Donald J. Bourbon

Some people never change

In September, 1987, Ronald Reagan was in his second-last year as President of the United States. The economy was strong and stock markets were soaring. The Cold War was thawing. Three months earlier, Reagan had stood at the Berlin Wall and called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Republicans already adored Reagan. But when he left office, and the Soviet Union peacefully dissolved, they revered him. Even today, his speech before the Berlin Wall is cast as an almost sacred moment — when American strength and idealism shone brightest and changed the world for the better.

But in 1987, one American rejected all that. He was a New York real estate developer named Donald J. Trump.

America is weak, Trump believed. Foreigners are laughing at us. A real president would make them pay.

Just why anyone would care about the foreign policy views of a New York real estate developer known mostly as a loud-mouth braggart with a taste for gaudy interior decoration and trash talk wasn’t clear to anyone but Donald J. Trump.

So on the morning of September 2, 1987, people in Washington, Boston, and New York opened their newspapers to discover a full-page ad labelled “an open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”

The headline: “There’s nothing wrong with Americas Foreign Defence Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

This being a Trump production, his people bragged to the press that the open letter cost almost a million dollars ($2.7 million in 2024 dollars.) A spokesman told reporters Trump had no political ambitions. He was simply a patriotic American.

Anyone who has followed Trump at any point in his career — most of the planet by now — knows the man is obsessed with being “laughed at.” Nothing is worse, in Trump’s mind. And the only way to not be laughed at is to be strong. And feared.

Hence, the letter hinges on the claim “the world is laughing at America’s politicians…” and closes with “let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

His solution to being laughed at would, happily, solve every other major problem the United States faced in 1987. Deficits. Struggling farmers. The homeless. High taxes. Everything would be better if only America’s leader had the guts to grab foreigners by the scruff of the neck and shake money from their pockets.

Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies. Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from one of the greatest profit machines ever created — machines created and nurtured by us. “Tax” these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.

Note that Trump did not call for cuts to defense spending. That would be weak. Guns and bombs are strong. Rather, he was calling for America to maintain its globe-spanning military but demand that other countries pay for it.

What Trump described was less a system of alliances than a Mafia protection racket in which the neighbourhood thugs demand “tax” money from local shopkeepers in exchange for the security provided by the gangsters. Movies often make out arrangements like this to be simple robbery, with the thugs saying, “nice place you got here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” And there certainly was an element of shakedown to them. But traditionally, these payments really did buy at least a degree of security: If other thugs showed up demanding payments, the first set of thugs would run them off. You wouldn’t want your cash cow driven out of business, after all.

The fact that running a protection racket is also a good way to be hated by the people you squeeze was irrelevant to Trump. Reagan’s idea of America as a “shining city on a hill” was of absolutely no interest to him. For Donald Trump in 1987, there was no such thing as “soft power,” the term political scientist Joseph Nye developed and popularized in the same era as Trump’s open letter. There was only power. I think I’m safe in suggesting that Donald Trump has never read Thucydides’ history of the Pelopennesian war, but Trump’s attitude was very much in accord with a famous line from that work: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

As to the obvious objection that America is stronger with committed allies, or that by making a disproportionate contribution to security the United States gains enormous capital it can and does spend in countless ways, Trump would have rolled his eyes. He was not one for such subtleties. And it never seems to have occurred to him that if America bullied its friends and allies as he suggested, those countries would develop new security and trade alliances from which America would be shut out — thus costing America both its former allies and its protection payments. Like nuance, Donald J. Trump doesn’t do long-term thinking.

But that was almost forty years ago. The world has changed profoundly.

Today, Donald Trump is not denouncing the weak and feckless President Reagan. He is denouncing the weak and feckless President Biden. And he is not calling on America to shakedown Japan and Saudi Arabia for American security in the Persian Gulf. He is calling on America to shakedown NATO members — the same NATO members who rallied to the defence of the United States after 9/11 and sent their soldiers to die in Afghanistan at the request of the United States — in exchange for protection against the Russian imperialism which Ronald Reagan denounced in 1987.

It was famously said of the French royal family, the Bourbons, that they learned nothing and forgot nothing. Apparently that line was tweaked and taken out of context, as so many famous lines from history have been.

If so, I suggest we update it with a much more accurate and apt version: Donald Trump has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.