Donald Trump

The Trump presidency has demonstrated the appeal of populist authoritarianism to many Americans. The way the country responds to the attack on the U.S. Capitol will indicate how long this movement lasts.

Nolan Quinn contributed to this post. Twitter and other social media platforms have suspended or restricted President Donald J. Trump's access, mostly because of his and his followers’ use of them to incite violence, though their stated, precise reasons vary from one to another. They are all private companies, and thus are subject to few restrictions [PDF] on what content they choose to moderate or remove. Mainstream American opinion is outraged over the assault on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6 and many Americans are incensed by related efforts to suborn the Constitution in blocking the certification of President-Elect Joseph Biden’s electoral victory. Barring the president from social media platforms has not been seen as an infringement on his constitutional right to free speech. The legal argument runs that companies are free to enforce their own standards and policies regarding the content they host. Further, President Trump remains free to make his views known by the myriad other means of mass communication that exist in the United States such as the press, television, radio, and other social media sites. Polling data shows [PDF] that a majority of Americans do indeed favor increased regulation of social media. But reactions to the moves by Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and others to limit Trump’s social media access have followed a familiar partisan split. An ongoing debate about how much governments should regulate social media and what the boundaries are (or should be) between free speech and incitement to hatred and violence has been made more pressing by the events of January 6. This same debate is underway in sub-Saharan Africa, where social media is of growing importance and other types of media are weak or even absent. In some states trending toward authoritarianism or worse—Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, for example—regimes seek to limit social media to enhance their power by muzzling the opposition. But in others, especially those riven by ethnic and religious conflict, there is legitimate concern that media, now including social media, are a means to incite violence.  Nigeria is a case in point. The country is besieged by an Islamist revolt in the northeast, conflict over land and water in the middle of the country that often acquires an ethnic and religious coloration, and a low-level insurrection in the oil patch. The government is weak and commands little popular support. Under these circumstances, Nigeria is ripe for social media incitement to violence. Weak African governments are often heavy-handed and resort to draconian punishments which are difficult to carry out in practice; their responses to incendiary social media posts have been no different. In Nigeria, the government has introduced legislation to regulate social media that includes the death penalty for certain types of violations. Human rights organizations, many of which are suspicious the administration of Muhammadu Buhari is moving towards authoritarianism, see the legislation as infringing on free speech and stifling the ability to criticize the government. In Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa, while social media is strong, more conventional media is less so. Hence restrictions on access to social media would, indeed, impede the flow of news and information to a greater extent than in the United States. Though it remains to be seen, major social media platforms’ barring of Donald Trump is likely to be cited in the Nigerian debate by those that favor the proposed legislation. In commentary by outside friends of Nigeria, it will be important not to impose on Nigeria the circumstances of the United States, which are not necessarily parallel.

History will judge the Trump presidency to have been a consequential one, but more for its destructive effects than for its achievements.

Each Friday, I look at what is happening in President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition to the White House. This week: The mob that stormed the Capitol Building this week highlighted how Donald Trump’s presidency has left the United States worse off than when he started.

Americans should be under no illusion about the serious damage to their country’s remaining moral authority and capacity for international leadership caused by yesterday's assault on the U.S. Capitol in Washington. In addition to its function as the seat of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Capitol has been a symbol around the world of representative government and of the strength of American democratic institutions. The assault on it by a mob—egged on by a sitting American president—the apparent incompetence of the security services charged with protecting it, and the pictures of mob looting have been spread all over Africa. With its extensive internet coverage, it is safe to say that many Nigerians know as much about what happened as Americans do. A sample of tweets from my roughly 18,000 Twitter followers highlights the themes of American hypocrisy in presuming to criticize Nigeria's poor governance, a strongly negative reaction to police use of live ammunition and the killing of a demonstrator, and the collapse of the American pretense (from their perspective) of American moral leadership. Here are some representative tweets (omitted are the personal attacks on me, mostly for "hypocrisy"): “Leave Nigeria internal affairs alone and face your country, your democracy is under siege, capitol Hill is being ransacked by protesters, people being shot!” “The arrest and killings of American peaceful protesters are poor representation of America to the ongoing Buhari administration. who gave the order to shoot a peaceful protesters at the #CapitolHillmassacre? Her last words were peace and unity!” “Quench this fire first. Frankly speaking, you guys have lost moral authority.” “Face your undemocratic terror country.” “Before you start to fix the problems overseas please fix the problems in your home first.” “How is your country fairing today democratically?” “You guys should all hide your heads in shame!” “At this point I think Americans should keep quiet about all happenings in the world.” “Go and settle the coup at Capitol building today. I thought USA was a nice country until I met Trump. Mr John, charity begins at home” “Sir it'll be advisable you concentrate on what tyrant @realDonaldTrump is doing to American democracy and institutions of governance. Thank you” “The use of live bullet on Peaceful Protesters in the state is a poor representation of America This is condemnable.” Rebuilding American moral authority will be a difficult, lengthy process. It is to be hoped that starting this process will be a foreign policy prerogative of President-Elect Joe Biden and Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken. For now, American prestige in Nigeria, at least, is in the gutter and American soft power in the world's second largest continent is evaporating.

President Trump’s legacy on cyberspace policy has been consequential but not transformative, an unsurprising outcome for a one-term president.

The United States can only promote human rights abroad if it begins from a position of humility, acknowledging that the struggle to make America a more perfect union is ongoing.

Each Friday, I look at what is happening in President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition to the White House. This week: Donald Trump is using all the powers of his presidency and creating a host of problems for the incoming Biden administration.

Last week President Trump invited reporters to listen in on a call intended to celebrate the normalization of relations between Sudan and Israel, a diplomatic achievement that comes with more than a few complications. During the course of the conversation with the Sudanese and Israeli prime ministers, the president of the United States took it upon himself to casually issue a bellicose threat to Ethiopia on behalf of Egypt and its president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a man Trump has referred to as “my favorite dictator." Seemingly miffed by the failure of his administration’s clumsy effort to broker a deal on the use of Nile waters now that Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam has become a reality, Trump posited that Egypt “will end up blowing up the dam. . . . they’ll blow up that dam. And they have to do something.. . . They should have stopped it long before it was started.” He also reiterated that he is holding up U.S. assistance to Ethiopia to pressure its government to agree to his administration’s preferred deal. The notion of casually inciting war in the strategically important Horn of Africa is sickening. The idea that the United States can successfully bully Ethiopia into a deal is ahistorical nonsense—a misreading of the stakes for Addis Ababa and an insult noted throughout the continent. But worse, the president is apparently completely oblivious to the United States’ own interests. The United States doesn’t provide assistance to Ethiopia out of sheer altruism; rather, officials from both parties have long recognized that a stable and successful Ethiopia is critical to the security of the region and an important part of any vision for cooperative, mutually beneficial U.S.-African relations in the future. The president’s appallingly careless statement is only the most recent example of the Trump Administration’s unforced errors in Africa. While Administration officials charge around warning Africans about the danger of doing business with China, they ignore the damage they’ve been doing to the United States’ credibility and desirability as a partner. Just as youthful African societies are mobilizing to demand more accountable governance and more of a say in shaping their own futures, the United States is making the worst possible case for itself. The current administration gives the impression that it disregards African interests in the foreign policy issues that directly affect them and that it imagines Africans as supplicants desperate for external patrons.  If President Trump is re-elected, it is difficult to imagine a change of course. But a Biden Administration would also face the immediate consequences of the damage done by the Trump years. Getting the United States on the firm footing required to meet a more assertive, transforming Africa, finding common ground, and advancing U.S. policy will be a real challenge, and it will need to be addressed immediately. Unfortunately, history suggests that this might be difficult. New presidential administrations have struggled to get their Africa teams in place quickly. Most egregiously, President Trump’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Tibor Nagy, didn’t take office until July of 2018, a year and a half after Trump was inaugurated. A new U.S. administration will have to move fast with a trusted and empowered team and a clear vision that rejects both business-as-usual and retrograde paradigms. Africa is poised to play a more significant role on the global stage. For the United States to meet the moment, policymakers will first have to climb out of the hole dug by President Trump. 

Each Friday, I look at what the presidential contenders are saying about foreign policy. This week: foreign policy was a topic at the second and final presidential debate of the 2020 campaign. 

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are set to debate tomorrow night in Nashville. Belmont University is hosting the event, and NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker will moderate. She has named six debate topics: fighting COVID-19, American families, race in America, climate change, national security, and leadership. So there should finally be discussion of foreign policy, which has largely been missing in the campaign so far. That’s understandable. Events overseas are not a high priority for most Americans right now. But whoever takes the oath of office next January 20 won’t have the luxury of focusing only on the country’s domestic problems. He will need to tackle a range of foreign policy challenges as well. Whether those challenges are met or flubbed will go a long way toward shaping the security and prosperity of the United States. Biden and Trump, however, will be thinking short term rather than long term tomorrow night. Their objective will be to move undecided voters in their direction. Sometimes what a candidate says about foreign policy can help on that score. But sometimes it can hurt. Here are seven memorable moments from past debates when presidential candidates took on foreign policy.   1976: Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford Gerald Ford entered his second debate with Jimmy Carter hoping to regain momentum. He ended up doing the opposite. Ford concluded an answer about his policy toward the Soviet Union by saying: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” The perplexed moderator gave Ford an opportunity to revise his comment, but he only dug a deeper hole, insisting that Yugoslavians, Romanians, and Poles didn’t consider themselves dominated by the Soviets. Ford said after the debate that he was arguing that the Soviets couldn’t crush Eastern Europe’s indomitable spirit. But the political damage had been done.    1980: Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan The lone 1980 presidential debate is best remembered for Ronald Reagan derailing Jimmy Carter’s criticisms by saying, “There you go again.” But Carter also hurt himself when he said: “I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry.” The vision of the leader of the free world discussing matters of state with his thirteen-year-old daughter handed Republicans an applause line. They ran with it. At one campaign stop the crowd roared when Reagan joked, “I remember when Patty and Ron were little tiny kids, we used to talk about nuclear power.” 1984: Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan Reagan looked tired and slow during his first debate against Walter Mondale. Pundits began to write his political obituary. At the second debate, however, Reagan was asked whether he had the stamina to handle a major national security crisis. The seventy-three-year-old replied: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The quip brought down the house. The “Gipper” was back and Mondale’s momentum was gone.  1992:  George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot Three decades ago Ross Perot made news by becoming the first, and so far only, third-party candidate to qualify for the presidential debate stage. He made his appearance memorable. He warned that if Congress approved NAFTA that Americans could expect to hear a "job-sucking sound going south" as companies moved to Mexico to cut costs. Perot was wrong on the merits—while NAFTA created losers as well as winners on the job front, on the whole it was a net benefit to the U.S. economy. But the Texan’s vivid phrase, which morphed in the retelling into “a giant sucking sound,” entered the American political lexicon as a pithy way to summarize the case against free trade.   2008: John McCain and Barack Obama Barack Obama looked vulnerable on foreign policy when he ran against John McCain. The Arizona senator was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who had spent six years as a POW in North Vietnam. In the first debate, McCain accused Obama of having spoken recklessly about striking al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan. Obama responded: “You’re absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say. But, you know, coming from you, who, you know, in the past has threatened extinction for North Korea and, you know, sung songs about bombing Iran, I don’t know, you know, how credible that is.” In a single sentence Obama shifted the debate from his judgment to McCain’s temperament. 2012: Mitt Romney and Barack Obama Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had similar views on most foreign policy issues, so instead of debating specific policy measures, the two tried to prove who was better equipped to be commander in chief. During the third debate, Romney claimed that the U.S. Navy was at its smallest since 1917. Obama responded: "You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go under water, nuclear submarines." The line sparked a frenzy on Twitter and the phrase “horses and bayonets” became the top rising search term of the night on Google. 2016: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Some debates produce moments of soaring rhetoric. Others generate moments reminiscent of a schoolyard playground. One example of the latter came during the third debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. When the reality TV star claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not respect either Clinton or Obama, the former secretary of state responded: “Well, that's because he would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.” That got Trump’s dander up and led to the following exchange:     Trump: No puppet, no puppet.  Clinton: And it's pretty clear—  Trump: You're the puppet.  Clinton: It's pretty clear you won't admit—  Trump: No, you're the puppet.   Clinton closed the exchange by arguing that Russia was clearly meddling in the election and that Trump had encouraged it. Biden and Trump both would love to land a knockout punch tomorrow night like Reagan did in 1984. But they could end up stumbling like Ford in 1976 or Carter in 1980. Either way, a debate success or a misstep will likely matter far less than in past elections. As of this morning, forty million Americans have already voted. That number will be even higher by the time the curtain goes up on the debate tomorrow night. None of this, however, will stop pundits from arguing over the next two weeks about who got the better of the exchange. Only Election Day will settle that question. Anna Shortridge assisted in the preparation of this post.

Each Friday, I look at what the presidential contenders are saying about foreign policy. This week: how Donald Trump and Joe Biden say the United States should deal with Afghanistan

Each Friday, I look at what the presidential contenders are saying about foreign policy. This week: Kamala Harris and Mike Pence discussed U.S. policy toward China and U.S. global leadership at Wednesday night's vice-presidential debate.