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Trump’s America: A kleptocracy but not a police state
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: I want to talk about checks and balances in the US political system. I get so many questions about this of course, because the United States today is the principal driver of geopolitical uncertainty, of global economic uncertainty. And people want to understand, is this the end of globalization? Is it the end of US democracy?
Everyone has their knobs politically turned up to 11 on everything, and that's very undifferentiated. So, how do we think about this? I want to give you a few thoughts on what is and what isn't a permanent change. What is and what isn't a serious threat and concern. Particularly big picture on the nature of the US political system.
I've said a number of times that I consider the US to be by far the most kleptocratic and dysfunctional political system among all of the advanced industrial democracies. I've said that not just in the last few months, but for years now, and that predates Trump. Trump has sped up the kleptocratic impulses in the United States.
The second most powerful person in the White House on President Trump, at least for now with an official position, is also the wealthiest person on the planet who continues to own and run six companies. Obviously, it's kleptocratic. Trump is very much pay for play.
If you're a TikTok investor and you give him money, he flips his position on TikTok. Very direct, very dramatic, but the United States has been kleptocratic for decades. It is the country where if you have money, you can use it to gain access to power and that will get you outcomes you want. Whether it's a specific tax code or a specific regulation or lack thereof.
That is much more true in the US than it is in Canada or Germany or Japan or Australia or New Zealand, or the Nordics, any of the advanced industrial democracies, the rich democracies, right, which is the cohort that you look at when you think about the US political system.
And that's interesting because when Trump leans in on that kleptocracy, when he expands it it may make a number of business leaders and bankers uncomfortable. It's unseemly, but they're used to it. They know how that works. They already have their lobbyists and their pacts. They already have their comms teams, they've got their people on K Street lined up.
They already know what it means to pay for an inauguration and to get people that say they have access to the family of the administration and they can help you as a consequence. They're willing to spend money on that and to make favors for that, all of the offer internships for that, all of those things, right?
And as a consequence, you don't get pushback on that, right? If Trump is going to shake down a corporation or else, they'll pay. And that's true across the board. You don't see a lot of public courage as a consequence from the business environment in the US.
The US does not have a long-standing policy of authoritarianism. The US is not used to dictatorship. And so when Trump engages in things that feel like a direct threat to the rule of law on say the ability of law firms to conduct their core business, which is representing anyone vigorously, that deserves defense.
Yeah, a couple of firms will bend the knee, but there'll be a lot of internal pushback and most won't because that's something that is beyond the pale.
And I think the same thing is true about academic freedom. Is when the Trump administration says whether you like the politics or not, that they're going to cut off funding if you don't eschew some of the independence that you have exerted and you have as your right as you do as a public institution, as a university.
And that maybe they should take away your tax-free status, all that kind of thing. Then you see a couple of universities will bend the knee, but most won't. And there'll be very strong pushback on that.
And so what I think is happening is that the US is going to continue to become much more kleptocratic beyond Trump, and I don't see anything that's going to stop that. That is a serious problem long-term in terms of reputational capital for the United States, both domestically in attracting capital and also on the global stage.
But I also see significant pushback on authoritarian impulses, and I think it's far less likely that the US is slipping into dictatorship. And so when the Financial Times writes that the US is halfway towards becoming a police state, I say, "No, not at all."
The US may well be today the most unfree of advanced democracies, but it is not the most free of authoritarian states because it's not authoritarian. You still have an opposition party that you can vote for and that says whatever they want.
I don't feel in any way like I am potentially going to risk arrest or my liberties by virtue of saying to you exactly what I think about what's happening domestically, internationally. If that starts to stop, believe me, you're going to hear from me before you hear it from somebody else. So that's one point.
Second point is that for Trump to be successful in subverting the checks and balances on him, if he wants to win as a revolutionary president, he has to do two different things. The first is he has to actually erode those institutions, those norms, those values, he has to weaken them. But then he has to actually execute on being the most powerful.
Because if you want to live by the law of the jungle, you have to actually be the effective apex predator. And what we've seen is that Trump has been reasonably effective at not paying attention to rule of law norms.
Look at trade treaties, USMCA. He's completely abrogated by virtue of saying, "Nope, national security emergency, I'm just putting tariffs on." That's clearly not what the Mexicans and Canadians signed up for. He doesn't care. And he is doing that with reckless abandon in all sorts of different places domestically and around the world.
But to be the effective apex predator, you have to not only erode the norms and values, but then you have to actually perform. What we're seeing is that having a fight with literally everyone simultaneously, your adversaries and your allies internationally and domestically turns out to be really hard.
I mean, even the mighty lion doesn't go after an entire herd of wildebeests simultaneously. You pick off an injured one, a little one, maybe a juvie, right? And what Trump is finding out is that he's going after a herd of wildebeest and he's getting kicked in the head.
He's done that internationally with, let's put 145% tariffs on China, the second biggest, strongest, most powerful economy in the world. And by the way, with a political system that's much more capable of waiting out and taking pain than the Americans are, because it's an actual authoritarian regime with a multi-generational rule from a communist party that is very consolidated.
So the Chinese are saying, "Oh yeah, we'll hit you back." And now Trump is saying, "Uh-oh, maybe bad idea." And he's also seeing that, for example, with his decision to go after Fed Chief Jerome Powell. He said how horrible Powell is and, "I should fire him. I should get rid of him." And a few days later he said, "Well, I'm not going to fire Powell."
Well, it's not like Powell's done anything differently. He's not behaving in any way that Trump would want, but Trump has recognized that trying to kick Powell in the head is a really bad idea because the markets are throwing up all over it and the business community and other countries and his own advisors.
It's harder to get that feedback to Trump because he has a group of advisors, some of whom are very capable, some of whom are completely incompetent, but all of whom are far more loyal and therefore far less willing to give him information he does not like.
But the bigger the obvious failures are, the more clear it is that you can't fight all the wildebeest simultaneously the more that information is going to get through to Trump and we are seeing that start to happen.
So, in other words, I do see snapback functions that are constraining what Trump is trying to accomplish. They are not coming from rule of law. They're not coming from the established institutions, which turn out to be a lot weaker than a lot of people had hoped or believed.
But they are coming from other powerful forces domestically and internationally that are capable of standing up and saying, "No, we're not going to take that." And you all know courage is contagious. You suddenly see some big guns that are coming out and saying, "No, we're not going to take it," and that actually provides space for other people to do it too.
And so at the end of the day, leading by example really matters, especially when something's happening that is obviously deeply damaging to yourself, to your family, to your colleagues, to your business, to your country, and to the world. And I think that's playing out right now.
Don't call me an extraordinary, unrelenting optimist. It's not that I am an optimistic person by nature, but this is coming from analysis. I'm more than capable of telling you when I think things are going to hell and predicting things that I really don't want to have happen.
This, on the other hand, is something I would really like to see happen, which is effective checks and balances on unhinged decision-making and I am starting to see that some of that is playing out. That's it for me, and I hope everyone's doing well. I'll talk to you all real soon.
Bukele's Bitcoin gamble in El Salvador
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, kicking off your week with a Quick Take. Hope everyone's doing well. I thought I would talk about El Salvador, a surprising amount of news coming out of this comparatively small country.
First of all, you've got a president who's been in power now for about a year, Nayib Bukele, he's all of 39 years old and 90% approval ratings, pretty consistent over the last year. And in part, that's because there's been massive violence and huge economic problems and extraordinary corruption in the country. And this is a guy who was a former advertising executive, he was a local mayor, and ran with a lot of charisma, with of course, an enormous amount of social media savvy. In fact, if you follow him on social media, he kind of styles himself the Elon Musk of the Northern Triangle, which is not really a great thing I grant you. The Northern Triangle is like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. And I mean, I guess if there is one such person that has to be Elon Musk, he's the guy.
But the point is he's really into showing himself as being hip, and technology savvy, and in the moment, and not in anybody's pocket, and I can do whatever I want. And indeed, he has been doing pretty much anything he wants. He said he was going to jail people in El Salvador, in his country, that broke the lockdown. The court said you didn't have the right to do it. He did it anyway. And he occupied parliament with military forces. He's removed his top judges, ignoring the legal process that needs to occur to make that happen. I mean, it feels like there are literally no checks and balances legally on Bukele in El Salvador right now. It's kind of like a Hungary Victor Orban type situation, except when there's no real opposition and the entire population is in favor. And by the way, no European Union either.
Now, there is the equivalent of a check and balance on Bukele and that's not a formal international structure, but rather the fact that his economy is really dependent on the United States. They use the US dollar as currency, and they need support from the IMF because their economy continues to deteriorate. He's handled coronavirus relatively well in terms of spread of cases and whatnot, I mean, almost in a Chinese type way, but that hasn't helped them in terms of getting hit with this massive global recession, the way everybody else has. And if you want support from the IMF, he would need to be much more transparent in the way he governs, which he's not prepared to do. In fact, just this weekend, he arrested yet another high-level opposition member on very dubious corruption claims. And at the same time, disbanded an OAS, Organization American States, unit that was meant to engage in anti-corruption oversight in El Salvador, supported by the United States, said, "I'm not doing that."
So clearly, he is indifferent to the fact that the Americans are not going to allow the IMF, and America's the biggest stakeholder there to engage in further lending. So what do you do? Well, I mean, if you're most leaders, you start putting capital controls on and try to have more direct control of your local economy and your currency, which is really hard to do when you're dollarized. But if you're Bukele, you do something completely unique, which is you say that Bitcoin is going to be the legal tender of El Salvador going forward.
He said, he's going to put legislation in front of the Congress. It will certainly be approved. This will be the first country in the world where Bitcoin is legal tender. Now to be clear, he is not going to be able to make the dollar illegal because a lot of people won't be able to use Bitcoin. Also, if you've watched Bitcoin, it's massively volatile, enormous swings, from dizzying highs to staggering lows sometimes over the course of hours and days. And I mean, if you're a relatively poor person, you don't want your currency to have that level of uncertainty. That's like all of these retail investors invested in GameStop and some of them made millions of dollars and a lot of them were wiped out. And that's why you kind of worry about what happens when the average citizen starts treating the marketplace as a casino.
And here, Bukele is basically saying that's going to be forced upon them. He can get away with it because of his extraordinary popularity, but the challenges for the average El Salvador are really significant, not to mention the fact that Bitcoin is itself hard to transact and expensive to transact in. And so, this is a very interesting new way to think about de-dollarizing. And a bunch of smaller economies around the world that don't have great relationships with the United States and are facing enormous financial pressure, especially if inflation starts picking up in the next year, are going to find this to be very worthwhile watching. It's a serious experiment. A lot of Sub-Saharan African countries, other Central American countries, maybe even some Asian countries. Sri Lanka would be an interesting one to watch because they are in a very similar economic position.
And again, capital controls would be hard for them. But ultimately this is not the thing if you are a crypto advocate that makes you say, "Bitcoin to the moon." It is an interesting thing, geopolitically, because it's one more way that the United States, by trying to weaponize its dollar, to use it as a political and economic club to get countries more aligned with the Washington consensus or else. China is a hedge for some of those countries, Bitcoin is increasingly a hedge for at least one of those countries itself. So pretty interesting stuff. Let's watch El Salvador closely.
Final point. Let's keep in mind that one of the reasons El Salvador is important in the United States is because of so many illegal immigrants coming out of El Salvador because they have no opportunity for themselves and their family, through Mexico, into the United States. It was a problem for Trump, is a problem for Biden, for Kamala Harris. The fact that this president is trying to avoid getting leveraged under America's influence by moving to Bitcoin is something that will make Bitcoin more problematic for US regulators. And so if anything, there's probably more likely to be a backlash when you've got a whole bunch of people saying, "Bitcoin uses too much energy. It's not green. It's used by people that want to engage in illegal activities." And now, it's currency for Nayib Bukele, who's a problem for American national security.
So on balance of, I was going to say, is this a good move for Bitcoin or a bad move for Bitcoin? Geo-politically, I would say it's actually a bad move for Bitcoin, but it's an interesting one for the president of El Salvador. 90% approval, who knew? Okay. Take it easy, avoid fewer people. Talk to you soon.
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