Today: If Donald Trump isn’t an autocrat, what is he? Stephen Hanson on the old historical model for the new American presidency.

+ U.S. law enforcement and military forces are converging. There seems to be less water on the far side than on the near side of the moon. &c.

But first …

• The S&P 500, a U.S. index of leading stocks, then rose by almost 10 percent—an enormous increase.
• That followed a week of steep losses that had wiped out more than US$6 trillion in the values of companies on the stock market.
• On Wednesday morning, before the pause, the prices of U.S. government bonds, or Treasury bills, continued to drop dramatically. Bond prices hadn’t fallen so much over three days since 1982.
• On Tuesday night, Trump said that many countries wanted to negotiate new trade terms with Washington: “I know what the hell I’m doing. … I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.”

What’s going on?

• Trump says the pause won’t include China; he raised tariffs to 125 percent on all Chinese imports after Beijing said earlier on Wednesday that it would raise import duties of U.S. goods to 84 percent.
• The White House said a basic 10 percent tariff would remain in place for all imports.
• The EU announced a set of retaliatory tariffs on Wednesday, imposing levies of 25 percent on an array of U.S. goods starting on April 15.
• Trump says that the pause was a response to the drop in the markets: “You have to be flexible. … Over the last few days, it looked pretty glum.”

Trump’s reversal was a shock to many—but the whole issue is still extremely uncertain. The White House has been saying countries want to negotiate—which implies that the tariffs are a ploy to win better trade terms for the U.S. and so that trade talks could undo the tariffs. But what about China? The two countries have the world’s two largest economies and are each other’s largest trading partners, but neither are showing any signs of easing the trade war. Which leaves their relationship—and the direction of the global economy—very much in doubt.

• Friedrich Merz, chair of the Christian Democrats, will be the next chancellor.
• His party won the general elections on February 23 with about 28.5 percent of the vote.
• The Social Democrats finished third with about 16.5 percent, their worst showing in decades.
• The populist-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) finished second with almost 21 percent.
• The Christian Democrats and Social Democrats say they joined forces to prevent the AfD from taking power, as they see it as a threat to democracy.
• The AfD is staunchly anti-immigration and pro-Russian, and some of its members have even expressed sympathies with the World War II–era Nazi party.
• But the two mainstream parties had to compromise on many of their core policies, like taxes and regulations, to form a government.

How is this going to work?

• Germany has been stagnating economically for years, so the parties agreed to allow increasing its national debt for new public investment and to support the country’s struggling car industry.
• They agreed to ease financial regulations, but the Christian Democrats had to water down their campaign plans for major tax breaks to individuals and corporations.
• They also had to compromise on plans to raise defense spending and limit migration, though there’ll be new immigration and citizenship restrictions.
• Recent polling shows that members of both parties are unhappy with the compromises and Merz’s popularity is falling—while the AfD’s is rising.

The Christian Democrats and Social Democrats have real policy differences—as they have throughout the decades they dominated the German political scene. But today is different: The country is facing a trade war with the U.S. and Russia’s war in Ukraine, both as Washington has seemed to be pulling back from NATO. Meanwhile, Germany—Europe’s second-largest economy—is dealing with a flood of cheap exports from China. The question is whether the two longtime rival parties can cooperate amid these era-defining challenges, along with the political challenge from the AfD, or whether they’ll split along the ideological lines that doomed the previous government and brought on early elections.

• For two years, the country’s military has been fighting a civil war against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
• The war has killed more than 150,000 people and forced more than 4 million people to flee their homes—the largest displacement in the world today.
• U.N. officials call the conflict the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, and there are reports that families are eating grass to survive famine.
• But the London talks won’t include the military or the RSF, just the foreign ministers of about 20 countries—including each side’s major backers.

What do the talks mean?

• Both sides receive weapons and money from an array of outside actors. Russia, among them, has been supporting both armed forces.
• The main RSF patron is the United Arab Emirates. RSF troops fought in Yemen’s civil war on the side of the U.A.E.’s ally, the internationally recognized government. The U.A.E., a hereditary monarchy, sees the RSF as helping it battle against the forces of political Islam.
• Meanwhile, Sudan’s military gets money and weapons from Saudi Arabia as well as from Qatar, which supports political Islam throughout the Middle East. The military also gets support from the Houthis in Yemen, who have been fighting against the U.S. and Israel.
• Sudan’s foreign minister protested his exclusion from the conference; he also criticized the inclusion of the U.A.E., Kenya, and Chad, on account of their support for the RSF.
• There’s plenty of evidence that both sides have committed war crimes. Last year, the U.S. State Department accused the RSF of genocide in Darfur; residents of Khartoum, the capital, recently accused the RSF of mass rape.
• In late March, the military ousted the RSF from Khartoum, which the rebels had controlled since early in the war. That might be a turning point, giving the military domination over much of the country, though the RSF still controls Darfur.

The fact that these countries accepted invitations to a peace conference looks like progress—but two main questions remain: Given the considerable sums of money that countries like Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. have invested into winning the war, will they be willing to stop the fighting now, with no clear winner? And even if they want to, will the military and RSF listen?

The custom of dons

Neither is praising foreign strongmen the only thing that’s worried his critics. Most remarkably, Trump led a concerted effort to overturn the result of his loss in the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.

At the same time, Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has little to do with the defining qualities of fascism. Which usually involve, for example, the state bringing a country’s largest companies, and most of its economy, under direct central control. Most fascist leaderships have also been virulently anti-conservative. But the Trump administration hasn’t done the one and isn’t the other.

And yet Trump clearly isn’t entirely business as usual in American politics, and some of the reasons why are the tendencies toward illiberal politics and disregard for the rule of law that have triggered his critics into seeing him as a sort of führer.

If he isn’t, then, what is he?

Stephen Hanson is a professor in the Department of Government at the College of William & Mary. Hanson says Donald Trump’s style of leadership belongs to a type of governance that goes back centuries, predating modern democracy: patrimonialism—meaning he effectively runs the state as if it were a family business. He accordingly expects personal loyalty from those beneath him, punishing impartial civil servants while doling out rewards to those who pledge fealty. That’s what we’re now seeing play out in practice, with Trump firing people in the American federal bureaucracy en masse, while giving loyal backers like Elon Musk favors—as with the recent Tesla car show on the White House lawn.

Trump’s brand of personal leadership resonates strongly with a lot of Americans, but Hanson says it has certain weaknesses, too. If his gutting of the bureaucracy—and his global tariffs—hurt the pocketbooks of American voters, their tolerance for seeing Trump reward his loyal backers might soon strike them as not just possible conflicts of interest but as outright corruption …

• Chinese scientists have found that soil samples from the far side of the moon—collected by the Chang’e 6 spacecraft in the South Pole–Aitken basin—contain less water (under 1.5 micrograms per gram) than the Earth-facing side (which range from 1 to 200 micrograms). Still: “It’s hard to say whether the far side is definitely drier than the near side.”

• “We love magazines” is the rallying call of magCulture. In-store in London and online everywhere, they celebrate the magazine—contemporary and historical—a medium we consider as important as it’s ever been. magCulture is the exclusive retailer for Altered States outside of the U.S.A.

Patrolling the border

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