The Melting of America's Softness

Trump is punishing the world because his daddy never loved him enough.

Courtesy of Margaritaman

When I was 16, I traveled to Switzerland as an exchange student. The family lived on a small farm outside of Basel. On their property were also small cabin-like cottages where Swiss citizens from nearby Basel and other towns passed their summers growing vegetables, barbecuing, and socializing. When the small car that smelled of hay drove down the dirt road to the home, all the summer-cottage renters knew that American had arrived. Coming to a halt, and for the first time experiencing jet lag, I climbed out in my all white, “cool” outfit.

People left their meals, others dropped garden hoes to race to the car, and some grabbed flowers from their gardens. The long-awaited arrival of the “American” was finally taking place, and no one wanted to miss out on the summer fun. Standing head and shoulders above the gathered crowd of around 30 Swiss, with a small dog snarling at me, demanding I bend down and pet it, and sticking out like a sore thumb, everyone present had come to see, hear, and meet me.

As I would later learn, and it is something that has followed me through my life since I have resided outside of America for the past 31 years, people are interested in “me” first and foremost because I am an American. It is then up to me to be interesting or not, but most likely, foreigners give Americans, even terrifically boring ones, the benefit of the doubt and accept them. They take an interest in us, and unless the American is a complete a**hole, most foreigners will be impressed to find out that you are from the U.S. Even in places where they may hate American politics, and where it could be dangerous just being an American, many local people will still try to find some goodness in the American.

No other country has this power, this strength, like the United States used to have. Take notice, here, I am writing in the past tense. Donald Trump worked hard during his first term to destroy American soft power, but he was prevented from doing so by layers of bureaucrats, diplomats, and resistance from our allies. Nonetheless, I can tell you that Russians love Donald Trump because their only context for a president is Putin, and so, comparatively, Trump seemed good.

Trump is successfully destroying American soft power by turning our allies into enemies and praising our enemies. His sickening praise for the murderous autocrats of the Middle East and his constant attacks on our allies are very effectively making all Americans and everything American appear bad and malicious.

In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement (Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value).

There is no ideological reason why Trump is doing this, though. Trump undoubtedly regards the America that the world loves and respects as an America that rejects, mocks, impeached, successfully tried, and found guilty, and to this very moment, regards as the worst president ever. Being the vile, petty, vengeful narcissist he is, Trump has decided that if “that America” is going to so openly mock and hate him, then he will destroy that America and everyone who respects her. If an ally respects the America of Biden, Obama, and post-WWII leadership, then that is an ally that clearly regards Trump a sniveling, cowardly felonious rapist. Angry little Donald pounds his small hands on the table and slurs, “I’ll show them.”

Trump, however, is not showing us. An army of traitorous fascists around him is, though, dismantling all that made the United States formerly a great and exceptional nation. The Trump administration, under the lead of the grotesquely sycophantic Marco Rubio, plans on gutting the apparatus formerly used for identifying human rights abuses and supporting local resources that fought against them.

Finally, the Trump administration’s proposed restructuring will eliminate the Human Rights and Democracy Fund, the primary funding source for the bureau’s democracy promotion programs, which provide a lifeline to embattled human rights defenders worldwide. Oddly, the bureau is planned to be housed within the State Department’s budget office, even though it will almost certainly no longer have any funds to disburse. While administration officials suggest that future funding could flow through regional bureaus, given the Trump administration’s approach to date, that possibility is highly unlikely to materialize.

In 2020, Joe Nye poignantly wrote, “human rights should not be framed as pitting values against U.S. national interests, because values are part of America’s national interest (Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value).”

Ronald Reagan had just weeks before my arrival in Switzerland put mid-range nukes into West Germany, and there were protests everywhere. Nonetheless, I was the toast of the village and drank for free on Fridays when we drank beer at the local tavern called the “Switzerhusli.” I wonder how many people would greet that same 16-year-old from America, who had arrived to stay for the summer with a local family.

Thanks to Trump, I don’t think many would bother themselves. Does it sometimes feel like we are stuck in a never-ending episode of The Twilight Zone? Stuck in the manic paranoia of a sick, sick man, he tries to cure himself by making the rest of us accept his twisted, sick views of the world.

It’s time to 86 the TV!

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