Trump’s Scare Tactics

 

Donald Trump is Scary Movie 6. How much is spoof and how much is genuine horror?

Going into 2025, the world was already pretty scary. Take your pick: climate change, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, pandemic, Elon Musk.

But in two short weeks, the current occupant of the White House has made life scarier still for specific communities of people. The Trump administration has already taken into custody thousands of undocumented immigrants and begun flying them out of the country. It has stripped trans Americans of federal recognition.

It has removed security protection for dozens of former federal employees, including former health official Anthony Fauci and diplomat Mike Pompeo, who have been the subject of death threats. And it tried to suspend all federal grants, disrupting countless people and communities.

As if that weren’t enough, Trump has let fly a quiver full of threats at a range of overseas targets. He has threatened tariffs against countries, some of them just for looking at him the wrong way. He has pledged to put the Panama Canal back under U.S. control.

He has made noises about seizing Greenland, regardless of what Denmark and nearly 57,000 Greenlagreenders have to say about it. Most recently, he promised maximum pressure on Colombia if it didn’t accept back its deported citizens (after some initial resistance, Colombia buckled).

Voters backed Trump because they wanted change, not chaos. Is the president driving America and the world to the precipice to give us all a good scare? Or does he intend to drive off the cliff because he can’t be bothered to take his foot off the accelerator and apply the brakes?

There’s no question that Donald Trump is Scary Movie 6 (release date: last week). What’s not entirely clear is how much is spoof—Greenland, really?—and how much is genuine horror.

Trump’s Record of Threats

In his first administration, Donald Trump gave a four-year preview of what he’d do if given a second chance and a team of loyal extremists.

In that distant time—before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, before the latest war in Gaza, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, before the coronavirus—Trump promised to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico.

He threatened to repeal Obamacare. He pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. He was going to repeal federal funding for cities that provided sanctuary to the undocumented. He intended to kick China out of the World Trade Organization, end birthright citizenship, bring back waterboarding, balance the federal budget, and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

In all, Trump made 55 promises (or threats, depending on your point of view) that he didn’t keep. Many of these intended policies got bogged down in the courts. Or Congress blocked them. Or they were unconstitutional, impossible to implement, or deeply unpopular. In some cases, Trump probably forgot that he even made a particular threat in the first place since he made so many of them.

Before you get all optimistic about how this record of failure is predictive of his current trajectory, Trump did indeed make good on a number of his threats. He imposed import tariffs. He defunded Planned Parenthood and changed the composition of the Supreme Court so that it could, among other things, reverse Roe v. Wade.

He bullied European countries to pay more for their own military operations. He withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change and canceled U.S. participation in the Iran nuclear deal.

One speed bump the last time around was Congress. Though the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress during Trump’s first two years, the party had not yet been turned into a full-on personality cult. Senator John McCain, for instance, famously prevented Trump from repealing Obamacare, an initiative the Arizona Republican didn’t even like. In those days, some Republicans simply refused to bullied.

Now, under the dubious leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson, House Republicans have generally become a team of presidential lapdogs. In the Senate, traditionally a more independent-minded institution, only a couple Republicans dare to stand up to Trump (and not that often either).

In the confirmation vote for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s clearly incompetent choice to head up the Pentagon, only three Republicans dared to object. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are the last moderates in the party.

The third naysayer, Mitch McConnell, was the Senate majority leader during Trump’s first term. His occasional opposition to Trump is now something of a surprise. This was the guy who carried water for Trump during his first term. Oh, how the Senate has changed if McConnell has become a cornerstone of the tepid resistance.

Threats as Policy

Trump’s approach to foreign policy can be summed up with this shorthand: flatter up, threaten down.

If Trump thinks he holds the more powerful hand, he confidently shoots off his mouth. So, for instance, Denmark is tiny, so Trump’s going after Greenland. This is the tactic of a hostile takeover. Trump sees a business opportunity—a huge undervalued enterprise that can be seized from a distracted and comparatively weak owner.

But, of course, geopolitics does not operate according to the rules of corporate capitalism, and Trump seems almost bewildered that everyone isn’t just rolling over and accepting his plan.

U.S. allies often have difficulty saying no to Washington, given the power differential, so Trump has long tried to bully them into spending more on their own militaries. This time, he is pushing NATO members to spend 5 percent of their GDP, an absurd figure that even the hypertrophied United States doesn’t reach (though tiny Estonia and Lithuania have both knuckled under).

Trump likes to make examples of countries, killing chickens to scare the monkeys, as the Chinese like to say. Thus, he brought out the big guns to threaten Colombia if it didn’t accept returned deportees. There was no formal diplomatic process. The entire episode was conducted on social media, Trump’s preferred mode of discourse. 

Targeting Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Trump vowed to impose 25 percent tariffs on Colombian exports right away, which would obviously affect the crude oil, coal and coffee industries. The tariffs would double if Mr. Petro didn’t fold on the issue within a week…. Presumably, Mr. Petro looked at his chances of coming out on top of this conflict and decided it was zero. 

The objects of Trump’s flattery are generally the kind of strong-arm militarists that Trump aspires to be: Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un. These leaders don’t just make threats, they follow through on them. Putin threatened Ukraine, then invaded it. Netanyahu threatened the leadership of Hamas, then set about destroying it. Kim Jong Un threatened to build a nuclear arsenal, and then did so.

China is in a category by itself. It is powerful, to be sure, and Xi Jinping thus receives his share of Trumpian flattery (“I like President Xi very much,” Trump said of the Chinese leader this week. “I’ve always liked him.”). But China also challenges American hegemony by controlling the supply chains of critical raw materials, replacing the United States as the primary trade partner for countries throughout the world, and outperforming everyone in producing renewable energy infrastructure.

With its capacity to make America look bad, China must be subjected to both threats and flattery, according to Trump’s playbook. This is perhaps the one place where Trump’s strategy resembles a kind of diplomacy, given its resemblance to past carrot-and-stick approaches coming out of Washington.

And Then There’s Ukraine

The real test of Trump’s threat-based foreign policy will be Ukraine. Initially, Trump’s approach was quite simple: threaten both sides until they come to the table and negotiate a settlement. It’s a classic Three Stooges skit: bang heads together until the two sides come to their senses. But again, geopolitics does not run according to the rules of the Three Stooges, which results in headaches more often than peace.

No surprise then that the Trump team now talks about a 100-day timeline for resolving the conflict, not the 24-hour deadline that Trump boasted of as a candidate. The 100-day plan is still built around a double-threat strategy. Most recently, Trump waxed ineloquent about the damage further U.S. sanctions could have on the Russian economy.

But this is where Trump’s approach breaks down.

Neither side is interested only in territory, which can be divided up in a peace deal. Putin wants Ukraine, obviously, but it is also sacrificing so many soldiers in order to catapult back into superpower status, to regain a place at the table to influence European security, the global economy, and the very DNA of the international community. If that option is not available under Trump, Putin has another strategy: ratchet up conflict with the West alongside a range of rogue states.

Ukraine, meanwhile, wants to eject Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, obviously, but it also wants to avoid full occupation, frozen conflict status, and perpetual limbo as a country-in-waiting for membership in the European Union. It wants NATO membership, too, but it would probably accept some form of heavily armed neutrality, at least for the interim.

Mere threats can do little to bridge such differences. Maybe Trump can achieve a ceasefire through sheer force of will. But it won’t last. The Three Stooges are not a good role model for conflict resolution.

What About Us Chickens?

Trump’s threats are meant to be entertainment—to grab the media’s attention, mobilize MAGA followers on social media, and enrage his adversaries at home and abroad. But these threats are also very real, as the record of his first term demonstrates. Threats, for Trump, are like seeds. He scatters them to the wind and then sits back to see what germinates.

The most important way of confronting Trump’s full-spectrum threats is to find a strategic point of resistance and allocate a lot of resources to reinforcing it. One recent example is the lawsuit that Democracy Forward launched to stop Trump’s suspension of federal grants. A federal judge temporarily halted the suspension. And then, under pressure from all sides, the administration backed down.

A lot of dead chickens will of course scare the monkeys. But a chicken that continues to cluck despite all the force deployed against it? The monkeys will see that courageous chicken and take heart. A powerful poultry pushback also sends an important message to all the rest of us chickens.

Resistance is not futile.

Foreign Policy in Focus, by John Feffer | January 29, 2025 | Scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the U.S. a more responsible global partner.