Trump's MAGA agenda poses as anti-globalist--but masks a self-serving, chaotic new form of globalism.

[Celerity]

Donald Trump Is a Globalist

https://www.socialeurope.eu/donald-trump-is-a-globalist



No one has been more consistent in denouncing globalists and globalism than Donald Trump. Tariff may be his favorite word, but globalist is his preferred epithet. How ironic, then, that Trump and his second administration have emerged as an uber-globalist monstrosity. To be sure, Trump’s MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement is ostensibly about turning one’s back on the rest of the world. Echoing aviator Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist America First movement of the 1930s, its goal is to unwind the cross-border ties that have underpinned economic relations for decades.

Before MAGA, free and open trade was the order of the day. Countries like China and Russia were brought into the World Trade Organization on the assumption that integration with the global economy would nudge them toward political liberalization. Large numbers of migrants, skilled and unskilled, crossed into America every year, seeking economic opportunities that they could not find at home. But the liberal world order has now been replaced by Trump’s bewildering slew of tariffs, mostly directed against America’s longstanding friends and allies, and often-brutal deportation of migrants.

Moreover, whereas the United States previously anchored a global system of open capital markets, now Trump’s advisers are proposing extraordinary interventionist measures to usher in a new regime. Among other things, they want to convert short-term Treasury securities into very long-term bonds, an extraordinarily disruptive move that most bondholders would regard as a default. In each case, the Trump administration’s goal is to kick away the pillars of a system that many MAGA supporters no longer consider beneficial.

But the reality is that Trump is still fully engaged in the globalization game. His key adviser and financial backer, Elon Musk, has a vast international portfolio of business interests – notably in China – and Trump himself has real-estate holdings around the world. Such global interests are central to the new US policy. The only real card that Trump could play to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table is the prospect of a large inflow of US investment in Russian energy and minerals.

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