For Some, Trump’s Mask Is Finally Slipping
European leaders have given up pretending the president is someone he’s not. Maybe some American voters will, too.
THERE IS A WELL-KNOWN DRAMATIC device that comes to mind when watching the Trump show. A villain whom the audience knows to be duplicitous and dangerous has a talent for presenting himself as normal and benign. Only the hero knows the truth. But at a critical moment—Captain Queeg’s rant about strawberries in the Caine Mutiny, or Lonesome Rhodes’s hot mic moment in A Face in the Crowd—the mask slips and everything is revealed.
Some have been waiting for years for such a moment, an epiphany in which Trump’s base will finally come to see that nearly every word out of his mouth is a lie—“including ‘and’ and ‘the,’”as Mary McCarthy once scathingly said of Lillian Hellman. In this fantasy, his supporters would see his unhinged tantrums, pathetic boasts, and omnidirectional aggression for what they are. Throughout 2017 and into 2018, I was one of those fervently hoping for such a moment.
But years ago, I accepted that the scales-falling-from-the-eyes revelation will never come for the MAGA faithful. They are too invested. As psychologists and others have observed, it is far easier to con someone than to convince them that they have been conned.
Still, the Trump bitter-enders represent only about 29 percent of the voters who pulled the lever for him in 2024, according to new research by More in Common, an international pro-democracy organization. (Full disclosure: I serve on More in Common’s board.) And as a recent Chicago Tribune report found, a small but significant percentage of 2024 Trump voters either regret their vote or have serious concerns about the way things are going. When elections are decided by just a few hundred thousand votes in seven states, those defections are crucial.
It’s entirely possible that those swing voters care only about the cost of living and not about the collapse of American decency, but on the chance that that isn’t the case, it’s worth spelling out one of the great delusions of the Trump era that has been definitively unmasked by the Davos Debacle.
Trump has always claimed that his derisive pose toward our NATO allies arose from pique that they were not pulling their load on defense spending. Many reasonable people agreed that Europe should spend more on defense, and so they took Trump at this word. When European nations did boost their defense budgets, some were quick to give Trump credit—though the big increases came only after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, not in response to Trump’s threats and whines.
While Trump’s resentment of America’s outsized role in NATO was doubtless due in part to his perennial sense of being exploited (no matter how many advisors attempted to disabuse him of the notion that there was one NATO bank account in Brussels into which the United States made disproportionate contributions), the ground truth of it becomes undeniable now. It isn’t just the money.
Trump has never believed in the principles that NATO was founded to promote and preserve. He doesn’t feel affinity for liberal democracy. Recall that in early 2024, Trump recounted a conversation (probably fictional) with the leader of a “large” European nation who supposedly asked Trump whether America would come to its defense in the event of a Russian invasion. Trump claimed to have replied: “You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent? No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay.”
Even if it were true that a European power had spent too little on defense, welcoming a Russian invasion would rather defeat the purpose of the whole treaty.
Trump doesn’t respond to naked aggression the way normal people do. He gets excited. Recall that when Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, Trump swanned into the Mar-a-Lago dining room gushing over what a “genius” Putin was. He later issued some rote condemnations, and eventually settled into the narrative that the attack would never have happened if . . . you know the rest. But his initial response to the murderous violence was delight, just as he had reveled in the January 6th attack on the Capitol—the gravest assault on our democracy since 1861.
Most hostility to the “neocon” agenda stems from the belief that the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan failed, but Trump doesn’t even endorse the goals. He doesn’t believe in promoting democracy at all, even if it costs us nothing. Early in his second term, Trump visited Saudi Arabia and declared that the days of Western leaders “in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs” were over. In hindsight, it’s clear that this rule applied only to authoritarian countries. The Trump administration applied no such rule to our democratic allies.
Trump called former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “far left lunatic” who had destroyed Canada with COVID mandates. He lambasted Volodymyr Zelensky (but not Putin) for failing to hold elections. JD Vance, among other MAGA figures, excoriated European nations for their tolerance of limitations on free speech. Vance’s critique is not without some validity, but it’s rich coming from an administration that is openly attempting to quash free speech here at home, and further, one that is supposedly taking a hands-off approach to others’ internal governance.
It’s hard to think of an occasion when Trump has criticized any authoritarian for their repression. On the contrary, he praised Xi Jinping for his treatment of the Uighurs, and he has often lauded authoritarian leaders (Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Nayib Bukele, Rodrigo Duterte, among others) for their “strength.” Only democratic leaders get labeled crazy or weak.
It’s Trump’s lack of belief in liberal democracy, as much as stinginess, that explains his coolness toward Ukraine. What seems blindingly obvious to every liberal democratic leader—that brute conquest by a quasi-fascist regime against a fellow democracy demands a forceful response—is not at all clear to Trump. What’s in it for me? he keeps asking. Can I get a Nobel? Can we extort some rare earth minerals?
With the snatching of Maduro in Venezuela, we can see the full contempt Trump harbors toward democracy. The United States went to considerable risk and expense to capture Maduro—but there isn’t even a pretense of pivoting now to help restore democracy to Venezuela. It’s all about the oil. If a Maduro lookalike will pony up petrodollars to Trump, that’s all he cares about. It’s Putinesque.
Trump behaves as a bullying autocrat at home; why would he uphold the rule of law and democracy abroad?
And now we come to Greenland—the mad king in full regalia. There are several layers to this betrayal of American and Western values.
To even threaten military force against a peaceful ally violates common sense, as well as the norms and rules that America spent decades enshrining in international law and practice.
To do so because a private entity in a third country—which Trump himself confirmed he knows is not the same country—hurt his little feelings by declining to give him the Nobel Peace Prize is cringe-inducing and frankly borderline insane.
To insult every member of NATO is to alienate the United States from the entire democratic world.
To admit, in public, that because he is pouting over not winning the Peace Prize, he will no longer prioritize peace is as clear a confession as can be that his true interest was never peace.
For now, Trump has climbed down from his threats (after a market plunge). But our former friends will no longer labor under the delusion that he is a fellow liberal democrat.
Trump has contempt for democratic norms. He wants to move America’s pieces to the other side of the chessboard, alongside those whose systems and methods he finds more congenial—Russia, China, El Salvador, Turkey, and Hungary. NATO leaders at last see it, perhaps it will also dawn on some critical American voters.