It was an interview straight out of a Machiavellian stage play: two people on the set - Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News veteran known for her sharp rhetoric, and Donald J. Trump, the president of rearview mirrors and distortions. What followed wasn't a conversation, but a kind of dialectical dance of dissolution, in which reality was gradually replaced by strategic cynicism.
When Bartiromo confronted the president with the question of how one could negotiate with an actor like China that hacks, steals, manipulates, Trump responded laconically: "You don't think we do that too? We do." A moment of speechlessness. For a few seconds, even Maria Bartiromo was silent - no small feat. Then Trump repeated his sentence, as if he wanted to carve it into granite: "We do a lot of things." The world, he said, was "a nasty place." The world, as he sees it - as a mirror of his own understanding of power: a rough zero-sum game in which morality only exists when it is useful.
Trump presents himself as a realist, but what he practices is political theology without mercy. The former real estate mogul does not speak as the president of a constitutional state, but as a businessman among pirates, making it unmistakably clear to his listeners: there is no innocence, only successful deception. That Maria Bartiromo of all people becomes the conscience in the room feels like a surreal scene change - because even she later accuses him of not actually using the levers against China. Trump counters calmly: "If I ever need them, I’ll use them. But if I don’t need them, that’s good too."
Amid this Kafkaesque conversation, Trump strings together fragments of his familiar economic dogmas: the trade deficit with China, he says, ballooned to a trillion dollars under Biden, whereas he himself had brought the Chinese to a halt with 145 percent tariffs. The rest was "a good relationship" with Xi Jinping. That tariffs don’t replace "friendships" and that economic dependencies can't be resolved with martial pathos doesn’t concern him. For Trump, reality is not what is - but what is enforced through repetition. When Bartiromo brings up an alleged case of Chinese nationals trying to "bring a pathogen into the country," Trump says coolly: "You don’t even know where that came from. Maybe from some wackos." It's the same technique he has used before to blur all guilt: evil is everywhere, so no one is guilty. An ethic of ubiquitous filth, from which only one emerges untouched: himself.
One is reminded of his infamous interview with Bill O'Reilly in 2017. Back then, when O'Reilly confronted him about Putin’s role as a murderer, Trump replied: "There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?" It was the birth of his "whataboutism" doctrine - a logic in which every crime is justified by another. Now, eight years later, that doctrine has become a state philosophy. A system that no longer justifies itself, but merely relativizes. "The world is nasty," says Trump. But perhaps it's not the world that is nasty - but the way he puts it into words. Because with every sentence he speaks, a piece of the moral claim that a democracy like the United States once upheld dissolves. What remains is a mirror he holds up to our faces - distorted, glaring, and at its center a man who reshuffles all the cards to ensure that in the end, he always wins.
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