The latest episode of National Public Radio (NPR) veteran Diane Rehm’s “On My Mind” podcast, with The Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker, discussed the central role of the application of fear in the second Trump administration. It is worth the listen.
I’d previously called Trump, “America’s first Balkan president,” as his methods from the outset carried parallels with the Balkan leaders from the late 1980s forward, particularly (but not solely) Slobodan Milosevic in rump Yugoslavia/Serbia, who worked to generate division and enmity from the commanding heights of power through propagating fear and dispensing patronage.
These levers remain vital for the Balkan leaders of today, including Milosevic’s understudy Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, whose most recent campaign slogan “mir i stabilnost” (stability and peace) conveyed the implicit threat that without his continued control these desirable states of being would cease.
Trump’s messaging to his supporters – “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” – conveys the same idea: only he can ensure your security. Now returned to power, he is pursuing a retribution agenda against his critics and perceived enemies, first using Elon Musk’s DOGE to gut so-called “woke” institutions like USAID, and expanding to RFE/RL, VOA, USIP, the Department of Education and beyond. He’s intentionally generating fear among foreign students, legal residents, naturalized residents, as well as the legal community, media, academia, civil society, and the wider society.
The patronage element became evident even before Trump’s inauguration with his cabinet picks – all loyalists, many billionaires, often with thin qualifications but for their fealty to him, as with the allegiance of tech titans, caricatured here by Ann Telnaes, who left Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post after this cartoon was pulled. Trump meme coins provide a potential route to provide financial tribute, for domestic and foreign actors alike.
Patronage serves as a vital binding agent for these (and other) prime beneficiaries of the Trump regime. But what has solidified Trump’s popular base (those in the red MAGA hats and often decked out in Trump swag), which stands to pay for his policies, both in the near and longer term? What has made him a powerful political force is his effective weaponization of inat.
Inat is an Ottoman Turkish word widely used in the Balkans, usually translated as “spite.” But while not inaccurate, that does not convey its core connotation – that those who feel it are willing to sustain pain themselves to see harm come to those they resent, have a deep-seated grievance against, despise – or fear.
Trump managed to dowse for the dark soul in America and bind it to more prosaic and widely felt resentments and discomfort at the speed of social change – providing an ever-expanding series of targets for his personalized constituency.
This reached its first term apogee in the attempted violent putsch on January 6, 2021. But its long tail can be demonstrated through the alchemy wrought on large segments of the public’s consciousness and memory in the five years since the arrival of the Covid pandemic and the protest cycle after the murder of George Floyd. That window of opportunity in 2020 has since closed – it now seems like a Covid fever dream.
An effort to recast the entire historical episode as “chaos” and “radical” began in 2020 and is now orthodoxy in Trump’s GOP. Despite the threat to Trump’s support base made evident then, he managed not only to consolidate it, but build it further during the Biden presidency. His dominance of the Republican Party is effectively absolute; all legislators and executives feel disposable unless they bend to his whims, and hand over power, effectively rendering the famed American “checks and balances” as hollow words.
Trump’s inat politics, already applied abroad in his first term, are now wreaking havoc on a global scale: the betrayal and coveting the territory of foundational allies Canada (until now the country’s neighbor and best friend) and Denmark, extortion against Ukraine and Panama, initiation of trade wars. All targets of aggression are portrayed as exploiters of American goodwill, in need of retribution. There is never discussion of how the US (and in particular the very business leaders now aligning themselves with Trump) benefited from the international practices and norms in places for decades.
This is a trope familiar in the Balkans as well – the aggressor and dominant power actor portraying itself as victim. This was most recently on display last year during the UN General Assembly vote to commemorate genocide in Srebrenica, when Vucic wrapped himself in the Serbian flag and cried at what he claimed was an injustice against all Serbs.
Patronage and fear are also applied on the global stage. The fear of losing American military support for the war of defense against imperial aggressor Russia was an evident driver for Ukraine to engage in “peace talks” which seem aimed at achieving a deal amounting to Ukrainian capitulation to Russian aggression and US-led colonial extraction of the country’s resources – an idea broadly rejected by Ukrainians. The US is now effectively engaging in a coercive pincer with Russia against Ukraine.
But that fear has been felt also in the rest of Europe, where it is painfully – and finally – sinking in that US commitment to Article 5 and NATO is highly questionable under Trump, and is probably effectively dead. Seeking to divide European countries through the dangling of potential patronage – particularly to exploit British hopes of a separate trade deal – or at least exemption from tariffs – has been ruthlessly exploited, as have affinities among political leaders on the right, like Victor Orban.
Thus far, Europe+ has demonstrated laudable coherence. But the scale of the challenge is immense, given the centrality of the US in the NATO architecture. For Europe to rise to the challenge of its own defense and those of its proclaimed values – its comparative advantage against Russia, China, and a hostile US – it will have to go far outside its current comfort zone of consensus decision-making and liberal economics.
Finally, the exuberant mean-spiritedness of the Trump administration’s actions – condemning millions to potentially starve, die of HIV/AIDS for want of ARVs, or die unnecessarily after natural disasters, to give but three real time examples – bears underscoring. As Adam Serwer titled an Atlantic article and his later book, “The Cruelty is the Point.” It is a vulgar display of power.