Issue:
December 2024
The world braces as Donald Trump musters his forces for America’s ‘great debasement’
Sunday evenings in November brought a new weekly obsession: watching the BBC television drama Wolf Hall. It’s about the life of Thomas Cromwell, arch fixer to England’s King Henry VIII. The new series started just a few days after the U.S. presidential election, and sometimes I have found myself trying to fight off comparisons between the bloated egos of Good King Hall – a masterclass of acting by Damian Lewis – and Donald Trump. Both take pleasure in observing the effects on others of their capricious exercise of power.
Granted that Wolf Hall’s elaborate Tudor costumes bear no resemblance to the coterie of Trump courtiers at Mar-a-Lago, and that thus far, Trump hasn’t claimed to rule by divine right or had any of his wives and counsellors beheaded. To his credit, Henry was a highly cultured Renaissance patron of the arts – as well as being a violent paranoid brute – whereas Trump is reputed to prefer books with lots of pictures and to have ghastly taste.
One of Henry’s lesser-known achievements resonates in the age of Trump. Between 1544 and 1551, Henry ordered the amount of gold and silver in coinage to be cut and in some cases replaced entirely with base metal.
The ‘Great Debasement’ of Tudor England was a seminal event in the history of money. In today’s world of floating exchange rates an equivalent would be the inflation unleashed by the opening of the monetary sluice gates during the Covid pandemic, and the supply-side whammies that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In 2024, discontent over rising prices has prompted voters to punish incumbent parties, including the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, which in October lost its outright majority in the Lower House for the first time since 2009. In the U.S., there’s a consensus that the two main issues that gave Trump and the Republican Party control of the executive branch and both houses of Congress were anger at the cost of living and high levels of illegal immigration. And yet, if fully implemented, Trump’s pledges promise to fuel inflation, and may even trigger a debt and dollar crisis. Trump calls tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” He has yet to concede that they will make goods sold in America more expensive – in addition to wrecking international commerce. According to the Peterson Institute, behind Trump’s tariff walls American consumers will pay an extra $2,500 a year. A Harris poll conducted after the November election found 59% of Republicans conceding that tariffs will increase prices – a stunning example of turkeys voting for Christmas.
The same economic illogic pervades another signature policy of Trump, the great crackdown on immigration. On January 20, his first day in office, Trump has vowed to declare a national emergency and order the military to begin deporting 11 million undocumented migrants. Yet slashing the supply of labour will inevitably push up the cost of production. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 40% of the farm labour force is made up of undocumented immigrants. They also keep costs down in U.S. construction.
In an article entitled “Deporting immigrants could hurt housing”, USA Today cites an estimate by the National Association of Home Builders that immigrants account for 25% of the construction workforce and almost a third of jobs in allied trades. The newspaper doesn’t say how many are “undocumented” but notes that foreign-born construction workers earn 24% less than those born in the U.S. The inevitable outcome of deporting these workers is that house building will slow and buying a housing will become even less affordable for those on lower incomes, who turned out in droves on November 5 to vote for Trump and the Republicans.
A third plank of Trump’ economic policy is to lower taxes. This will spur consumer spending and in an inflationary environment that will add rocket fuel to inflation. To press the lid down on rising wages and prices, the Federal Reserve will need to raise interest rates, increasing the cost of mortgages, consumer debts and government borrowing. Tax cuts mean less revenue to pay a ballooning bill on government debt – unless, as Trump and his supporters fervently believe, the American economy will be firing on all cylinders, with Treasury coffers overflowing.
Trump’s picks to help usher in his “golden age” for America are a motley crew. For instance, opponents have described Tulsi Gabbard, his nominee for director of national intelligence, with oversight of the CIA, NSA and a host of other U.S. spy agencies, as an “unpaid agent of Vladimir Putin”. That’s one interpretation of Gabbard’s claim that the Joe Biden administration and NATO had provoked the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by ignoring Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”. In 2022, she also echoed longstanding Kremlin propaganda by posting on Twitter “undeniable facts” about secret U.S. biolabs in Ukraine. "Instead of trying to cover this up, the Biden-Harris administration needs to work with Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the U.N. to immediately implement a ceasefire for all military action in the vicinity of these labs until they're secured," she said. At the time, a commentator on Russian state media referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.”
In war-ravaged Syria, Gabbard has defended Russian airstrikes carried out at the request of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and in 2017 met the ruthless dictator, saying he was not an enemy of the U.S. In 2019, she called on Trump to end his trade war with China and spoke out against the remilitarization of Japan. “Her judgement is non-existent,” Trump’s onetime national security adviser John Bolton told CNN.
Pete Hegseth, the nominee for secretary of defence, is a fellow Army National Guard veteran who came to Trump’s notice thanks to hosting the Fox & Friends talk show on Trump’s favourite TV channel, Fox News. Unusually for a prospective head of the Pentagon, Hegseth specialises in denouncing America’s military leadership. “The Left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace. We must wage a frontal assault,” he wrote in his recent book, The War on Warriors. He lampoons the Pentagon’s current military ethos as “We will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything!”
Equally unorthodox is the president-elect’s choice for secretary of health. Known principally as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, John F. Kennedy Jr. is also determined to take on Big Food, which he blames for making Americans sick and obese. This part of his radical agenda appeals to nutritionists and the liberal-left of American politics, like Bernie Sanders. It would be astonishing if Trump were to give it his full backing. A photo posted by Trump to X shows Kennedy holding a McDonald’s burger, seated across from Trump and Elon Musk aboard a private plane. Trump is grinning at Kennedy’s obvious discomfort. Kennedy has said that he is “not a church boy”. According to the Wall Street Journal, he is a recovering heroin addict who attends daily 12-step meetings. Senators are also expected to question him about an allegation that he sexually assaulted a woman in the late 1990s.
Trump has appointed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to shrink the federal government, with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy as co-adviser in a new department of government efficiency, or DOGE. For relief from the air-punching, high-testosterone swagger of Musk, who intends to slash $2 trillion from $6.75 trillion in annual federal spending, I turned to the cool, spare and sardonic prose of George Will in the Washington Post. “Debt service (13.1 percent of fiscal 2024 spending) is not optional and is larger than defence (12.9 percent), which Trump wants to increase. Entitlements (principally Social Security and Medicare) are 34.6 percent, and by Trumpian fiat are sacrosanct. So, Musk’s promise is to cut about 30 percent of the total budget from a roughly 40 percent portion of the budget, politics be damned,” Will points out.
Before turning MAGA-red-in-tooth-and-claw, Musk was a disdainful critic of Trump. Their feted bromance may not last the distance. Trump’s promise to “drill baby drill” for gas and oil does not mesh with Musk’s commitment to sustainable energy and running the world’s most famous brand of electric car. Neither does Trumpian bashing of China sit well with a billionaire who has scrupulously avoided criticising the Chinese Communist Party to protect Tesla’s gigantic factory in Shanghai and its lucrative share of the Chinese EV market.
In November, Biden finally gave permission to Ukraine to fire American ATACMS missiles into Russian territory. It was an apparent response to the deployment of 10,000 North Korean troops to fight against Ukraine. Biden’s decision prompted Donald Trump Jr. to post on Musk’s X (formerly Twitter): “The military-industrial complex seems to want to make sure they get World War III going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives.” He went on: “Gotta lock in those trillions. Life-be-damned imbeciles.”
The editor of BBC radio news asked their diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, who was in Ukraine’s city of Dnipro, for his reaction. “If you’ll allow me to be a little undiplomatic correspondent for a moment, Donald Trump Junior’s tweet is fairly stupid, and I think most people would recognise that,” Adams replied. “Clearly, this is not designed to trigger an escalation in the war,” he added. “It is to try and bolster Ukraine’s position, ahead of possible peace talks that Donald Junior’s father might try and preside over when he comes into office next year, something that President Zelensky has indicated he might be interested in being a part of.”
In recent weeks, various retired figures from the British security and defence establishment have been briefing the media on possible “realist” outcomes to the Ukraine war. “Ultimately, this is not about territory. It’s about sovereignty. If we push Ukraine into a position where it has to accept unarmed neutrality alongside loss of territory, that will embolden Putin to a degree that makes Europe’s position highly perilous,” Alex Younger, head of the Secret Intelligence Agency (MI6) told the BBC. “But it also puts Trump on risk because I think he would own a fiasco if he attempts to go down that route, and I think he will come to see that,” Younger continued. “If there is a land-for- peace deal, regrettable, of course, but accompanied by commitments, probably short of NATO if it is to be realistic, to the residual Ukraine, Europe is in an incomparably stronger position. That’s the vital ground of the conversation. Putin will be very, very focused on this in his conversations with Donald Trump.”
It raises the question of whether Trump is up to such a momentous task of diplomacy. His conduct so far does not inspire much confidence.
Peter McGill is a former FCCJ president and Tokyo correspondent of the Observer. Now based in the UK, he is writing a book about Japan.
