Opinion
Donald Trump is thrashing about wildly as if to escape somehow the fate that awaits him in the US midterm elections in three weeks. He thinks he is impressing the world with his immense power. In truth, he is demonstrating the impotence of power.
His biggest political problem is one of his own making, with a little help from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu: the misbegotten war on Iran. Trump’s words from February will ring through the years. After Netanyahu’s hour-long pitch to Trump’s inner cabinet for America to join his proposed war, the US president casually responded “sounds good to me”, according to New York Times reporting which has not been denied.
His decision to wage that war, in disrupting the global oil supply, fated him to break the three promises that most directly affect the living standards of America’s people.
He promised cheaper petrol; it’s more expensive. He promised lower prices; they’re higher. He promised lower interest rates; they’re higher, too. As those costs have risen, Trump’s approval rating has fallen.
Unable to extricate himself from his war, he’s tried to shrug off the importance of the cost of living: “You know what I really love? I love the inflation.”
That impressed no one, of course. So now he’s trying a couple of desperate measures abroad to cut the cost of fuel and repeating some tired distractions at home.
Will he succeed in bringing down fuel costs? His first move, earlier this month, was to demand that the Europeans release more oil from their strategic reserves. The US president announced a great win on October 3: “Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked diesel oil.”
There would be a fresh supply of 100 million barrels of fuel entering the world market, he said. This would be helpful but hardly transformative; the world burns a little more than that every day. But, unfortunately, it was misleading. It turned out to be a re-announcement. There’d been an agreement in March for the rich democracies, including the US, to release 400 million barrels from their stocks. About 100 million had yet to flow. So this new statement was merely a promise to fulfil the March deal.
Next, Trump asked Russia to release extra oil, which Vladimir Putin is only too happy to do. Because the US led the world in banning purchases of Russian oil to punish it for invading Ukraine.
On Friday, Trump excitedly said that Putin would release 300,000 tonnes of diesel fuel immediately, another 500,000 tonnes in the US election month of November, and another one million tonnes afterwards.
Prices, Trump wrote, “will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!” But 300,000 tonnes are only enough for half of one day of US diesel consumption and make no difference to the global market.
This deal, like the earlier one, is trivial, as reflected in market prices. The price of Brent Crude remains unimpressed, around $US100, compared to $US70 before his war.
It’s actually worse than useless. Because it opens the sanctions spigot for Putin without making a material change to the oil supply. Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelensky called it a “weak” move and a “gift” to Putin.
Almost immediately, Trump went on to make another fantasy declaration. Russia and Ukraine had agreed to a ceasefire on each other’s oil assets, he said. That would protect oil production. But this was “news to everyone”, responded Zelensky.
It was in 1965 that the noted scholar of strategy Hans Morgenthau described US president Lyndon Johnson as demonstrating “the impotence of power”. It became a famous commentary on the US prosecution of its war on Vietnam. Trump learned nothing from that quagmire and now has one of his own.
Powerless to deal effectively with the real problems of war and oil supply, Trump is making new attempts at distraction. But he’s using manoeuvres he’s used before. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that they failed to achieve his aims the first time around.
In the past five days, Trump has revisited these three greatest hits of his vengeance project, all of which ended as great flops.
First, he revived his attempt of 2022 to sue Hillary Clinton for conspiring with the FBI to create “Russiagate”. That effort ended in humiliation for Trump. The District Court fined him almost $US1 million and said his case was “completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose”.
On the same day last week, Trump resuscitated a year-old bid to sack Lisa Cook, one of the governors of the Federal Reserve Board. The Supreme Court ruled against Trump on this matter four months ago, and now he’s concocted a panel of his own deputies to investigate her for supposed mortgage fraud.
Third, he returned to one of his original grievances, against the news networks. His Department of Justice, it emerged, is investigating Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News. These are part of Trump’s so-called “fake news”, with the recent addition of Fox News.
After he tried to deny some of them access to the White House a month ago, these five networks suspended coverage in an act of solidarity against government news control. The courts have blocked the ban so far. Trump’s new move is to investigate them for supposed anticompetitive behaviour.
To top it off, he’s returned to his pursuit of fantasy geography. He’d earlier claimed to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” and the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”.
At a rally on the weekend, he grew more ambitious: “So, I was thinking of either the Atlantic or the Pacific. We call it Trump Ocean or Ocean of the Americans, something like that.”
His incompetence in war has trapped him in the impotence of power, which is about to be compounded with electoral rebuke and further loss of power at the midterms. We should expect more efforts at distraction, more flights of fantasy, as this reality descends.
Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.