Trump Is a Just Real Estate Guy Who Sees America as a Property

He runs the U.S. government like a bigger version of his company. But America will outlast him.

Every few weeks, someone in Washington — usually a conservative intellectual of one sort or another — claims to have discovered a coherent philosophy behind Donald Trump’s impulsive, self-dealing foreign policy.

For example, the current issue of the venerable Foreign Affairs magazine has an article by a former Trump official, A. Wess Mitchell, proclaiming that Trump is pursuing a “GRAND STRATEGY OF CONSOLIDATION.” In this telling, our 4-D chess-playing president is concentrating America’s power and resources on defending our homeland and hemisphere while pulling back from Europe and the Middle East and avoiding costly wars. Whoops!

Photo by Justin Cron on Unsplash

So, it’s with some trepidation that I propose here my own general theory of Trump’s foreign policy. Mine doesn’t project my own preferences onto him or fantasize he’s someone he’s not. On the contrary, it assumes he is exactly what he has always been. Trump is a real estate guy who sees the United States government as a bigger version of the company he spent his life running, and he is using it to serve the same values and goals on a global stage.

The Trump real estate organization never needed to own every piece of property, and billionaire Trump was happy to share his world with others like himself, just as President Trump is happy to share the planet with other powerful men. His be-all- end-all is for the company he owns, which he conflates with the country he leads, to make money.

If you treat countries as the equivalent of property development companies, with profit as your only motive, your foreign policy is probably going to look something like this:

Rule 1: Money is coming is good. Money going out is bad. Therefore, trade deficits are bad, even if the deficit is with some poor country in Africa that can’t afford American goods but has a natural resource we need to buy. Charging tariffs fixes this problem by bringing more money in, especially if you wrongly imagine, as Trump does, that the other country is paying the tariff.

Rule 2: Land should belong to whoever is best able to develop it and be traded for commercial advantage. This doesn’t mean Trump will invade foreign countries to seize land he’d like to exploit. But he also can’t comprehend people whose attachment to some silly sovereignty would outweigh the opportunities he’s offering. Why wouldn’t Greenlanders take his money to merge with America? Why wouldn’t Gazans thank him for wanting to turn their rubble into a gambling resort? Why wouldn’t Canadians want to join a richer empire?

Rule 3: Foreign countries are useful only insofar as they can help us make money. This means there is no moral hierarchy among countries, no distinction between democracies and dictatorships, no credit given for shared sacrifice or common values. What matters is whether they can finance our business ventures or mine natural resources with us. In fact, it’s easier to do such deals with a Vladimir Putin or a Xi Jinping, authoritarians who don’t need permission from legislatures and courts, than with European allies that moralize about the rule of law. So, China can be our enemy one day and our friend the next if we can get it to invest $1 trillion in America (as Trump says he wants, U.S. national security be damned). We can bomb Iranian mullahs to open the Straits of Hormuz, then toll the strait together and split the profits. It’s nothing personal — just business.

Rule 4 (following from #3): Big, powerful countries are more useful allies/business partners than small ones. Obviously, we can make more money being friends with Russia — with its vast tracts of oil, minerals, and beauty queens — than with tiny Lithuania. So, as Trump asked in 2016 and has thought ever since, wouldn’t it be a “good thing” to be “friends with Russia?” Why defend its little neighbors unless they pay us market rate for protection? Why, for that matter, should we even bother to have ambassadors to most countries? The Trump Organization wouldn’t have wasted money on an office in Burundi or Paraguay unless it was to manage a golf course deal.

Rule 5: We should not pay for global public goods — only for what brings financial return. The Trump Organization benefited from the government funding schools, roads, and police. But it did all it could to avoid paying taxes for those services — and usually got away with being a free rider. Likewise, it’s sad, and maybe bad for America, if Ukrainian children are killed, if tropical forests are cut, or if hunger and disease make people migrate from poor countries. But if other rich countries say they care about those problems, why not make them pay to solve them?

Rule 6: War is bad for business. We shouldn’t stand on principle when trying to end it. Promoting peace should be a priority for America. But peace comes from deals, not from expensive security arrangements. And the easiest way to cut deals is to push weaker parties to give in to their stronger adversaries. Ukraine ceding land and people Russia would be better than the United States spending more money defending it. Taiwan capitulating to Beijing would be better than the United States risking war with China — especially if Xi Jinping promises to sell us Taiwanese chips on the same terms after “unification.”

I’m not saying that everyone around Trump subscribes to these cynical rules. Secretary of State Marco Rubio may sincerely believe, for example, that the seizure of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela can lead to democracy there. But that’s not why Trump let it happen. He was happy to leave the rest of Venezuela’s dictatorship in place for now, so long as it cut the United States in on its oil business. He approved the war with Iran because he was convinced it would end as quickly and result in a similar arrangement; now he is desperately seeking an exit because, again, real wars are bad for business. And he’d rather send real estate executives than diplomats to seal the deal.

But Trump’s cynical playbook doesn’t account for people who are motivated by genuine beliefs. He is flustered and frustrated by those willing to risk their lives and fortunes for something good, like the Ukrainians, or for something evil, like the regime in Iran. He is easily manipulated by people who take advantage of his simplistic greed — most of the trade deals and investment commitments he’s gotten appear to be or are fake. So, he constantly fails — as a president and as a businessman (just look at the balance sheets of his cryptocurrency and social media companies).

The price America pays will for a time be steep. We’ve surrendered our position as leader of the free world. Our enemies see that America can be bought and are taking advantage of it. The increase in sickness, misery, and violence abroad may be felt in the form of pandemics, trade disruptions, and migration at home. We won’t even make more money.

But the president/CEO will eventually be retired. The soldiers, diplomats, and intelligence officers he considers to be his employees but who still cherish their oath to the Constitution will outlast him. Republicans in Congress, meek as they may be, passed an international affairs budget this year that preserves much of what he wanted to destroy. Our allies will remain wary of us after he’s gone, but we’ll still be the only power able to do constructive things in the world. There will be a demand for that if we provide the supply.

So, count me in the camp that says America, the country, will recover, once it sheds the company that tried to swallow it. The company itself may not survive the separation.

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

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