There are many adjectives typically used to describe Trump’s approach to office: “impulsive”, “capricious”, “irrational” are among the more polite ones. But pragmatic? Pragmatism represents the triumph of practical truth. It stems from the recognition that, however much you may want the world to reflect your beliefs, bend to your ideas, yield to your ambitions, there is, in the end, an inescapable reality that cannot be manipulated or denied.
Does that sound like the man who said “Canada was meant to be the 51st state because we subsidise Canada by $200 billion a year"?
And yet, halfway through the first year of his second term, we need seriously to consider the possibility that America’s most instinctual, unpredictable president is shaping up to be a hard-headed practitioner of realpolitik at home and abroad.
If you don’t believe me, listen to the growing complaints from sections of the Maga base who have watched with alarm as their president has abandoned them on issue after promised issue, slaughtering sacred cows that he himself had sanctified: bombing Iran, making nice with Nato, siding with Volodymyr Zelensky against Russia, agreeing to let millions of illegal immigrants stay in the country after all because they do necessary jobs.
And now this week, the latest betrayal: Trump’s top legal officer announced that there was no conspiracy surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Trivial though it may seem, Trump’s abandonment of the Epstein conspiracy is a telling moment. The fate of the former financier and sex offender is a central article of faith in the Maga canon: that the man found dead in a New York jail cell was murdered to silence him before he could come to trial and finally reveal all about his intimacy with powerful people, including, in no particular order, the Clintons, Israel, Wall Street, Hollywood and the British royal family. It is a faith fed repeatedly by claims from the president himself about Epstein (which sat awkwardly at times with the fact that Trump was a one-time associate of the man).
And yet, the Epstein case is a signal example of simple Trumpian pragmatism. Trump - through Pam Bondi, the attorney general - reviewed the evidence, excised the hype and fantasy and came to a rather dull conclusion: that Epstein, facing the prospect of the rest of his life languishing in the worst of America’s jails, hanged himself with a prison sheet while his guards were sleeping along the corridor.
The wailing from Trump supporters was loud. “I just really need the Trump administration to succeed and to save this country ... And then for them to do something like this just tears my guts out,” Alex Jones, uber-conspiracist, posted on X.
Where Epstein is symbolic, Trump’s other Maga apostasies are substantive. As I argued in this column a few weeks ago, the decision to bomb Iran went against the non-interventionist, “restrainer” strand of Trumpian thinking. It was a move driven by opportunism and expediency: a softened-up target presenting a chance to achieve a core goal of US foreign policy.
The rapprochement with Nato at the summit in the Hague last month was at odds with the Maga crowd’s denunciation of European fecklessness and the perils of American entanglement in a far-flung alliance. But it marked the practical recognition that Trump’s pressure over the past six months had achieved a desired outcome: more balanced defence spending.
Trump has moved further away from Vladimir Putin and towards President Zelensky in the war in Ukraine. Looking beyond his odd affection for the Russia leader, and the repugnant spectacle of the humiliation of the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office earlier this year, it’s always been clear that it was Trump’s ambition to get a deal to end the war.
Having tried to bully Ukraine into accepting a ceasefire, he now seems to have firmly pivoted. This week he not only distanced himself from a curious Pentagon decision to briefly suspend already approved arms transfers to Kyiv, he seemed to be moving towards actually approving the supply of the first new munitions to Ukraine since he took office.
On illegal immigrants, after heavy lobbying from business leaders and warnings that the nation’s supply of food and minimum-wage restaurant staff was at risk, Trump has agreed to exempt undocumented workers in agriculture and hospitality from his mass deportation programme.
What about his big, favourite thing, you say: tariffs? Isn’t he now doubling down on a policy almost all agree is driven not by practical considerations but by blind faith in the great moral virtue of import duties? But even here there is pragmatism at work. Trump paused the initial “liberation day” tariffs almost immediately when economic reality set in. This week he extended the pause to August 1, but even if he goes ahead with the duties, it will reflect the growing evidence that the tariffs imposed so far have done no obvious harm to the US economy.
None of this should come as a surprise. The causes of Trump’s political success are rooted in popular dissatisfaction with failed conventional politics in the US - reflected in similar populist anger in much of the West. Yet the man himself was never a real radical, but always focused on what he could gain in practice, as his former friends Bill and Hillary Clinton could doubtless attest from their many shared conversations at Jeffrey Epstein’s parties a few years back.
The Times
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Is Donald Trump a pragmatist? If I told you the US president was the kind of leader who weighed the evidence before reaching big decisions, carefully calculating the costs and benefits of his actions, and then proceeded to make policy on the basis of what was most likely to achieve the best outcome irrespective of his rhetorical priors, you would conclude - rightly - that I was a candidate for institutionalisation.