Opinion
Donald Trump, famously, is unpredictable. He promised to not start wars, then started one. He denounced the idea of regime change as a “proven, absolute failure”, then embraced it. He abuses critics and then embraces them.
He exultantly imposed Liberation Day tariffs on almost all countries, then paused them a week later. That generated the acronym TACO – Trump always chickens out.
He revels in his own fickleness: “You call that chickening out?” Trump replied to the accusation. “It’s called negotiation.”
Former aides have attested that he will sometimes reverse his positions out of sheer perversity.
Paradoxically, his erraticism is one of his few consistencies. A decade ago, he celebrated it with the words: “It’s very important to be unpredictable.”
But in three of the fundamental themes of his second presidency, he is consistent and persistent. Not exactly predictable, but reliable.
First, he uses the presidency for the self-enrichment of himself and his family; second, for self-aggrandisement, usually at the taxpayer’s expense; third, for attempting a consolidation of authoritarian power. We saw striking examples of each in the past week.
The act of enrichment was the announcement that the Trump Media & Technology Group would provide priority access to the president’s Truth Social account – for a fee. Trump uses his Truth Social account to make statements and announcements, big and small, every day. Last month, he posted 676 times.
As The Wall Street Journal summarised: “Milliseconds matter on Wall Street, and Truth Social wants to charge traders to get faster access to the president’s posts.”
Trump Media, 41 per cent owned by Trump himself, promised that it would give faster access, but without announcing the exact speed advantage or the cost to buyers.
The mechanism, familiar to big funds managers and traders, is the API – the application programming interface – a standard tool of algorithmic trading. It’s notorious for allowing institutional traders to make profits unavailable to small investors.
“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, Trump Media’s interim boss. “As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.”
You can see its value to traders. For example, a Trump Social post on US Steel sent its share price leaping from $US42 to $US52 in two days last year. His post on Intel rocketed its shares from $US121 to $US140 in a few days. His pronouncements on the Iran war have moved oil prices every week since he launched the attack.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, a leading Democrat candidate for the presidency, was unimpressed: “He is now literally selling early access to market-moving information. Where is the investigation? And how are spineless Republicans OK with this? Disgusting.”
Trump has put his investments into a revocable trust, managed by his sons, to protect him from the accusation of conflicts of interest. But, in a frank admission, he said that he’s been less constrained in business dealings in his second term because “I found out that nobody cared”.
The API deal is just the latest in a continuum. His declared personal income trebled in the latest financial year from $US760 million to $US2.4 billion partly due to crypto investments entangling Trump with the rulers of Abu Dhabi.
Last week’s act of taxpayer-funded self-aggrandisement was the announcement that his face would be impressed on a new one dollar coin.
“It’s very cute, they gave me a coin,” said the president. The “they” is the US Treasury. “That’s very unusual, from what I understand.”
He’ll be the first president, indeed, the first living person, to be depicted on a US coin in a century. But since they put Calvin Coolidge on a coin, the law has changed to prohibit it. The reason? A country’s currency may bear the likeness of reigning monarchs but not of elected leaders in democracies. So it’s likely to be tested in the courts or the Congress, or both. The Congress already has blocked a plan for Trump to put his face on a $US250 banknote.
Like everything else in Trump’s revival of the Gilded Age, from mercantilism to colonisation, the coin will be coloured gold but contain no actual precious metal, its value superficial and worthless.
Other Trump vanity projects include his portrait now appearing in some US passports, giant banners of Trump’s visage glowering from government buildings in Washington, and a proposed Trump Arch to tower over all other Washington monuments. Doubtless there will be more.
Trivial, perhaps, but the underlying impulse is not – which brings us to his efforts to consolidate authoritarian power.
Trump’s address to the nation on Thursday (US time) was devoted to discrediting the US electoral system. He said he was releasing documents to prove “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure”.
He focused on the 2020 election, which he has never conceded but continues to maintain he won.
“Just as disturbingly,” he went on, “this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people.”
Three points. One is that the documents revealed little new, and certainly nothing to prove his contention that he won in 2020.
Another is that, while he spent a lot of time alleging, correctly, that China wanted to undermine the US political system, the real undermining of Americans’ confidence in their elections was done by Trump himself.
A third is that Trump’s claims about a rotten election system imply that Trump himself might be illegitimately elected. Just bizarre.
But, as many commentators have observed, his address only makes sense as a prelude to rejecting the results of midterm elections due in November.
Trump is not on the ballot, but Republican congress members are, and are expected to lose ground. His denunciation of the electoral system gives him a potential pretext to order federal intervention into the system, which is administered by the states.
Indeed, the following morning he sent his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, out to issue a threat to state officials – if they didn’t do what the White House wanted to manage the election, the federal government will pursue them with fines and prison terms.
And, from there, all of this could form a potential platform for annulling the 2028 presidential elections. And claiming that he must stay in the White House beyond the constitutional limit.
It’s only a scenario. But while he’s unpredictable, on these three themes his direction of thrust is reliable.
Peter Hartcher is both international and political editor. His political column appears on Saturdays.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
