The limits to scapegoating

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The sacking of Kristi Noem, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief has exposed clear limitations on Trump’s ability to use scapegoating as a political weapon. In turn, this begs the question what Trump will do instead.

One of the most important weapons in Donald Trump's policy arsenal is scapegoating, which he uses almost to the exclusion of all other policy levers. His love for scapegoating places Trump in the illustrious company of other greats of 20th Century politics, such as Hitler who scapegoated Jews, Mussolini who purged communists, Stalin who attacked Kulaks, Pol Pot who laid waste to intellectuals, Mao who went after political rivals and 'class enemies', and Pinochet who persecuted leftists.

As a rampant populist with strong authoritarian leanings, Trump has ‘scapegoated’ from the very beginning of his political career. Both his election campaigns were designed to place blame for the discontentment of rural and working-class Americans on Latin Americans and Muslims, labelling them as criminal and rapists. He also promised travel bans on people from dozens of "shithole countries" as he put it.

Trump was inspired by and in turn inspired the likes of Nigel Farage, whose successful Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom targeted immigrants from Europe, who, Farage said, took jobs away from ordinary hardworking Brits. Other rightwing populists followed in his foot steps; Giorgia Meloni landed the top job in Italian politics by attacking immigrants. In France, Marine Le Pen tried to do the same, albeit, so far, with far less success.

While some ‘scapegoaters’ moderate their speech after they take office - Giorgia Meloni being a case in point - Trump has done the opposite. He doubled down on his targets by designing policies to inflict maximum cruelty. Trump's obsession with scapegoating has been so all-consuming that he has shunned all attempts at deeper reforms of the US economy. Instead, he flips effortlessly between scapegoating domestic and external targets according to the relative political costs; at home voters sometimes baulk at excessive cruelty, while overseas scapegoating can result in serious international tension, even war.

For Trump, scapegoating is all about deflection and obfuscation. Trump understands, or perhaps he just senses that fixing society's real ills is far too politically taxing and technically challenging. Besides, it takes a lot of time to do good and the rewards are not immediate. Trump wants instant reward and he wants the reward for himself. Scapegoating does exactly that by producing juicy headlines that at the same time deflect attention away from society’s broader problems. As such, scapegoating complements his efforts to gut government departments, weaken education, defund science and research, and discourage independent journalism.

Scapegoating requires a constant supply of fresh targets Trump can blame for mounting failures and society's festering problems. Fortunately for Trump, one of his greatest talents, perhaps his only talent, is to identify such targets. He is simply excellent at finding the most vulnerable and then destroying them, a skill he may have acquired, honed, certainly, in his Epstein days, when he regularly raped defenceless children. In this regard, Trump was lucky to be born in the USA, which, among OECD countries, has the lowest level of empathy and places the highest value on individual success over wider societal well-being. These factors make it possible to crush many vulnerable groups before enough people get upset and try to put a stop to proceedings.

The logic behind Trump's targeting of the very weakest is twisted, but it is logic all the same; the weakest are most easily crushed, so by targeting them Trump maximises his victories while taking the least risk. Emboldened by each victory, he then moves on to the next-weakest group, and so on.

Yet, despite Trump's talent for instinctual scapegoating, his performance in office has been somewhat patchy. Early in his first term, he invested huge amounts of political capital in building a wall on the border with Mexico, which was rather inefficient. It was only later he figured out that sowing terror, say, in the hearts of young immigrant mothers by taking their children away, was far more effective.

Trump repeated the mistake at the start of his second term, when he targeted critics in US universities, who soon proved not to be the types to just roll over and die. But then, like in his first term, he adapted, reverting to inflicting maximum cruelty on the most vulnerable by forming GESTAPO-style ICE snatch squads, funding them with enough money to build an army in mid-sized developed country, and then putting them to work picking brown people off the streets.

Given Trump's enormous commitment to ICE, it must have been a shock for the president when ICE ran into serious opposition less than a year into its operations. It turned out that sending undocumented immigrants to torture-jails in El Salvador, often without due process, did not go down well with many Americans. Also, the good people in major metropoles, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis objected to having ICE goons on their streets.

After a series of violent, deadly even, confrontations, which unfolded in the full glare of the media, the depravity, brutality, and ineptitude of ICE was exposed, eventually forcing DHS to pull ICE out of big cities. Ironically, Kristi Noem, Scapegoater-in-Chief, became a scapegoat herself and may yet face impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives. This matters, because as long as proceedings against Noem are ongoing it will be difficult for DHS to return to large-scale ICE operations in major American cities.

ICE’s problems show that Trump has reached an important limit as far as domestic scapegoating is concerned. As president, he cannot afford to have ICE goons roam the streets if their operations eat into his approval ratings, especially this close to the mid-term elections. Trump has therefore ratcheted up his external scapegoating instead.

Like in his domestic scapegoating, Trump’s external scpegoating has been hit and miss. China was Trump’s first external scapegoat, but his attack misfired. China is neither weak nor vulnerable and the US depends at least as much on China as China depends on the US, so China was always going to be a bad scapegoat. Trump's tariffs predictably failed to alter the trade imbalance between the two nations; China did not even have to deploy its main weapon of selling US Treasury bonds to deflect the attack. Trump eventually realised his mistake and has so far shied away from attacking China in any serious way since.

In recent months, Trump has given external scapegoating another go. His first target was Venezuela, which is one of the most pathetic nations in the Western Hemisphere. In a rather spectacular raid on Caracas, Trump kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and imposed a blockade on Venezuelan oil exports (other than exports going to his oil buddies, of course).

Unlike China, Venezuela meets most criteria for a suitable scapegoat. The country may once have been a great oil power, but decades of grotesque mismanagement by the Chavista leadership have shrunk oil production to a trickle and rendered the country desperately poor. The Venezuelan government is even in default on its domestic and external debt obligations, so it has no means of raising money in global capital markets. Only two other countries in the Western hemisphere are as weak as Venezuela, namely Haiti and Cuba, the latter being in Trump's scapegoat sights.

Emboldened by his initial success in Venezuela, Trump then decided to take on Greenland. At first sight, Greenland is also an easy target; a huge territory with fewer than 60,000 people and protected only by tiny Denmark. However, Trump's attempt at annexing Greenland flopped big time, because he woefully misread the mood in Europe. European Union member-states plus the UK closed ranks at Davos and Trump had to return empty-handed to the United States, relinquishing his Greenland ambition and U-turning on threats he had made to impose major tariffs on European powers, such as Germany.

Following this humiliating climbdown, Trump switched focus to Iran as his next scapegoat. Iran, he claims, interfered in US elections and has posed an existential threat to the United States since the revolution of 1979. Trump probably did not come up with this fanciful narrative himself. It appears to have been concocted by the Israelis. Netanyahu has managed to get the United States to beat up on Israel's favourite bogeyman, while the war conveniently deflects attention away from Israel's illegal attacks on Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon. Netanyahu must be laughing.

Like Venezuela, Iran appears at first sight to be a suitable scapegoat. Heavily sanctioned by the international community and run by priests for nearly half a century, Iran is not exactly in great shape. It is marginalised, un-diversified, vulnerable. To make matters worse, the Ayatollahs, who have run the country since 1979 are fond of Venezuela-style economic populism, which has produced extreme corruption and widespread poverty.

Unlike Venezuela, however, Iran invests heavily in its military, particularly its drone capability. Iran is therefore not exactly a pushover. Having said that, Iran is not the existential threat Israel and US like to make it out to be either. According to the Global Firepower Index, which ranks countries according to their defence capabilities, USA ranks top in the world, while Iran is only down at number sixteen. Remember that the GFP Index is highly non-linear, because the US has greater military capability than the combined might of the nine next-most militarised nations in the world, so when the US attacks Iran, aided by Israel, which also ranks above Iran, it is very much a 'David versus Goliath' situation. This is no war of equals; Trump and the Israelis only talk up the Iranian threat in order to get carte blanche to kill with complete impunity.

The big question is now this: will Trump's scapegoating of Iran save his political bacon at the mid-term elections? In my view, it is extremely unlikely for reasons I have elaborated elsewhere. Polls back this up; American voters do not seem to be very happy with the way Trump is conducting the war.

One of the interesting aspects of the conflict so far is that the United Kingdom has refused to participate in US offensive operations against Iran. Like France, Germany, Spain, and others, the UK says the attacks are illegal. This is a remarkable departure from UK’s traditional 'lapdog' role and illustrates just how far Europe has come in terms of standing up to Trump since Greenland. Trump is now paying a price for his myopic attempt to scapegoat Greenland and Denmark.  

Hence, it seems that having hit the wall in domestic scapegoating, Trump is now facing the same problem in external scapegoating. The mid-term elections are only a few months away and his two most important political instruments - domestic and external scapegoating - are no longer fit for purpose. Does he even have other weapons? I am not sure.

Where does that leave us? Well, the next eight months will be extremely interesting. Expect a heady mixture of horror and comedy. Trump will flail about with greater and greater urgency as he tries to find a strategy that works with voters. He will lash out, double down, U-turn, and head off into weird nooks and crannies to try to regain political momentum. He will use shock tactics and he will almost certainly make bigger and bigger mistakes. His mood will swing greatly. He might even develop new and interesting rashes. While this will seem comedic at times, there will also be dangers and many new innocent victims. In the end, however, the Republicans will lose both houses of Congress and Trump will be impeached.

The End