‘Trumptinism: When geopolitics turns into ego-politics’

The new geopolitical thinking of Trump and Putin bears striking similarities. Both dislike multilateralism, feast on authoritarian leadership, actively meddle in foreign elections to expand their influence and favour rich friends and oligarchs over ordinary citizens. The danger is that this Trumptinism is gaining traction in other countries, with ordinary people being the first to suffer.  

Swedish stock market analyst Marcus Widen launched the word ‘Trumpcession’ last week. Trump's policies do not deliver economic prosperity or lower inflation as promised during his campaign but instead result in lower growth and higher inflation. New figures from the OECD show that Trump's aggressive trade policies are putting the global economy on a trajectory of slower growth and higher inflation rates, with countries already in the eye of the storm, such as Canada and Mexico, in particular set to slow down. Moreover, in the US, we see falling consumer confidence, a deteriorating labour market, uncertainty, instability, chaos, a falling dollar, sinking stock markets and a shrinking home approval rate. ‘Joe Sixpack’ is immediately hit hardest by the first few months of the renewed Trump administration.   

However, these results are not surprising. Populist parties are gaining ground worldwide. Their seemingly simple answers appeal to an increasingly wide audience during elections, but on the economic front they rarely deliver the promised results. Research by three German economists from the Kiel Institute (Funke, Schularick and Trebesch), published last year, identified 51 populist leaders (both left and right) over the period 1900-2020 and concluded that the medium-term economic results of populism were disappointing. After 15 years, economic activity per capita in these countries was 10% lower than in an alternative scenario without populist leaders, which at the Belgian level would amount to a loss of 60 billion euros. Besides the loss of economic activity, inequality rose, public debt increased and international trade decreased. Across various countries, time periods and policy stretches, populist policies yielded overwhelmingly disappointing results.  

​​​​The geopolitical thinking of Trump and Putin has further striking similarities. Both have an aversion to Europe and multilateralism; after all, they prefer individual countries where divide-and-conquer strategies are easier to apply than cooperating blocs that can form a counterforce.   

Both, moreover, feast on authoritarian leadership. Last weekend, Trump once again showed his admiration for Russia's Putin, China's Xi Jinping and North Korea's Kim Jong-Un. Moreover, they like to manipulate elections in other countries to destabilise them. Trump's henchman Elon Musk even actively campaigned for the German AFD, while Putin campaigned for the same party via trolls on social media.  

So there are more similarities than differences between Trump and Putin. We can now speak of Trumptinism: a geopolitical doctrine characterised by a strong aversion to multilateralism and a preference for authoritarian leadership. It involves leaders actively seeking to influence foreign elections and putting the interests of rich friends, oligarchs and Big Tech above those of ordinary citizens. It focuses on ego-politics instead of geo-politics, subordinating economic growth and stability to personal and geopolitical interests, resulting in policies that lead to lower growth, higher inflation and wider social harm.     

The great danger is that this Trumptinism seems to be finding more and more adherents in other countries, with average Joe as the first victim. Let us remain extremely vigilant about this.