Trump’s War Against Democracy and the Rules-Based World Order

Donald Trump’s regime is not only rapidly dismantling the constitutional democracy of the United States. It is also destroying the rules-based world order with brutal openness to replace it with the arbitrary power of “might is right.”

Building an axis of evil

The new rulers in Washington are evidently keen on building an axis of evil with Vladimir Putin’s terrorist state.  For that reason, they are no longer prepared to name that country as an aggressor at the UN and also shy away from mentioning its genocidal war crimes and the crimes committed against humanity in Ukraine.

Instead, Trump wants to force the invaded country to cede territory without effective security guarantees and, in line with Putin’s wishes, to renounce its membership bid of NATO.

He is also fixated on exploiting Ukraine’s moment of need to secure access to its mineral wealth.

Lies, lies and more lies

To this end, Trump has showered Ukraine and its president with lies and malicious slander from the Kremlin’s propaganda kitchen — culminating in the purely fictitious claim that Zelensky is “a dictator,” supposedly with an approval rating of “only 4%” among the Ukrainian population. (Later he pretended not to remember saying that at all).

The disgraceful and disgusting treatment to which Zelensky was then subjected during his visit to the White House definitively underlines that there is a method to Trump’s madness.

To please the dictator in the Kremlin, he abandons the Ukrainian people and dishonors the United States as a nation whose identity is based on standing up for freedom and self-determination around the world.

Vance as hitman

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Trumpists’ attacks on the civilized world go beyond the practices of unscrupulous great power politics — such as threats of violence and political and economic blackmail.

Trump and his propagandists, above all Elon Musk, are conducting a large-scale operation to manipulate the collective consciousness of democratic societies.

Their aim is to catapult the Western world into a “post-factual” age.  The criteria developed since the Enlightenment for distinguishing between lies and truth, fact and fiction are to be suspended.

Democracy redefined

This includes the attempt to appropriate terms with positive connotations in liberal societies in order to reverse their meaning. The fact that the term “democracy” is a primary target for Trump and his agitators in this sense was made clear by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference.

There, he denounced European states as undemocratic because their governments did not listen to the will of “the people” and suppressed dissenting opinions. By that, he meant far-right positions such as those of Germany’s pro-Kremlin AfD.

In doing so, Vance not only trivialized the targeted disinformation operations of autocratic powers such as Russia and China.  He also effectively denied democracies the right to defend themselves against this form of hybrid warfare.

A little history

Notably, the attempt by Vance and other Trump supporters to discredit Europe’s liberal democracies in this way is based on ideas that have been developed since the 1970s by the “Nouvelle Droite” — far-right intellectual circle in France.

According to them, the far right must achieve “cultural hegemony” over the social discourse in all Western societies by re-evaluating central concepts of liberalism.

In addition to the French roots, Vance’s thinking also hails back to 1930s Germany. At the time, the right-wing nationalist and pro-Nazi constitutional law expert Carl Schmitt wanted to replace parliamentary democracy with a democracy “by acclamation.”

This means that “the people” should give their unanimous approval to their supposedly infallible leader.  He can then invoke this approval when making his own arbitrary decisions, passing them off as an expression of the authentic will of the people.

Europe ill-equipped

Stunningly, the European far-right parties that follow this concept now don’t just enjoy the support of Putin’s Russia, but also of the U.S. administration.

European societies are completely ill-equipped against this general attack on the intellectual foundations of democracy — as was recently demonstrated in the German parliamentary elections.

The election campaign was almost exclusively dominated by the alleged complete failure of the democratic state in shaping migration policy.

In contrast, the extent of the disinformation warfare operations by means of which Russia massively interfered in the German election, and the covert sabotage operations with which the Kremlin is attacking the country, were barely mentioned.

There is no doubt that migration poses considerable problems — especially as murderous attacks committed by asylum seekers are becoming more frequent in Germany. However, it is fatal if this danger is viewed in isolation from Putin’s disinformation apparatus. 

Weaponizing migration

Putin has long been fond of instrumentalizing the issue of migration to portray the democratic constitutional state as being in a state of collapse and incapable of acting.

We would all do well to remember that Russia itself has produced waves of refugees, which it has used to destabilize Western societies.  For example, with its terrorist bombings against the Syrian civilian population, Russia drove over one and a half million Syrians to flee to Europe.

Remarkably, this connection was largely ignored in the German election campaign. The election results reflected this: More than a third of the German electorate voted for the pro-Kremlin parties AfD, Die Linke and BSW, while the democratic center once again shrank significantly.

Gripped by Putin’s and Trump’s propagandists, liberal democracy in Europe is eroding at an alarming rate.

Editor’s note: This article was first published in German in the online magazine “Perlentaucher”