Image by Greg Rosenke.

Donald Trump hates Antifa. He hates late-night TV hosts, Democratic-controlled cities, and anyone who has ever challenged him in court. As of October, he officially hates the Nobel committee for not giving him a peace prize, despite his efforts to strong-arm its members into voting for him.

The president has gone after everyone he thinks has ever done him wrong. But there is a Venn diagram to his vendettas, an overlap in his circle of obsessions.

Map out his attacks, subtracting the purely personal and the primarily partisan, and you’ll see that they converge on a profound disgust for the liberal international order. That Trump has personally profited from that very global order — his portfolio of international real estate, his business’s reliance on global supply chains, the unacknowledged benefits he’s accrued from the international rule of law — makes no difference.

“Globalists” like Barack Obama, George Soros, and Emmanuel Macron have made fun of him, not fully accepting him into their ranks and refusing to acknowledge his brilliance with medals and awards. In the president’s skewed accounting ledger, the gatekeepers at the global country club who don’t want him as a member must be made to pay.

Trump has attacked the liberal international order in seemingly every conceivable way. He’s initiated a global trade war. He’s dismantled U.S. humanitarian assistance to impoverished lands and put pressure on allies to spend more money on war preparations, not welfare programs or foreign aid. He’s destroyed relationships with liberal allies like Canada and the non-Hungarian members of the European Union. He’s levied sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in an effort to shut it down. He’s gleefully ignored international law by embracing ICC scofflaws like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. And he’s committed his own crimes, like the extrajudicial murder of the crews of nine boats near the Venezuelan coast and five in the Pacific Ocean.

The United States had long been a pillar of the liberal international order. So, when Trump takes a sledgehammer to its base, he causes potentially irreparable damage to the reputation, power, and global position of the United States. Many Americans, particularly those in the political center, are aghast at the self-inflicted wounds this country is now suffering.

In other quarters, however, there’s celebration.

America’s right wing has long hated everything that shimmers in the distance beyond the territorial waters of this country. The U.N. gives it indigestion. Ditto the European Union, the Third World, and anything connected to universal human rights. The most reactionary elements of the Republican Party have blocked Washington’s ratification of international treaties, undermined global efforts to address threats like climate change, and claimed to spot Communist (or Islamist or terrorist) conspiracies behind every international institution and many nationalist movements. Such right-wingers have pushed to eliminate all forms of soft power in favor of beefed-up hard power. The ascendancy of Trump has provided them with an opportunity to force conventional conservatives from their party, while consolidating an America First position.

Elements of the left, too, have rejoiced in Trump’s globalism-bashing. The most predictable support has come from unions that believe the president’s tariffs will protect American jobs. But some leftists have also been hesitant to support the work of the now largely shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — even its distribution of AIDS medicines and climate funds — because of its legacy as a “destructive arm of American imperialism.” Some have even joined hands with Trump to........

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