Imagine that the president of the United States was a “Manchurian candidate,” an embedded foreign agent determined to wreak maximum damage on the country and limited only by the need not to act so outrageously and preposterously as to blow his cover. What are some of the things that even a Manchurian candidate would hesitate to do? What would be the limit of the self-inflicted wounds that he would dare to attempt?
In foreign affairs he might hesitate to openly undermine the world order established by the US after World War II, of which it has been the major beneficiary. Surely he would not declare Canada—a country with which we have the longest nonmilitarized frontier in the world and that has been our best trading partner—a threat to national security and target it for absorption through economic extortion as our fifty-first state. Surely he would not openly hope for and encourage the dissolution of the EU. Surely he would not disparage our NATO allies and threaten one member that has been extremely supportive of the US—Denmark—with the military seizure of its overseas territory of Greenland. Surely he would not consistently denigrate the leadership of our democratic allies as weak and stupid while praising our authoritarian rivals as smart and tough, thus revealing his own political role models and authoritarian aspirations.
Surely he would not cut off aid to Ukraine—which without the loss of a single American service member’s life has so taxed the military strength of Russia that it had to abandon a dictator it supported in Syria and has depleted its military stockpile to the extent that it is taking Cold War–era tanks out of mothballs—all to save a minuscule percentage of our defense budget (with most of this Ukrainian allotment spent on procuring weapons in the US in any case). Surely he would not seize the Panama Canal, where one homemade rocket fired from beyond the American reoccupation zone could take out just one lock and effectively close the canal to all traffic, thereby inflicting immense economic and strategic damage on the US. Surely he would not openly advocate the ethnic cleansing and American occupation of Gaza—policies that were prosecuted as violations of international law at Nuremberg. More likely, he might attempt to dismantle USAID, precisely because it is an extremely effective but underappreciated institution of American soft power that presents a favorable face of American expertise and compassion to the rest of the world.
Having inherited by far the strongest economy in the world, how far would he dare to go in squandering American prosperity and dissipating America’s leadership in the world economy? With the historic example of the Smoot–Hawley tariffs that aggravated the Great Depression, would he dare to launch a broad and untargeted tariff war on the entire world? And then would those tariffs be announced, suspended, and reimposed in a whiplash fashion for the triple effect of raising prices due to taxing imports, discouraging domestic investment due to uncertainty, and inviting widespread, systemic corruption as various companies scramble to obtain waivers? On top of that, would our Manchurian candidate threaten to politicize the Federal Reserve by firing its chairman, thereby also tanking the stock market, fanning inflation with lowered interest rates, triggering flight from the dollar, and ultimately threatening the dollar’s position as the reserve currency of the world economy and all the advantages of that position?
Would he proclaim eighteenth-century mercantilism as his economic philosophy, viewing all international economic relations as bilateral, win-lose scenarios determined by who has a favorable balance of payments (based on the exchange of goods but not services)? Would he threaten foreign students, revoke their visas, and arrest and deport them arbitrarily, even though the large foreign student population attending American universities both brings foreign payments into the US and provides the opportunity to skim off the world’s top talent to energize our future economy? Would he cripple American economic vitality by attacking the remarkable synergy of the university–government–philanthropy partnership that makes the US a world leader in research? And would he simultaneously cut both taxes and much of the IRS personnel, assuring a twofold drop in tax revenues and a soaring national debt? Would he actually have us behave like Greece, Argentina, and Turkey at their economically most disastrous and foolish?
Faced with the existential threat of a rapidly heating world, would he denounce all efforts to slow climate change as an alleged hoax perpetrated by elite, radical left Democrats/Communists to hinder economic growth and competitiveness? Would he defund and discourage solar and wind energy production while exhorting an economically dubious but climatically ruinous return to coal? Would he dismantle the government-funded institutions that both track and warn about extreme weather threats and produce the models that predict future climate developments, so that “inconvenient truths” remain ignored and we march blindly toward the inferno?
With the Covid-19 pandemic hardly behind us and the bird flu virus rapidly mutating and infecting other animal species, would he dare to dismantle the public health system by decimating its personnel? Would he dismiss an entire cohort of experienced doctors, scientists, and other experts who work for agencies such as the CDC and FDA? Would he appoint a health and human services secretary who grasps at every discredited quack remedy (ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for Covid; cod-liver oil and antibiotics for measles) while rejecting recent vaccines because they always need more testing and older vaccines (polio) because they allegedly killed more people than they saved? Would he really dare to undertake unilateral medical disarmament?
Would he proclaim a campaign of retribution and extend his populist attack targeting allegedly disloyal former employees and so-called elites to include the medical, scientific, and academic professions and institutions, precisely when our country’s competitiveness in the knowledge economy is crucial? Would he, in effect, propose performing a lobotomy on the country’s capacity to produce and disseminate knowledge? And would he extend this attack even to the legal profession, not just barring law firms that have ever opposed him in past court cases from government contracts but going so far as to ban their lawyers from entering federal buildings? (Would this include washrooms in national parks?) Wouldn’t he fear appearing totally petty and ridiculous?
Would he attempt quite blatantly and openly to undermine American democratic political culture? In particular, would he dispense with the rule of law and due process, even in defiance of Supreme Court decisions? Would he presume to follow the model of the Third Reich’s “protective custody” decree and allow the government to arrest and incarcerate anyone indefinitely without indictment, trial, and sentence, starting with noncitizens but then moving on to the homegrown? Would he be cynical enough to justify his actions under a rarely used wartime emergency provision of the law, though there is no war? Would he add the innovation of incarcerating the victims of such detention not in domestic concentration camps but in rent-a-cell prisons in El Salvador for life?
Despite the Clinton/Gore model of a successful downsizing of the federal bureaucracy through incremental and targeted measures, would he instead empower the richest man in the world to simply close entire agencies—especially those that combine expertise with a mission to improve people’s lives—and indiscriminately fire swaths of employees from other agencies with the totally undocumented and obviously false claim that each and every one had performed poorly? Would he appoint to his cabinet and other important positions people so clearly unfit for them that he had to exert considerable political pressure on his Senate majority just to get them confirmed and then face immediate blowback from their incompetence (exhibit one being his defense secretary using insecure communications to reveal military attack plans to his wife, his brother, and a journalist)?
No. Surely in a democracy that has survived for 240 years, no foreign embedded Manchurian candidate would dare risk exposing himself by dropping such a cluster bomb of obviously and predictably damaging actions and policies all at once. However, what if our Manchurian candidate president was not in fact an agent of an enemy power at all but acting entirely for his own reasons? And what if his base and his party continued to support him, no matter how disastrous his presidency was proving to be? Then we would be in very big trouble indeed.
English (US) · 