Don’t Panic, Trump Is Flagging

We are delighted to feature Francis Fukuyama in the pages of Persuasion once again. Some of you may not know that he writes a regular column, “Frankly Fukuyama,” which is proudly part of the Persuasion family, and which you need to manually opt in to receive.

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Over the past decade, and particularly over the past year, it has been hard not to indulge in catastrophic thinking. What began in the early 2010s as a “democratic recession” has morphed into a full-blown retreat of democratic government across the world, and nowhere more so than in the United States. Donald Trump’s second term was always expected to be bad, but his actions have been so much worse than even last year’s pessimists—and I include myself in that group—imagined.

Domestically, he has hollowed out the Justice Department and turned it into an instrument of personal revenge. With ICE, he is in the process of creating the country’s largest law enforcement agency, loyal primarily to himself rather than to the law, whose agents have gone after law-abiding migrants and swept up U.S. citizens with no due process. He has put a charlatan in charge of America’s public health service, and has indiscriminately fired civil servants and closed entire agencies in ways that will undermine government capacity for years to come.

It is in foreign policy, however, that some of the most immediate damage is being done. He has sided with Russia in its unjust war against Ukraine, having his incompetent negotiator Steve Witkoff insert Russian demands into a so-called “peace plan” that would ratify a total capitulation to Moscow. He has levied tariffs on every country in the world except for authoritarian friends like Russia, and denigrated America’s closest allies. And he has shown a clear preference for strongman authoritarian government, being open to any non-democratic country (including China) ready to make a deal with him. Foreign leaders have come to understand that the way to influence American policy is to bribe the president personally.

It is at this point that domestic policy joins hands with foreign policy. Trump has