The Genealogy of Trumpism

Trump’s policies seem to defy any logic. Analysts and historians are looking for predecessors. As Laurence Saint-Gilles shows, the closest parallel would be the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose entourage was riddled with Soviet agents who provided the American president with reasons to give in to the Stalinist diktat in post-war Europe. As in the case of Roosevelt, Trumpian policy is only rational in terms of Russian geopolitical interests.

The upheavals caused by the Trumpist revolution, both internationally and domestically, are such that they plunge observers into an abyss of perplexity. The changes underway are so rapid, so unprecedented, and so radical that they are overturning all our traditional points of reference and ways of thinking. Indeed, how could we “think the unimaginable” until recently¹: that the United States, inspirer, founder, and defender of the liberal international order established in 1945, would negotiate face to face with Putin’s Russia – guilty of having unleashed a war of aggression – a “peace plan” that would lead to the dismemberment of the Ukrainian state, or even its outright disappearance? How can the Western world’s leading democracy, which holds the world record for the longevity of a written constitution, scuttle itself by destroying its institutions and renouncing the fundamental principles that form its ideological foundation? How can it justify reneging on its international commitments, abandoning Ukrainian democracy in the midst of war, openly showing contempt for its allies, colluding with a Russian regime that presents itself as the enemy of Europe and the West? In short, how can we explain the madness that is dragging the United States into a spiral of frenzied self-destruction that nothing seems able to stop?

In the United States, as in the rest of the Western world, if this expression still has any meaning, the abundance of publications, blogs and podcasts devoted to the Trump phenomenon testifies to the collective anguish aroused by his upheavals. As we struggle to find a rational explanation for his erratic behavior, we are inclined to refer to pre-existing analytical grids, to look to American political history for the harbingers of catastrophe. We need to go back in time, in search of a precursor, an ideological filiation. During his campaign, Trump constantly referred to his illustrious predecessors, as if he were trying to point us in the right direction. Journalists, political scientists, and historians are forever tracing the genealogy of Trumpism. Yet, using a similar approach based on the study of historical precedents, their analyses lead to such contradictory conclusions that Donald Trump’s personality, style, and political thinking seem irreducible to any form of classification.

“Trump’s very 19^th Century politics” 

At the start of his first term, a common explanation was to see Donald Trump as a kind of free electron who could not relate to any of the mainstream currents of American foreign policy, since he stood apart from both Rooseveltian liberal internationalism – vigorously condemning nation-buiding foreign operations and US alliances – and the interventionism of the neo-conservative movement within his own party. As early as 2016, in an article for Politico, Thomas Wright denounced this error: “Trump is so obviously sui generis that it’s tempting to say his views are alien to the American foreign policy tradition. It’s just that these currents of thought have been dormant for some time²”. His precepts in this area (mercantilism, isolationism and populism) belong, according to this researcher, to an ideological corpus that predates the Second World War, dating back to the 19^th Century.

In the manner of General Andrew Jackson, president between 1829 and 1837, Donald Trump would embody American populism, capable of using force swiftly and decisively when the security of the United States requires it³. As for his “love” of protectionist barriers and high tariffs, Thomas Wright already saw this as a legacy of the presidency of William McKinley (1897-1901). During the recent presidential campaign, McKinley supplanted Andrew Jackson in the Trumpist pantheon. Donald Trump proudly claims his legacy, seeing this “successful businessman” as a true trailblazer. He even paid tribute to him in his inaugural speech, invoking a return to “America’s golden age” and promising to restore his name to the highest office in the land. On the face of it, McKinley seems well deserving of the nickname, “Tariff King”: as a representative from Ohio in 1890, he raised tariffs from 38% to 50%, and when he became president, he signed the Dingley Tariff in 1897, which went even further. However, if Trump were really inspired by McKinley, he would know that his tariff, far from working miracles, led to higher prices and the electoral rout of his own party in 1890. At the end of his life, McKinley “threw away his legendary protectionism⁴”.

Researcher Thomas Wright was also the first to note the analogies between the America First movement and Trump’s ideas. His hostile stance on U.S. alliances and international commitments echoes that of the unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination in 1940, Senator Robert Taft, an emblematic figure of the conservative isolationist movement who, before 1941, opposed U.S. aid to the United Kingdom and, after the war, criticized Harry Truman’s containment policy, believing that the United States had no interests in Western Europe. Moreover, Donald Trump’s sympathy for authoritarian regimes is reminiscent of Charles Lindbergh. The American aviation hero who led America First made no secret of his admiration for Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler.

However, analysts who trace the origins of Trump’s foreign policy back to this 1930s current are in turn making a mistake, argues Michael Kimmage in Foreign Affairs⁵. When America First developed, the United States had only modest military forces and had not yet achieved superpower status. The movement’s supporters wanted above all to maintain this situation and keep their country out of the conflict. Yet, while the current President wants to remove his country from international commitments, there is no indication that he wishes to see it withdraw from world affairs, as evidenced by his threats to annex Greenland or take back the Panama Canal, and to interfere in European affairs by supporting nationalist candidates.

So, some would rather see Donald Trump as the heir to President Theodore Roosevelt, the symbol of triumphant American imperialism at the beginning of the 20^th Century: after buying Alaska from the Russians (in 1867), the United States “liberated” Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spanish colonialism under President McKinley, and dug the Panama Canal under President Roosevelt. During the campaign, Musk said America had not had a stronger candidate since Theodore Roosevelt. Donald Trump is extremely flattered by this comparison, as he is one of the presidents he most admires. But as essayist David Gessner explains in the Washington Post, he undoubtedly worships him for all the wrong reasons⁶. In reality, there are many similarities between the two men. The similarity stems from their narcissistic personalities: as Roosevelt’s own daughter Alice wrote of her father, “he wanted to be the dead man at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.” But far from the simplistic caricature preserved in the collective memory, that of a “bellicose Trumpian brute,” according to Gessner, Roosevelt was a far more complex character, torn between two contradictory tendencies, pragmatism and idealism. Among the two tendencies Roosevelt detested most in politics were dogmatists, idealists who harm just causes through their bigotry. Roosevelt’s criticism could be applied to what we now call “wokists”, and has much to appeal to Donald Trump and his supporters. But, on the other hand, Gessner explains, Roosevelt hated those who were “too successful” just as much: “mercantilism for its own sake seemed contemptible to him, and the ‘predatory wealth’ of corporations and big capitalists appalled him.” It is all the more astonishing that Elon Musk invokes the legacy of a Theodore Roosevelt in his tweets, even though the latter considered oligarchs to be “the elite of the criminal class⁷”. According to Roosevelt, “efficiency for its own sake was, if not evil, at least amoral” if it was not put at the service of the greater good.

Thus, despite being regarded by his detractors as “racist, sexist, and imperialist”, “Roosevelt not only surfed the progressive wave, he practically founded it,” laying the foundations for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s future presidential program: “Throughout his career, he became increasingly vehement in his efforts to tame corporate power, support the poor, and equalize wealth. He paved the way for many of the programs implemented by his distant cousin, his Square Deal foreshadowing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. As president, he fought monopolies and fought for a living wage. As a Bull Moose candidate in 1912, he advocated universal suffrage and a social safety net including workers’ compensation, protection for the unemployed, and pensions for the elderly. Compassion for those less fortunate than himself became his guiding force⁸”.

It is unlikely, then, that Theodore Roosevelt would have recognized an heir in Donald Trump, who within his first 48 hours in the White House, repealed by executive order Joe Biden’s directives that expanded access to healthcare and health insurance for America’s middle and lower classes, and even blocked federal Medicaid funding. Had he known Donald Trump, Gessner believes, Roosevelt would certainly have hated him.

Trump vs Reagan 

When Donald Trump identifies with a great President like Ronald Reagan, he has no qualms plagiarizing his slogans. Make America Great Again has even become the acronym of the Trumpist Party. Yet few commentators have dared to draw a parallel between the two presidents although the analogy would be “instructive,” says historian Niall Fergusson, who considers that Trump could draw inspiration from the “peace through strength” motto of Ronald Reagan’s first term⁹. In the early 1980s, Reagan strove to re-establish America’s military and ideological superiority in the Euromissile crisis, before embarking on a phase of negotiation with the new leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, during his second term. This led to the signing of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF, 1987) and, in the early 1990s, the START agreements. According to Niall Fergusson, Trump, who was literally “born to haggle,” has the same negotiating skills as President Reagan. Trump’s method, as described in The Art of The Deal, of being aggressive in the face of a tenacious adversary, but knowing when to back down when necessary, is said to have similarities with Reagan’s strategy. Yet Donald Trump’s diplomatic skills are being sorely tested in the U.S.-Russian talks that were supposed to bring peace to Ukraine within 24 hours. Even before the talks opened, Trump was quick to agree to all of Vladimir Putin’s demands, whether they concerned Ukraine’s refusal to join NATO, Russian-occupied territories or the lifting of US sanctions. With Trump, the adage “peace through strength” has become “peace through surrender.” Indeed, in return for their concessions, the Americans, by way of peace, have obtained only vague partial ceasefire agreements, with no monitoring mechanism to guarantee their application, leaving Russia free to shell Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

Fergusson acknowledges that there are “major differences” between Trump and Reagan: “Trump is a protectionist. Reagan was a free trader. Trump is hostile to illegal immigration. Reagan was flexible on this issue. Trump likes authoritarian men, whereas Reagan was an enthusiastic promoter of democracy.” With these exceptions, it seems to him that the similarities between Trump and Reagan are “numerous and significant.” He recalls that Reagan, like Trump now, was feared by liberals at home and abroad: “As Max Boot shows in his new revisionist biography of Reagan, he was considered, at the time of his first electoral victory, ‘an amiable dunce’, in the words of Democratic Party bigwig Clark Clifford… Reagan was mocked, belittled and patronized more than any other major politician of his time – and the same is true of Trump now¹⁰.”

However, unlike Trump, it was Reagan himself who helped shape the image of an “uncultured redneck.” Antoine Vitkine’s documentary L’Enfance d’un chef (Childhood of a Leader) reveals that Ronald Reagan was an excellent student whose academic achievements placed him well above the average but isolated him from other children¹¹. He understood that to attract sympathy, it was better not to be at the top of the class. So, to make himself popular, the actor took on the role of the positive but somewhat naive hero. Reagan was aware that his opponents, the media, and the Soviets underestimated him, but he saw this as an asset he could use to fool his opponents.

In Trump’s case, there is nothing to suggest that the “useful idiot” persona is a make-believe role, if Fiona Hill, who from 2017 to 2019 was his advisor on Russian affairs and attended his telephone conversations with Vladimir Putin, is anything to go by: “the interpreter was constantly smoothing things over and not conveying the full substance of what Putin was saying. The Russian president chose his words very carefully and often mocked Trump openly…” Thus at the G20 summit in Osaka, “Trump and Putin have a conversation, and Putin tells him about his new hypersonic missiles. Trump listens and replies: ‘Oh, I’d like that!’ Putin comments: ‘Yeah sure you will.’ They continue talking about Israel. Trump starts boasting that ‘nobody has done more for Israel than me’ and starts listing all his successes. Putin listens to him and replies in a completely sarcastic tone so that even non-Russians understand that it’s a mockery: You’re great Donald. Maybe Israel should name a country after you […] Trump doesn’t understand that he’s being mocked and replies, ‘No, that would probably be too much¹²’”.

Unlike Donald Trump, Reagan was quickly feared by the Kremlin, which saw him as an anti-communist and a ruthless enemy. In April 1982, in an attempt to block his re-election, KGB chief Yuri Andropov ordered an “active measure.” The Kremlin’s men infiltrated the Republican National Committee headquarters and, to discredit the President, portrayed him as a corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex and popularized the slogan “Reagan is war.”  Cartoonists took up “the habit of depicting a mad Reagan astride a falling atomic bomb, like the character of T. J. ‘King’ Kong in the film Dr Strangelove¹³”. But the conspiracy was a resounding failure, and Reagan was re-elected in 49 states. This setback for the KGB had far-reaching consequences: in his second term, Reagan stepped up aid to the Mujahideen, turning the intervention in Afghanistan into “Soviet Vietnam.” This marked the beginning of the retreat of Soviet imperialism in the developing world and Eastern Europe, where one Communist regime after another collapsed, like an avalanche that would in turn sweep away the USSR.

In 1987, Gorbachev realized that his country had lost the Cold War by failing to win the Euromissile battle. Since then, the men of the KGB and GRU have been ruminating on their defeat and plotting revenge. In the ranks of the GOP, they could now rely on an ultra-nationalist movement, stemming from the networks of Edouard Lozansky and Dimitri Simes, two so-called Russian “dissidents” living in the United States who had infiltrated the Republican Party since the 1970s¹⁴. Although ultra-conservative, this new trend stands apart from the Reagan legacy and embodies right-wing isolationism, “considered marginal and extreme¹⁵”. Pat Buchanan, a former advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, was a candidate in the 1992 Republican primaries on themes (economic nationalism and anti-immigration) that foreshadowed those of Trumpism.

But it was precisely in Donald Trump, a vain businessman spotted by the Czechoslovakian services as early as 1977, that the services pinned their hopes. Trump entered politics in 1987, on his return from a trip to Moscow that fueled rumors about the real nature of his ties with Moscow[16]. Having placed their man in orbit, the Russian services never let him go. They did everything in their power to make sure that he reached the White House, as he would be the instrument of their revenge against Ronald Reagan and the strong, self-confident America of the 1980s, which they blame for the loss of their empire in Europe and the break-up of the USSR. They bet on Trump first and foremost because he is such an “anti-Reagan” that his character contrasts so sharply with that of the former president: “Trump’s personality is as abrasive as Reagan’s was charismatic, as vindictive as Reagan’s was magnanimous,” concedes Niall Fergusson. If you had to find similarities with a president, you’d have to look to Putin: like Putin, Trump holds a grudge. This makes him easy prey to manipulate. It’s not hard to convince him that Europeans are profiteers who dump their defense on the United States, that Zelensky is ungrateful, responsible for the first impeachment proceedings against him, that the intelligence services invented Russiagate to discredit him, that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole victory from him in 2020… During the campaign, Trump kept repeating that he and Putin had the same liberal enemies, which enabled him to present Russia as an ally in his fight against woke totalitarianism and to justify collusion with the enemy, which at other times would have been considered an act of treason. During Trump’s first term, Russian propaganda spread through society via the media and social networks without encountering the slightest resistance from the state apparatus. But since his re-election, under the guise of dismantling the “deep state,” he has proceeded to dismantle the agencies responsible for defending the United States against attempts at foreign interference and destabilization: the new Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, has announced the closure of the FBI’s New York office responsible for counter-espionage, and investigations targeting Russian oligarchs have been closed¹⁶. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan appointing Tulsi Gabard as head of the US intelligence agencies? Her appointment, according to Russian propagandists, was enough to “shake the CIA and the FBI.” But Donald Trump is not content with destroying the safeguards designed to protect the United States, he is also tearing down all the instruments of American soft power: USAID, which came to the aid of Russian and Belarusian dissidents, has been disbanded, and Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the radio stations that carried America’s voice beyond the Iron Curtain have been silenced. In the collective imagination, the memory of Ronald Reagan is associated with the space shield project, designed to make American territory invulnerable to attack by the Soviet enemy. Trump, on the other hand, may forever be remembered as the man who “unilaterally disarmed” the United States, in the words of Democratic Senator Whitehouse¹⁷. As in Ben Kichner’s cartoon on the cover of The Economist, the representative perched on a swinging globe, Trump is a wrecking ball hurled at his own country at high speed¹⁸.

Of course, there will always be some astute observer – as editorialist David Frum points out – who will convince us that Trump is hiding his game, that his methods are brutal but that he has noble intentions in mind. And in particular, that his “pro-Russian inclination is really a grand strategy to counter China¹⁹”. During the first presidency, pundits harped on about the “Nixon reverse.” Like a great strategist, Trump would like to reverse President Nixon’s Chinese strategy, which exacerbated Sino-Russian rivalries to force the USSR to accept Détente with the United States. This analysis does not stand up to scrutiny. For if Donald Trump had in mind to stand up to the world’s second-largest economy, he would want to mobilize solid allies, stresses David Frum. Instead, he prefers to alienate “America’s two immediate neighbors and its historic partners in Europe and the Pacific region, and during his last campaign he declared that Taiwan doesn’t deserve U.S. protection because it ‘gives us nothing²⁰’”. Furthermore, by destroying development aid programs, Trump is providing China with the opportunity to strengthen its influence in Africa, while the closure of Radio Free Asia is a stab in the back for Hong Kong dissidents. And, if he really wanted to counter China, Trump would stand firm with Putin, as the war in Ukraine is a way for Beijing to test America’s resolve. Decidedly, according to David Frum, setting Donald Trump up as “a brilliant diplomatic pivot, à la Kissinger, doesn’t pass the laugh test²¹”.

“A New Deal with Moscow?”

But perhaps there is yet another avenue to explore. Historian Walter Russell Mead puts us on the right track, reminding us in the Wall Street Journal that Donald Trump was not the first to “set aside morality to make a deal with Moscow”: “Franklin D. Roosevelt, convinced that he would need Soviet help against Japan if the Manhattan Project failed to deliver a weapon of war in time, went to Yalta in the final months of World War II in the hope of enlisting Joseph Stalin in the fight against the Pacific²².” On the face of it, the two presidents are polar opposites: one having established the very international order that the other is striving to destroy.

However, the parallel is enlightening, for at Yalta in February 1945, as in Teheran in 1943, Roosevelt was unaware that negotiations with the Soviets were deadlocked, with Stalin always one step ahead of him: he knew everything Roosevelt wanted from him, everything he was prepared to cede to him, and he could therefore at leisure play on the dissensions of the “special relationship” between the British and the Americans, of which he knew nothing. Since the 1930s, the Cheka’s espionage departments and the GRU had infiltrated whole sections of the federal administration: “ambitious young idealists” such as Alger Hiss, Julian Wadleigh, and Lawrence Duggan at the State Department, Harry Dexter White at the Treasury, and George Silverman as government statistician… saw themselves as warriors engaged in the secret struggle against fascism²³”. On September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of war in Europe, writer and former Soviet spy Whittekar Chambers confided everything he knew about Russian espionage in the United States to Under Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Roosevelt’s advisor on homeland security. Berle gives the President a memorandum with the names of all the leading spies, including Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and even Lauchlin Currie, one of the President’s closest advisors. But Roosevelt deemed “the idea of a spy network within his administration absurd” and ignored the warnings of his own services²⁴. At Stalin’s request, Washington’s moles flushed out Communist sympathizers in government bodies who were likely to become agents. By April 1941, the NKVD had already recruited 221 of them. Some joined the American intelligence center as soon as it was created. One of them even obtained a position as assistant to OSS Director William Donovan, who later declared: “I would have hired Stalin if I thought it would help us bring down Hitler²⁵”. This explains why there is a “chasm between the information provided to Stalin about the USA and that available to Roosevelt about the USSR”.

This disparity gave Stalin an advantage at his first meeting with Roosevelt in Teheran, in November 1943: thanks to his informers, Stalin knew that Roosevelt was ready to “bump into” Churchill in order to reach an agreement with him. He even suggested, for alleged “security” reasons, that he stay at the Soviet Embassy rather than the American Legation. “It does not seem to occur to Roosevelt that the building is rigged with microphones and that all his conversations are recorded and transcribed²⁶”. Roosevelt was also unaware that his “most influential advisor,” Harry Hopkins, had clandestine links with the Soviet ambassador in Washington. Thanks to this secret channel, Moscow knew the content of the talks between Churchill and Roosevelt in May 1943, Hopkins having gone so far as to pass confidential documents to his Soviet contact and discreetly warn him of FBI eavesdropping. Harry Hopkins was undoubtedly not an agent in Moscow’s pay, as the Soviets later claimed, but he was not only naive or overconfident in Stalin (familiarly nicknamed “Uncle Joe”). He also acted out of ideological inclination, making him an agent of influence. Sincerely convinced that Nazi Germany represented a far greater danger than Communism, Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to accept the border rectifications that would allow Stalin to keep his conquests in Eastern Europe (half of Poland and the Baltic States and Bessarabia annexed during the September 1939 invasion, in accordance with the secret protocol of the German-Soviet Pact) without even obtaining Moscow’s recognition of the Polish government in exile, as Churchill wanted, as compensation: “Thanks to Hopkins, who relayed Kremlin propaganda, Roosevelt abandoned half of Europe to Stalin²⁷”.

Roosevelt’s unconditional support for Stalin was not simply a matter of credulity; it was also a rather cynical geopolitical calculation, for Roosevelt believed that these territorial concessions would be enough to appease Stalin’s obsession with security, giving him a “protective buffer” against Germany. At Yalta, having already conceded everything to Stalin, Western leaders had nothing left to offer him in return for the restoration of Polish democracy and the promise of free elections. And since Alger Hiss had managed to sneak into the American delegation, Stalin knew that the West, anxious not to lose face with their public opinion, would be satisfied with the participation of a few democrats in the puppet provisional government he had installed in Poland. Stalin pretended to give in to his opponents on the promise of free elections, to give them the opportunity to capitulate without discrediting himself. But, in the end, Stalin was not content to simply pocket Poland; for him, it was only the first step in a larger plan to communize the whole of Europe. Donald Trump is making a similar mistake: he believes that offering Ukraine to Putin will appease his thirst for conquest in Europe and divert him from his alliance with China. But abandoning Ukrainian democracy will not be enough to convince Putin to give up his imperial ambitions. For him, “the Russian sphere of influence does not end in Ukraine. It begins in Ukraine²⁸”. On the other hand, he will not fail to regard the abandonment of Ukraine as an American capitulation, which will only strengthen his resolve to side with the stronger Chinese president.

Let us bear in mind that the Roosevelt administration’s “incredible laxity” in matters of state security was not only detrimental to the loss of the eastern half of Europe. It had far-reaching consequences for the security of the United States itself. For the Soviets did not just penetrate the secret services and certain sectors of the administration. Informed in early 1943 of the Americans’ intention to acquire nuclear weapons, they infiltrated the secret laboratory at Los Alamos. Five months before the first successful nuclear test at Alamogordo, they knew the main elements of bomb construction and the process for detonating it. Four years later, the first Soviet device was a perfect copy of the Alamogordo device. And according to Vassili Mitrokhine, the penetration of the Manhattan Project was only “the most spectacular part of the immense expansion of scientific and technological espionage during the war.” This was to contribute to the development of Soviet weapons programs²⁹. Thus, many of the problems faced by the United States throughout the Cold War (the nuclear arms race with the USSR, the partition of Europe, etc.) had their origins in decisions taken by President Roosevelt under the influence of the “Washington moles.” 

Finally, by infiltrating the Roosevelt administration, the Soviets came close to achieving “the most spectacular infiltration of a Western government³⁰”. In 1944, on his return from an official trip to the Soviet Union, where he had been duped by the authorities into seeing nothing but “gleaming kolkhozes and radiantly smiling workers,” Vice-President Henry Wallace became the Kremlin’s zealous advocate. Although he had criss-crossed Siberia and Kolyma, where thousands of political opponents were languishing, he did not say a word about the Gulag and claimed to have seen only “free men³¹”. His naiveté is matched by that of Steve Vitkoff, who declared the day after his meeting with the Russian President that Putin is not a bad guy and that he even prayed for his friend Trump³²… Thanks to Henry Wallace, Stalin almost pulled off a masterstroke by installing a pro-Soviet president and government at the top of the American state. Wallace declared that if Roosevelt had died before the end of his third term, and if he had had to succeed him in November 1944, he would have chosen Lawrence Duggan as Secretary of State and Dexter White as Treasury Secretary³³.  Then there would probably not even have been a “Cold War” because Soviet expansionism would have met with no resistance from the United States. Finally, after his re-election in November 1944, Roosevelt replaced Wallace with Truman, a decision that frustrated Moscow’s calculations in extremis.

Since Donald Trump’s re-election, Americans have had the feeling of being plunged into the heart of a plot worthy of a Cold War thriller, where agents of the enemy have taken control of their institutions. So, to calm the anxieties of their compatriots, Donald Trump’s supporters always find a rational explanation for their President’s iconoclastic attitude, with plenty of historical precedents: “Whatever the case, we can take comfort in the fact that the nation, the presidency and the republic have been through all this before and survived it,” asserts the very conservative Washington Times³⁴. These reassuring messages do not just come from the Trumpist press. They are ubiquitous in the arguments of today’s leaders. In this respect, Vice President J.D. Vance’s Munich speech is a veritable anthology of Orwellian novlanguage. As in the good old Soviet waffle, words are misused to express the opposite of reality, and references to history are used to deceive us. J.D. Vance’s crusade for freedom in the glory days of the Cold War is transformed into a battle against new dangers that come not from Russia, China, “or any other external actor,” but from a “threat from within,” that of the new totalitarianism represented by the progressive camp guilty of attacks on “freedom of expression.” The latter would imply that a foreign power, its agents, and influencers could pour out a continuous stream of fake news without hindrance; “respect for democracy” would mean the right for outside actors to influence election results through illegal, occult, and massive funding etc…. And even Pope John Paul II and his famous exhortation “Do not be afraid” are called upon to convince democratic voters not to fear coalition with extremist movements³⁵. However, doublespeak and historical revisionism are mental manipulation techniques frequently used by totalitarian regimes to paralyze the popular will – a further indication of Russian influences in Trumpist discourse.

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Thus, analysts’ efforts to establish the genealogy of Trumpism always come to a dead end. Just when we think we haveve found its original model, fictional Trump fades into reality, like an elusive mirage. And yet, while Trumpist thinking eludes any coherent doctrine of American foreign policy, it nonetheless has a logic of its own. From the point of view of Russian geopolitical interests, it is even more rational. The increase in tariffs, for example, isolates the United States from its trading partners and exacerbates friction with China, with the risk of a Sino-American trade war leading to conflict in the Pacific – a godsend for Moscow, which would then have a free hand in Europe.

As David Frum suggests, we should be wary of discourses that aim to rationalize and normalize the Trump phenomenon in order to offer us a message of comfort and calm our anxieties, for they act on us in the same way as fentanyl, which “soothes immediate pain” but causes “serious long-term damage”: “Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, those soothing messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind³⁶”.

1. Philippe de Lara, “Thinking the unimaginable”, Desk Russie, Feb 23, 2025.
2. Thomas Wright, “Trump’s 19th Foreign Policy”, Politico, Jan 20, 2016.
3. Charles-Philippe David, Louis Balthazar, Justin Vaïsse, La politique étrangère des Etats-Unis, Presses de Sciences Pô, 2003, p.79.
4. Pascal Riché, “Trump ignores it but his protectionist hero William McKinley, has finally changed his mind”, Le Monde, April 3, 2025.
5. Michale Kimmage, “American Power in the new Age of Nationalism”, Foreign Affairs, March-April 2025, pp.12.
6. David Gessner, “Trump venerates Teddy Roosevelt but Roosevelt would Have hated Trump”, Washington Post, Sep 39, 2020.
7. David Gessner, Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Niall Fergusson, “How To Win The New Cold War: To compete with China Trump should learn from Regan”, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2025.
10. Niall Fergusson, Ibid.
11. “L’Enfance d’un chef”, documentary written and directed by Antoine Vitkine, Arte France, 2009, YouTube.
12. Fiona Hill, “What does Trump see in Putin?”, Foreign Affairs Interview, March 13, 2025, Youtube.
13. Niall Fergusson, Ibid.
14. For more on the infiltration of the Republican Party, see the article “The Russian Lobby”, Desk Russia, 05/13/2023.
15. Laure Mandeville, “Pat Buchanan, le grand ancien de Trump”, Le Figaro, March 1, 2016.
16. Françoise Thom, “The lessons of Trumpism for Europeans,” Desk Russie, Feb 23, 2025.
17. Quoted by Françoise Thom, Ibid.
18. Ben Kirchner, “America’s Foreign Policy”, The Economist, July 2018.
19. David Frum, “Don’t Trust the Trumpsplainers”, The Atlantic, March 12, 2025
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Walter Russell Mead, “A New Deal with Moscow?” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2025.
23. Christopher Andrew, Vassili Mitrokhine, Le KGB contre l’Ouest ( 1917-1991), Fayard, 2000, pp.166-167.
24. Christopher Andrew, Vassili Mitrokhine, Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Françoise Thom, The second front, Desk Russie, Sep 23, 2023.
28. Robert Kagan, “The United States must resist a return to spheres of interest”, The Brookings, Feb 19^, 2015.
29. Christopher Andrew, Vassili Mitrokhine, Ibid, p.183.
30. Christopher Andrew, Vassili Mitrokhine, Ibid, p.172.
31. Thomas Wieder, “Les Abandonnés américains de l’Eldorado soviétique”, Le Monde, April 2, 2009.
32. Steve Vitkoff’s Critical role in Negociating Global Peace, interview with Steve Vitkoff by Tucker Carlson, March 24, 2025, Youtube.
33. Christopher Andrew, Vassili Mitrokhine, Ibid, p.172.
34. “Donald Trump and Teddy Roosevelt, “Our nation has seen this before and survived”, The Washington Times, December 18, 2023.
35. J.D. Vance’s full speech in Munich, Le Grand Continent.
36. David Frum, Ibid.