Douthat: Trumpism is doomed without restraint

There are two ways to react to Donald Trump’s latest spurt of mad-king behavior, as he tries to bully and meme his way to the acquisition of Greenland under the threat of a trade war if not a real one.

The first reading is straightforward: This is malignant narcissism flavored with insane Nobel Peace Prize-related self-pity, the usual Trumpian unfitness magnified by the excitement of his Venezuelan intervention and the vicissitudes of old age, with the entire NATO alliance imperiled by the warmongering whims of its leading power’s would-be Caesar.

The second interpretation purports to be more hardheaded and sensible, wiser and world-weary after so many years of watching Trump at work. Isn’t this always how he negotiates? Stake out an absurd-sounding position, freak out all the institutionalists and keepers of consensus, rattle the markets and then use the madman’s leverage to induce other countries to accept an advantageous-for-America deal? You can’t take the wild things he says on social media as the essence of his policy; he’s a performer and a player of games, and while he doesn’t always chicken out, he’s always looking for a way to shake hands at the end.

My own conclusion, deep in the Trump era, is that you need to blend these readings to understand the situation. Trump is an unstable narcissist with a bottomless appetite for attention and a defective moral core, and if you think he’s merely playing a negotiator’s part, you misunderstand him: There is a perfect sincerity to his most absurdist whines and boasts.

At the same time, he also has a certain degree of self-awareness and a strong instinct for the ways of power in the world, neither of which is immediately apparent from just listening to him brag and bully. He wants to be the center of attention, not to destroy the world, and he has spent a lifetime turning his own personal defects into strengths — in effect, using his own low character and poor impulse control as a weapon in negotiations, a source of fear and anxiety and unsettlement for counterparties, an irrational-seeming means to what often turn out to be rational-enough ends.

Devil’s bargain

Every bet on Trump, from the bet made by Republican politicians in the spring and summer of 2016 down to the bet made by swing voters in the fall of 2024, is a gamble that his rational cunning and instinct for self-preservation will circumscribe his megalomania. It’s a bet that the part of Trump that seems qualified for 25th Amendment remedies can be controlled and channeled by the part of Trump that lives inside reality and understands its limits, however unwelcome they may be.

The problem with this bet is that Trump’s rational side can’t do the job of containment alone. Maybe it could once, when the stakes were real estate deals and reality television programming. But now you can get to stable outcomes only when other people or forces break through his solipsism to make the limits of reality plain.

In the first Trump term this role was played by his Cabinet and advisers, with such success that some Americans became nostalgic for Trump stability amid the rolling crises of the Biden term. But you could see, in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021, what happened when the constrainers withdrew and left the president alone — alone with enablers and cranks, but more important, alone with himself. Without any external check, at least until his plans hit the wall of Mike Pence and the Senate, the internal check collapsed and mania ran wild.

In his second term, the internal checks have been too weak from the start. Figures like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent have tried to steer the president and sometimes have done so successfully. But many of the people around Trump think the first term’s advisers went too far in trying to constrain him, that his instincts are better than the doubters think — and meanwhile Trump himself obviously feels vindicated by his return to power and wants to turn the dial further, further, further …

… which means that the most important checks are now external ones. It was not Trump’s Cabinet or his own instincts that forced him to retreat from the wildest part of his trade war: The bond markets and Chinese power did that. The Supreme Court helped shut down the deportations to El Salvador’s prison system. Congress has been quietly moving to unwind parts of the DOGE experience. Public opinion (and specifically public support for SNAP benefits) put an end to the government shutdown. Jerome Powell’s assiduous cultivation of the Senate and calculated public interventions have limited Trump’s war on an independent Fed. And where there’s no constitutional counterforce, as with the pardon power, there’s just a rampage of corruption.

Wanted: guardrails

So who can play a reality-imposing role with Greenland? My expectation is that it’s some combination of forces — that between them, financial markets, opinion polls, European leaders and U.S. senators will turn NATO’s pointless crisis into some kind of negotiation, some limited claim of Trumpian victory, that does not end in unjust warmaking. (The Supreme Court’s role can be assessed when we have its ruling on the kind of tariffs Trump is using to browbeat allies. But for now its failure to issue an expedited ruling looks like an example of an external check unwisely withheld.)

But even if you assume that the Greenland episode won’t, God willing, be the foreign policy equivalent of Trump riding his narcissism all the way to a riot at the U.S. Capitol, it’s inherently destructive just to have him ride the Viking ship this far.

Destructive of U.S. interests vis-à-vis China, since Trump’s behavior is clearly encouraging some European and Canadian tilt toward Chinese power. Destructive of U.S. conservative interests vis-à-vis our civilizational neighbors, because he’s undermining right-wing and populist parties all across Europe in the same way that he undermined Canadian conservatives last year. Destructive of his own party’s prospects in 2026. And destructive of global confidence in American stability and Washington’s basic common sense.

Again, it’s possible to achieve positive ends through Trumpian means. But the mechanism of that achievement requires constraints, and the ones we have now seem too weak for the purpose — with three years still to go.

Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist.