Poke The Bear

Donald Trump is a lame duck (not a bear)—an unusually weak one, in some ways—and he knows it.

(Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

After two months of watching American corporate and opposition-party officials “obey in advance” or, worse, choose to align with Donald Trump for selfish reasons, it’s nice to see leaders in foreign countries recognize something that hasn’t really sunk in among U.S. elites: Donald Trump is a lame duck.

He’s weak in the ways every lame-duck president is, and, to an under-appreciated extent, his efforts to menace and extort concessions out of domestic and international rivals is a form of rebellion against his own expiration date, his looming irrelevance.

Trump will enrich himself in his lame-duck presidency—indeed, he used his campaign to funnel money into his own pocket, and pivoted quickly as president-elect to plans for looting the treasury. He’s found he can abuse (or simply threaten to abuse) coercive powers of government to bring major corporations to heel, and this feeds an illusion of strength. The fact that certain elites comply feeds it further, as does the fact that most mechanisms of accountability have been dismantled.

But he’s still a lame duck. An unusually old, tired, and manipulable lame duck. At some level he realizes there’s no next referendum on his time atop the heap. I suspect this is why he and his fellow trolls suggest he may seek an unconstitutional third term—it’s not just to trigger the libs, it’s also to paper over this definitional vulnerability.

If Trump accomplishes little in office, but also causes little damage, he might feel bitter and resentful about his impotent showing, but he’ll retire or die with the best legacy he can hope for: a contested one, where too many Americans adore him for history to write him off as a total fuckup or failed experiment or national embarrassment.

By contrast, if he unleashes war or another economic calamity or social collapse, or even just bungles another national emergency—all real possibilities—he’ll vindicate his haters and die a pariah.

His vanity is a limit on his transgression. And so more of his detractors in the United States should learn from their foreign counterparts, and poke the bear. The more simultaneous poking, the better.

SHEIN ON, CRAZY DIAMOND

There’s a small debate on the anti-Trump left, mostly implicit, about when and whether to respond to Trump’s diversions in his second term.

Liberals today seem more inclined than in 2017-2020 to roll their eyes or mutter at his empty provocations, and move on. This is as much a mental-health exercise as a strategic ploy. It’s arguably a wiser approach to opposition than indiscriminate resistance, though of course it means we’ll err in certain edge cases—over-reacting to some things, under-reacting to others.

But a good way to resolve the debate might be to establish an informal rule: responding to Trump’s provocations is always acceptable if the effect is to belittle him; to make him look like a boob or a chump or a phony. Not “ahhh! this is dangerous!” but “whatever, clown!” Not “what about our norms!” but “try me.” Etc, etc.

When Trump said he’d rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, U.S. liberals mostly resolved to ignore it, but Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum pointed to an old map of what is now the southwestern U.S. and said, “¿Por qué no le llamamos ‘América mexicana’? Suena bien, ¿verdad?”— “Why don’t we call this Mexican America? Sounds good, no?”

In response to Trump’s ongoing campaign to belittle Canada as the 51st state, the leader of the Canadian Green Party, Elizabeth May, suggested a different trade. “I don’t want to belittle Trump,” May said. “But on the other hand, hey Donald, have we got a deal for you. You think we want to be the 51st state? Nah. Maybe California would like to be the 11th province. How about it? California, Oregon, Washington.”

The president of Honduras took a more aggressive tack and threatened to expel armed forces from a base the U.S. military uses there if Trump implements a mass deportation regime.

In so many words they are all saying, ‘we have a relationship with the U.S. government, which we honor, but it happens at the moment to be under hostile occupation by a nettlesome troll. This is unfortunate, and there may be long-term consequences, but he’s a lame duck and we’ll wait him out.’

I would like to applaud this approach, and encourage more of it from more western leaders, ideally in collaboration. Maybe they can start trying to one-up each other. Instead of simply saying Greenland isn’t for sale, the prime minister of Denmark might ask Trump whether the United States can really afford a tariff on Ozempic given our epidemic of obesity, embodied by Trump himself.

MORE LIKE CUCKERBERG

There are obviously certain leaders who can’t chance it. Volodymyr Zelensky comes to mind.

But in large part because Trump is a lame duck, many others can. And my hope is that they’d inspire domestic elites—Democrats in particular, but business leaders and celebrities and other public figures—to get in on the fun.

It was a mistake for the Kamala Harris campaign to muzzle Tim Walz and generally back off its early mockery of Trump and the weird MAGA establishment. It’s a mistake today for Democrats in Congress to make a show of its servility. Instead of trying to rise above Trump’s antics, or validating them the way John Fetterman has of late, Senate Democrats could sign an open letter to the unwilling people of Greenland and the government of Canada ridiculing Trump’s impotent bluster, and assuring them legislation to annex their territories will not pass.

If there’s an ambitious, vain liberal out there who wants to be president, that person should appoint themselves Trump’s daily troll. How’s Greenland coming along? As good as the wall? Oh you’re going to run for a third term? At 82? Sounds great. Since the rules are out the window, maybe Barack Obama wants to run again! If so, we’ll clear the field for him.

Everyone with something at stake in this coming term should look around and ask themselves whether they’d feel better if they comported themselves like Claudia Sheinbaum or Jeff Bezos. Or Mark Zuckerberg. Like someone with dignity or like an embarrassing beta who ritually emasculates himself (not all at once but slice by slice, inch by inch, in exchange for nothing).

Bezos and Zuckerberg surely think they’re being savvy, or that a little crow-eating and ring-kissing is a small price to pay for some additional billions, or to avoid petty harassment. Trump loves to be flattered, and so long as we cross our fingers behind our backs….

They’ve forgotten or failed to recognize two important things: First, Trump will demand more and more elaborate acts of submission. He understands and respects strength, even if he hates it when others exercise power against him, but he exploits weakness. Gaining his forbearance isn’t an initiation rite, like fraternity hazing, it’s an open-ended process of humiliation with no guarantees attached. Second, and more importantly, he’s a lame duck who carries enormous tail risks. As collaborators, people like Bezos and Zuckerberg have claimed partial culpability for whatever destruction he might wreak. They’d have been better off operating on the level, treating Trump as a pest with a defined political life expectancy. It might have been frustrating at times, but their hands would have been clean and their businesses insured against mass boycott.

Let their indignity be a lesson to others: It is unusually easy to call Trump’s bluff, and he’s most error prone and unbecoming when he’s an object of ridicule. It’s an effective mode of resistance, a long bet on the future, and it’s more fun than cowering.