Because reading and writing about Donald Trump Jr’s corruption wasn’t depressing enough, allow me to also recommend Anne Applebaum’s piece in The Atlantic: MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption. It is a piece that really requires a complete read, but the quick précis is that it describes how US foreign policy under Trump is empowering an alliance of kleptocrats and white nationalists.
Indeed, Don makes a cameo in the piece as Applebaum explains the difficulties that the Brazillian government had in engaging with the Trump administration.
with billions of dollars in the balance and Brazil’s sovereign democracy under attack, Brazilian officials suddenly found that nobody in the Trump administration would speak to the formal representatives of their left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s ambassador to Washington found herself isolated. The foreign minister, a diplomat who had known U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for decades, could not get through to anyone. A junior official told me that even his graduate-school classmate at the U.S. Treasury would not answer his calls.
The Brazilian finance minister at the time, Fernando Haddad, finally managed to schedule a call with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But two days before the meeting was to take place, the Treasury Department canceled it—and then Bessent used the same time slot to meet with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son. The younger Bolsonaro—who lives in Texas, has befriended Donald Trump Jr., and attends Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meetings—was flaunting his connections in Washington, which were manifestly better than those of Lula’s administration.
This is just yet another illustration of how this administration does not behave normally, but instead abuses power to achieve the personal preferences of the president. Keep in mind that the context for the above was the use of tariffs by Trump to punish the Brazilian government for prosecuting Trump’s ally, Jair Bolsonaro, for planning a coup. This was not about US interests, even badly formulated ones. No, this was all about Trump’s interests and treating the US government as his own possession.
Applebaum notes that the incident with the Brazilians (which she describes in fine detail in the piece) illustrates where we are with the US government under Trump vis-a-vis the rest of the world.
The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can.
She notes later in the piece.
Wrongly described as “isolationists,” many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world.
[…]
Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America. Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who share their disdain for liberal democracy and for what were once considered, at least aspirationally, to be American values. To do so, they need to expand their global influence, manipulate elections in former partner nations, and alter the flows of money and power, especially inside other democracies. Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists.
These revolutionaries include white supremacists.
Some are ideologues such as Bannon and Beattie, people who believe that Western civilization is being destroyed by racial diversity, secularism, and the commitment to human rights. “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Beattie once wrote on X. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
And oligarchs.
These include executives from the oil-and-gas, cryptocurrency, and rare-earth-mining industries, and above all big tech companies. Their motivations differ from those of the ideologues, but they share the belief that only power matters, and that only superior humans—richer, more intelligent, usually male and white—should have it.
Here we get the connection, as I noted in my post on Don Jr., with Witkoff and Kushner:
Many of the unconventional figures who now act in the name of the U.S. are already working to make this dream real. In January, Steve Witkoff, the real-estate dealer turned U.S. special envoy, told a roomful of European presidents and prime ministers gathered in Paris to discuss support for Ukraine that he was already negotiating energy and mineral deals for American companies with Russia, to be implemented after the war. This surprised many of the meeting’s attendees, whose main concern was bringing peace to Ukraine. (A White House spokesperson denied that Witkoff made this statement.) Witkoff also specifically mentioned the role that the U.S. investment company BlackRock could play in the reconstruction of Ukraine, an unusual comment for a peace negotiator. But maybe not a surprising one: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has sat next to Jared Kushner while he negotiated with the Ukrainians, according to The New York Times.
The piece goes on to discuss territorial expansion: Trump’s Greenland and Canada obsessions. More specifically, it details MAGA interest, including US government behavior, linked to promoting separatism in the Canadian province of Alberta.
This is not solely a media project. On at least three occasions, State Department officials have welcomed representatives of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a separatist group. The names of the American officials present have not been published—Jeff Rath, one of the Alberta group’s leaders, has said its American contacts “don’t want to be wasting their time answering questions from the press.” The group reportedly requested a $500 billion loan for a future independent Albertan government. (Rath has denied this, but a co-founder of the group confirmed it to NBC News.) A State Department spokesperson has said that its officials meet frequently with “civil society types” and has not promised anything specific.
This behind-the-scenes conversation took on heavier significance in January, when Scott Bessent appeared on a far-right podcast run by the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and made a series of statements seeming to endorse the separatist cause. Alberta, the Treasury secretary told Posobiec, is a “natural partner for the U.S.”
The piece goes on to illustrate the building of illiberal international networks between the Trump administration and its domestic allies and like-minded individuals worldwide. This includes the promotion of illiberal political parties like the AfD in Germany and Nigel Farage’s Reform.
The piece ends on the petty, but quite public, corruption of Trump getting FIFA to allow red-carded American striker Folarin Balogun to play in the World Cup game against Belgium.
When the U.S. lost to Belgium—and lost badly—some wondered if Trump’s move had unsettled the players. They surely knew that the world was rooting against them, and seemed to have lost belief in themselves as a result. Other Americans may soon come to the same conclusion. For decades, we have told ourselves that our country represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies, like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when we realize that we no longer do?
And make no mistake: at the moment, we don’t. Trump clearly prefers autocrats to democrats, and we are boosting some combination of white nationalists and kleptocrats worldwide. We are attacking Canada, degrading Europe, dissing South Korea, and undercutting Ukraine. In the meantime, we are fine with doing deals with authoritarians in Venezuela while deepening ties with far-right parties in Europe (not to mention all the corrupt ties between the Trump family and various Gulf states).
Some of this is reversible, but the world knows that it can only be paused so long as the Republican Party harbors MAGA in its bosom. As such, the post-war world order is likely damaged beyond repair. And for all f its flaws, what replaces it is going to be more dangerous and insecure for all of us.
Again, I commend the entire piece, depressing as it undoubtedly is.
