Features

A mutant personality

Don­ald Trump is often com­pared to the likes of right winger Le Pen, Eu­roscep­tic Farage or po­lit­i­cal show­men Berlus­coni. Yet, none of these de­fine the mu­tant per­son­al­ity of the ty­coon who be­came US pres­i­dent last month. Trump is even dif­fer­ent from other US pop­ulists, such as for­mer gov­er­nor Huey Long, who took of­fice pledg­ing to nail the wealthy to the wall. Trump is a com­plex mix. He pro­poses re­duc­ing busi­ness reg­u­la­tion, cut­ting cor­po­rate tax and lim­it­ing the high­est tax bracket to 25%, thus ben­e­fit­ing the most wealthy. Yet, he also wants to free 75 mil­lion low-earn­ers from taxes, de­spite the es­ti­mated cost for doing so amount­ing to five bil­lion dol­lars. It is not clear what he will do about de­mands to raise the min­i­mum wage. Yet he has ruled out cut­ting pub­lic pen­sions. Al­though a mil­lion­aire, Trump was never the Wall Street can­di­date, and in fact he gar­nered votes in the Rust Belt, tra­di­tional De­mo­c­rat states and among those hard­est hit by the cri­sis. The pro­tec­tion­ism Trump pro­poses hardly fits with the fact that one out of every 14 jobs in the US de­pends on in­ter­na­tional trade. Mean­while, his staffing of his ad­min­is­tra­tion with rich fig­ures with a joint for­tune of 100 bil­lion dol­lars lies un­easily with his pop­ulism. Trump favours con­tin­u­ing the move to­wards iso­la­tion­ism begun by Barack Obama. Rus­sia and China are rub­bing their hands be­cause the slo­gan Make Amer­ica Great Again im­plies a re­nun­ci­a­tion of the coun­try's role as the de­fender of democ­racy. And the main loser in this strat­egy is Eu­rope, which will have to find 90 bil­lion dol­lars a year to keep a level of se­cu­rity that until now has been pro­vided for free by Wash­ing­ton. / R.R.

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