With all its spectacle and chaos, Donald Trump’s shock and awe strategy is both domestic and global. Domestically, Trump and his agents are targeting the American government and the country’s democratic norms, institutions, the rule of law, civil society, the Constitution, overall well-being and sense of normalcy. Trump is ruling as the country’s first elected autocrat; he is quickly acquiring much more corrupt power over all aspects of American life. The Germans have a word for this: “Gleichschaltung.”

Internationally, Trump is embracing a type of militant nationalism whereby the United States is abandoning long-standing alliances and the rules-based international order. This pivot includes enacting a historic global tariff regime and a fundamental reassessment of free trade and globalization.  

Donald Trump’s shock and awe campaign has been so effective, largely because he is a high-dominance leader. This is both a strength and a weakness.

Donald Trump’s high-dominance leadership style means that he is willing to smash and bypass existing norms to accomplish his goals. Trump’s MAGA followers love him because of this and how such behavior makes him look like a man of action and a great man of history who is willing to do everything necessary for people like them. This same disregard for the norms and institutions can also create widespread confusion and anxiety, which can ultimately backfire and otherwise interfere with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement’s revolutionary political project.

Instability is antithetical to America’s and the world’s economic stability. Economic instability and the larger societal disruptions it causes are the fuel for authoritarian populism.

The Wall Street Journal and other platforms and spokespeople for the moneyed classes and global capital and finance have been repeatedly signaling their growing concerns about how Trump’s economic policies, specifically his global tariff regime, will cause a recession or depression. To that point, Trump’s initial tariff regime was so disruptive it is estimated that U.S. stock markets lost trillions of dollars in value over a week-long period earlier this month.

Related

In an attempt to make better sense of the Trump administration’s shock and awe (and "shock therapy") approach to the United States and global political economy, the logic of the Trump global tariff spectacle, economic warfare in the 21st century and how these huge questions of global trade and economics impact the pocketbooks and wallets of everyday Americans, I recently spoke with Edward Fishman. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. Fishman's new book is "Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare," which has been called “masterful” by the Financial Times and “a compelling and dramatic narrative about the new shape of geopolitics” by the Wall Street Journal.

Edward Fishman previously served at the U.S. State Department on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as the Russia and Europe Sanctions Lead, at the Pentagon as an advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at the U.S. Treasury Department as special assistant to the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. His writing and analysis have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Politico, and on NPR.

What story are you seeing when you view Trump’s tariffs and larger economic shock and awe regime through your expert lenses? What is the larger narrative?

In some ways, Donald Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs marks the acceleration of a long-running trend rather than a break from it. Even before Trump returned to the White House, we were already living in an age of economic warfare. Sanctions, tariffs, and export controls have become the tools of choice for great powers competing with one another. That’s because we’re stuck with a global economy still built for the peaceful post–Cold War era of the 1990s, while the geopolitical environment has turned much more confrontational. Every new tariff or sanction is essentially a patchwork effort to retrofit the global economy for this new era.

What’s unprecedented, though, is that Trump isn’t just targeting adversaries — he’s going after our traditional allies, too. He treats a trade deficit with Canada or Japan as just as dangerous as........

© Salon