda on the part of the Trump administration. Working from the economically underpinned belief that the position of the USA as a global hegemon is unlikely to be tenable for much longer, it is no great leap to assume that the Trump administration has a worked-out exit scenario. The breaches of trust it has perpetrated, even with its closest allies and friends, point in such a direction, as do its economically counter-productive import tariffs and, last but not least, its noxious behaviour on the diplomatic stage – towards the elected Ukrainian president Zelenskyy, for example. The situation of a hegemon is invariably an awkward one in that it gives rise to a kind of “commons”, with the familiar problems of overuse and freeloading – of which the USA accuses Europe in particular at every opportunity. The key consideration here, however, is the financial burden on the hegemon, whose contribution is not fully compensated and becomes increasingly difficult to bear.”
HOPE YOU ENJOY THE READ.
HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND!