Donald Trump, accompanied by his attorney Todd Blanche, leaves a New York court on May 7, 2024. Photo: Win McNamee/AP.
By Franco Vielma – Mar 7, 2025
Although the new Donald Trump administration has yet to complete its first 40 days, given the cascade of events and decisions from the White House, this period has seemed like months or years.
This is not a compliment or an allusion to its effectiveness. Rather, in reality, it is a reference to Trump’s government methodology. It has hypersaturated the space of decisions, politics, and public opinion with a bombardment of multidirectional measures.
Imposition, withdrawal, reimposition, and resuspension of tariffs on Mexico and Canada. Tariff measures on Chinese products. Threats of trade war measures against Europe.
Possessing “one way or another” Greenland, the Panama Canal, annexing Canada, or renaming the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.”
Not to mention Ukraine, nor the country’s de facto loss of nation-state status under the United States’ charge now that an agreement for minerals and rare earth metals has been imposed on Ukraine to guarantee Washington’s insertion in the race for new technologies in the coming years.
In terms of Venezuela, sending Richard Grenell in an apparent dĂ©tente and a strategic policy for Venezuela on a new plane but then revoked Chevron’s License 41 at the request of “the crazy Cubans” in Congress.
Undoubtedly, Washington’s international policy has been aimed at forcing everyone to sit on the edge of their chairs. It is constituted of contradictory measures, constant pressure actions, declarations that come and go, unpredictable decisions, analyses and estimates on events that end up going up in smoke from one moment to the next, all at the speed of a government march that can be as successful as erratic, depending on the context.
We have already seen the well-deserved shouting at Zelensky in the Oval Office. We have even heard about the executive order for the return of plastic straws at establishments.
From this point on, a detailed review of what has happened these past few weeks is completely unnecessary. We have all heard in some way about what Trump has done. Our memory is still very fresh despite the overflow of events.
Somehow, even though we already knew the billionaire president, much of what is happening now seems new. Or at least it is shocking because it is disruptive.
We knew the president’s governing style during his first term. Now, it is unfolding in a more unbridled and forceful way because of the high incidence of the “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) sector in government in this new stage.
We are talking about a Trump “on steroids,” more experienced, more cynical. After four years out of government, he was vilified, prosecuted, convicted, and even the victim of an assassination attempt.
But we are also talking about an ageing and decadent tycoon, with Elon Musk and JD Vance as his right and left hands, with the plutocracy in full exercise at the top of the decision-making process.
The art of pressure
What is the common denominator of this extensive list of actions and situations that Trump is outlining inside and outside the United States?
In all cases and on all fronts, the “pressure” factor figures as Trump’s political mechanism and style.
Years ago, in 1987, he made a “confession of his part” in his style of doing real estate deals in a book co-written with Tony Schwartz called The Art of the Deal.
It is no coincidence that the name is an allusion to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, given that for Trump, business is also a form of warfare. So, this construction of principles could be the one that governs his methods in politics today.
In his book, he listed some key approaches and tactics: have the ambition to always go for more, know the context, maximize your options on the board, leave your personal mark, use instinct, persist, utilize crises to the benefit of your objectives, and negotiate with force and cunning, immorally if necessary.
In 1987, he explained how he bought the Commodore Hotel, inducing its owner’s desperation through pressure and blackmail, even exercising unfair and probably illegal practices.
To create pressure, but for what?
In reference to the international issue, the nature and purposes of Trump’s decisions are as diverse as the multidirectional actions he is executing on various fronts.
It is clear that he is not pressuring China, Canada, and Mexico—major US trading partners—over fentanyl or immigrants. He is actually pursuing a new trade policy favorable to his country by creating disadvantages for his partners to maximize the possibilities for domestic development, with the aim of fostering a new industrial dynamic.
In the case of Mexico and Canada, he wishes to continue the path initiated by ending NAFTA and signing the USMC in 2020 in order to create comparative advantages favorable to the United States. In the case of China, he aims to halt the country’s rise as a global industrial power.
This leads towards the push for changing the maps, annexing Canada to gain access to the Arctic’s resources and new shipping lanes via Greenland and extracting crude oil in international waters in the Gulf of “America” in the future. Dominating the Panama Canal and its major ports, expelling China, implies controlling a crucial logistical and transportation artery in the coming scenarios of the trade—and possibly military—war against China.
In the case of Ukraine and Europe, Trump is also redesigning political relations, which has implications for reengineering strategic cohesion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The terms are changing to the point of inducing an arms race that, in the short term, will benefit European arms companies but, in the medium term, will also benefit US manufacturers.
The war in Ukraine and the Western aid stripped Europe of Soviet weaponry that has been largely replaced by US weaponry. So, contracts between one side of the Atlantic and the other will endure beyond Trump.
The tycoon needs the ultimate dissolution of Ukraine as a state to perpetuate its dependent proxy status with the West, especially if Musk and “the Big 7” possess the Ukrainian land and minerals needed for the technology race. At this point, the West, having lost to Russia, needs an end to the shooting to kick-start contracts on the ground.
The multiple pressure factor is based on forcing negotiations, decisions, and actions of those involved.
Trump disrupts, burdens, harasses, and blackmails for the sake of getting something in return. He generates crises to take advantage of them, influences the playing field to maximize his options and wishes, and imposes a personal brand above all, as high and in large letters as any of his towers.
This imperialism, I insist, on steroids, aims at transforming the current correlation and composition of the economy, the flow of global capital, and the condition of resource territories to make them favorable to the United States. Trump fervently desires to halt the decline and end of the American century.
The constant pressure will not necessarily translate into “Make America Great Again” as it reproduces the contradiction and the crisis of elites on an international scale, which collides with globalization as an objective reality while increasing bellicosity and, in some cases, the rupture between the US and its traditional and strategic allies.
The United States is turning into a protectionist autarchy, ruled by a quasi-clerical conservative oligarchy at the top of politics.
Consequently, international trust will continue to be shattered because engaging in relations with the US involves risks. It occurs at the expense of the changes and swings of its pendulum policy, which reproduces its contradictions and externalizes them globally to the point of generating serious repercussions.
From this angle, Trump’s policy acquires an erratic, temperamental, unpredictable, and, consequently, dangerous dimension.
We do not know to what extent the United States will be able to capitalize on the gains the president will obtain from his international policy. However, it is almost certain that the current momentum of power, emerging economies, and new centers of gravity will collide in more dangerous ways with the United States.
These are difficult times to comprehend. Nevertheless, above many things, it must be admitted that the United States will probably fail to achieve some of its major objectives. In the long run, Trump is making an enormous contribution to US decline by reproducing strategic, methodological, and even philosophical contradictions in the Anglo-Western axis.
From the perspective of much of humanity that desires the end of US hegemony, Trump is surely not what we want, but perhaps he is what we need.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/SF
Franco Vielma
Franco Vielma is a Sociologist, writer. He is part of the Mision Verdad collective.
