Trump’s conviction and the end of American exceptionalism

Donald Trump is not the first former world leader to be convicted of a crime. Indeed, he’s not even the first former world leader in the past decade to face felony charges and then run again for national office. 

Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was convicted and jailed for corruption before returning to the presidency last year. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner just left Argentina’s vice-presidency, an office she held despite facing multiple corruption-related criminal charges after her presidential tenure ended in 2015. Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif returned to his country’s premiership in 2013 for a third time after a criminal conviction and imprisonment. 

The difference with Trump, then, is not the fact of his conviction but his nationality. On the world stage, it simply matters more when a former American president is found to be a felon than when the leader of any other country is handed the same verdict. 

Partly this is because of the US’s economic and military might. Despite the relentless rise of China, the US remains a singular geopolitical power because of its ability to influence international events though global capital flows and carrier strike groups. 

But on a day-to-day basis, America’s capacity to shape the world has relied far more on what strategic theorist Joseph Nye termed “soft power” — its ability to influence allies and rivals through the strength of its example. Despite its multiplicity of failings — from persistent and deepening income inequality to its lethal affinity for firearms — the US has, for more than a century, attracted political actors from all corners of the globe to shape their own systems and societies on an American template that delivered prosperity to a large and diverse swath of society based (mostly) on merit rather than blood or political connections. 

It was this role as an exemplar that buttressed America’s post-cold war status as the “indispensable nation”, the notion first articulated by Madeleine Albright that only the US had the capacity and influence to manage and resolve international conflicts. The sense that American institutions were grounded in transparency, fairness and reason gave them the sheen of comparative even-handedness on the world stage. 

And it is this ability that has been most damaged by Trump’s eight years on the American political arena, and the one that will be most undermined by the prospect of a convicted felon securing the Republican nomination for the presidency. 

Trumpian damage to American soft power was most evident during his presidency, when every international relationship — from Washington’s willingness to remain in Nato to its support for joint military exercises with South Korea — became transactional. Gone were matters of principle like democracy and human rights. The Americans, Trump announced, were in it for the money — just like everyone else. 

But it is in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election loss, starting with inciting the January 6 insurrection and continuing through to Thursday’s guilty verdict on 34 felony counts, that the most damage has been done. Why would anyone now look to an American political system that tolerates an insurrectionist and convicted felon as a model? Can anyone now, at home or abroad, assert American exceptionalism with a straight face?

The consequences of Trump’s damage to American soft power are, by definition, incalculable. These powers are “soft” because they are intangible. But is it any surprise that countries across the developing world are increasingly looking to Beijing and even Moscow for political and societal modelling rather than Washington? Correlation does not equal causation, but it should be no surprise that the rise of Chinese and Russian-style authoritarianism worldwide has come over the same decade that Trump has been defacing American institutions and democratic norms. 

Rana, there are some who argue that Trump’s conviction is just the opposite: a sign to the world that the American system works. President Joe Biden asserted this on Friday, taking to the White House podium to argue that Trump’s conviction shows that “no one is above the law” and that even a former president can be judged by 12 ordinary citizens.

But can Americans really be proud of that result when it also has absolutely no consequence on Trump’s standing in national politics? I fear that the nomination of a convicted felon by a major American political party for the highest office in the land — even if he doesn’t ultimately win — will do irreparable damage to America’s ability to influence international events. Biden seems to think otherwise. Who do you agree with?

Recommended reading

• Foreign Policy magazine has a pretty good summary of international reactions to the Trump verdict. Tellingly, it reports that Russian and Chinese state media have parroted Trump’s claims that the case was “rigged” and politically motivated.

• Sunday was Mexico’s presidential election, and I’ve been fascinated for months by Claudia Sheinbaum, as much for her biography as for her policy agenda (which largely mirrors that of her mentor, the incumbent president Andrés Manuel López Obrador). In addition to the prospect of being Mexico’s first female president, Sheinbaum comes from a Jewish family with origins in Lithuania and Bulgaria, where her mother’s family fled to escape the Holocaust. She also came to politics after a career as a scientist; she holds a PhD in engineering. The Financial Times’ Mexico City correspondent Christine Murray and Latin America editor Michael Stott had a nice profile of her at the weekend.

• Julia Ioffe, who covers foreign affairs for the online news organisation Puck, has been required reading since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when her knowledge of both the US foreign policy establishment and internal Kremlin politics became invaluable. But she’s also been worth reading recently on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Her most recent dispatch makes the case that the Biden administration has had a hard time coming up with a coherent war policy because . . . well . . . because the Middle East is pretty damn hard.

Rana Foroohar responds

Peter, I’m pretty patriotic, but I’ve always been sceptical of the idea of American exceptionalism. I think there is good and bad in this nation as there is in every nation. The idea of a presidential candidate who is also a felon is certainly a low point in American culture. But I’d have to agree with Biden that it’s also a sign our system is working. I think the larger problem is the decline of collectivism and the rise of a certain kind of rapacious individualism that Trump exemplifies.

A poll from the Wall Street Journal and NORC at the University of Chicago last year found that shared values like civic mindedness, religion, family and the love of country were on the decline. The only shared value in America that was rising was a belief in money culture. Nobody epitomises that more than Trump. In his world, nothing matters but brand value. That said, I just came from my daughter’s own graduation from the University of Chicago this past weekend. If you’re feeling bad about the country, just go to a commencement ceremony at a school like that. It was filled with the diversity, energy and optimism that defines America at its best. I came away feeling that if the country can still turn out kids like this, there’s hope for all, even in the Trump era.

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In response to “Why the world should learn to love Biden’s tariffs”:
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