Everyone knows it, Donald Trump has a good interpretation of how to exercise power: brutality. This is true in all areas: trade – with the staggering increase in customs duties -, immigration or even geopolitical questions, with its declarations on the Gaza Strip which could become a “formidable tourist area” and the way he chose to try to settle the war between Ukraine and Russia.
Trump’s tracks are not so impenetrable as that: it seems to make a gross analogy between trade negotiations-which he used to be in politics-and the way to lead the United States. A tract, in the market area, is always underpinned by a balance of power: moral values, pride, medium and long terms are only of mediocre. Business as usual.
Is Donald Trump wrong to behave this way? After all, the United States is still the first world force. Why would he deprive himself? By each of his decisions, he seems to ask us: and what are you going to do? In the immediate future, it is true, each of the partner actors of the United States has a lot to lose and that is almost everything that the 47th American president has in his sleeve.
Strategic behavior
However, only short-term spirits can believe that when there is an opportunity, it is always necessary to operate it immediately. This voracity of power, even the chimpanzees, which nevertheless belong to a very hierarchical and aggressive species, have learned to be wary of it. Because yes, there is politics among our distant cousins, and even forms of strategic behavior. This is demonstrated by one of the stars of global primatology, Frans de Waal, in many scientific articles drawn from field observations and which he synthesized in a bookChimpanzee policy.
What does this Dutch researcher learn from it? In all groups of chimpanzees, there are “clicks” of individuals based on elective affinities rather than on family proximity, and they are able to gang up, if one of them is attacked, against the dominant male himself. It is so true that no member, however hard it may be, can become pre-eminent in his group if he has his own network of reliable alliances.
No “alpha male” is powerful enough to impose itself by blind domination alone without ever taking into account the damage that a coalition could be hostile to its reign. Especially since chimpanzee has memory. As the sociologist Laurent Cordonier points out in his book The nature of the social About Simial Relations: “An individual who gets stunned by another member of the group is capable of waiting for a favorable situation before returning to him.”
Autoimmune disease
By behaving so brutally, Trump does not raise his policy above the subtlety of a dominant chimpanzee male, on the contrary. He believes that the one who holds strength today should never be concerned with his future weaknesses. But what does he fear, could he wonder by hammering his fists with his vindictive torso?
He could, first, arouse at his expense of unnatural alliances that, yesterday, no one would have imagined. Then it could permanently damage the soft power American, one of the major weapons of this country: for example, what will be the consequences, if only in terms of image, the freezing of the American agency for development?
Finally, the numerous anti-science decisions of the 47th President of the United States will do a difficult to reversible to an always fragile research ecosystem. It is only to mention the reduction of $ 4 billion imposed on medical research during this month of February.
The real question that will emerge from the ashes of the situation will focus on the very nature of democracy. After all, Trump was legitimately elected. The fact remains the disturbing example of an autoimmune disease of a political system that we cherish.
*Gérald Bronner is a sociologist and professor at the Sorbonne University.
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