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The stories that matter about money and politics in the race for the White House
In 1999, the late Boris Berezovsky had lunch with the FT’s editor and senior journalists. I had already met him in Moscow on several occasions. Berezovsky had just been involved in persuading Boris Yeltsin’s associates to appoint Vladimir Putin, then head of the FSB, the Russian security service (whom Berezovsky had met when Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg), as prime minister and his successor as president. “Why,” I asked, “did you entrust power to a former KGB agent?” I have long remembered his answer: “Russia,” he said, “is now a capitalist country. In capitalist countries, capitalists have power.”
My jaw dropped, metaphorically speaking. Berezovsky was an intelligent, ruthless and cynical man, who had lived much of his life in the Soviet Union. He was also Russian, who knew Russia’s brutal history. Yet he seemed to believe in Marxist nonsense about where power would lie in supposedly “capitalist” Russia. Of course, he was wrong. Power was in the hands of the man in the Kremlin, where it always was. Maybe I’m being too hard on him. Western leaders seem to think that sanctions on Russian oligarchs might sway Putin. I have no idea why.
In any case, a year after Putin came to power, Berezovsky, who had become a harsh critic, was expelled from Russia and transferred to the United Kingdom. In 2013, he died, either by suicide or by murder.
Berezovsky’s fate tells us something important: wealth is a source of power if and only if it is protected by a state governed by law. In a despotism, power gives wealth. It is the tyrant’s plaything: it can give, but it can also take away.
The United States is not Russia. Donald Trump is not Putin. But Trump has made it clear that he would like to use the office of president to punish his enemies. It has been specifically referred to former Rep. Liz Cheney, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris as his targets. His “justification” is what he sees as his own persecution. But he did in fact do it. try to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election by encouraging an invasion of the Capitol by “patriots” on January 6, 2021, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the results. The Big Lie of a stolen election has even become a belief shared by the Republican Party.
The question that arises is: are the oligarchs who are trying to make Trump president and JD Vance vice president, the latter a man who has declared would not have certified that election, About to learn what it means to have a tyrant as president? Yes, someone who attempts a coup against the electoral process, the very heart of democracy, is a potential tyrant. So is someone who can fill his government with people personally loyal to him. No one can then be truly safe except the loyal and the flatterers.
In the past, the power of the American president has been constrained by strong civic morals, by the decency of its leading political figures, by an independent judiciary and by independent political parties, but much of this has been eroded.
Given all this, Trump’s re-election will have global consequences. The damage done to the credibility of democracy is already noticeable: trust has been eroded, not just in American democracy, but in democracy itself. And this is only going to get worse (see charts).
Not only is liberal democracy at stake in the United States, but also America’s future in the world. It does not seem to have occurred to the new American right that abandoning Ukraine and possibly current NATO members to Russia will undermine America’s ability to form alliances against China. If I were Japanese, I would be nervous.
It also apparently hasn’t occurred to them that breaking trade agreements the United States helped create, including the World Trade Organization, will inevitably make the country look like an unreliable economic partner. Trump, the businessman, has been a serial bankruptcyThe United States will not maintain its credibility as an economic player if it behaves in this way.
Then there is the Trump who not only believes in high tariffs, but in tax cuts For the rich and a weak dollar. It is also, when appropriate, a believer in low interest rates and not believer in the independence of the Federal ReserveThe idea that one can simultaneously support a huge increase in import costs, through tariffs, that would reduce U.S. demand for foreign currency, and at the same time expect the dollar to fall in value against those same currencies is incoherent. Normally, the opposite should happen. But if the already high fiscal deficit were to widen further and the Federal Reserve were forced to ease monetary policy, the dollar could actually collapse, as it did in the 1970s. That would be a huge disaster.
Most important of all for the future of the world may not be Trump the would-be tyrant, Trump the traitor, Trump the protectionist, or Trump the devaluer, but Trump the man who got America out of the hole. Paris Climate Agreement when president. right now have a very small chance to keep the rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels below 1.5°C. If another Trump term sabotaged hopes for progress, that opportunity would almost certainly be gone, with possibly disastrous consequences. But Trump, the “very stable genius,” simply “knows” that the greenhouse effect is a jokeIt is indeed a threat, but we can still defeat it. Trump could be the leader who guarantees failure.
The plutocrats who support Trump may be safer than Berezovsky, but can they really be as free as they want? Yes, further erosion of democracy might protect them from interference by elected politicians they detest, but the men they put in power have a tendency to become absolute rulers instead. No one can really be safe.