The duties of Donald Trump turned on the fuse of a commercial war and kicked off a storm that burned hundreds of billions on the financial markets in a few days. This is what happened, and it is under the bleeding eyes of the world. What will happen, from now on, nobody really knows. China seems ready for direct and immediate retaliation; Europe and the rest of the world seem more available to open a negotiation. It will be seen. Even knowing exactly what the actors on the field will do, and nobody knows, it is impossible to imagine the medium and long -term consequences. Not knowing it, and this is the case, the fog is dense and impenetrable. What is after this turning point, nobody really knows, because the variable inserted is enormous, and it shows us once more that, precisely in the historical era that most has data and better believes (va) to master them, the unexpected is alive, it can be as big as a pandemic or as a war, and it arrives quickly in every corner of the world.

Why did he do what he did?

The simplest, most common thing, in these cases, is to throw it into psychology, or in bar psychiatry. “It’s crazy.” It is a “crazy” surrounded and recommended by people who have not understood that it was really crazy, by foolish servants, by someone who has a lot to gain on the skin of the many, who beyond the borders of the great country of which he is president, have everything or almost to be lost. With a character like Trump, the sketches of psychoanalytic flavor were wasted immediately, and as the extreme choices follow the declarations, the temptation to put it mainly on a personal level becomes stronger, almost irrepressible. A right -wing president, supported and celebrated as the hero of Wall Street and the most brazen and aggressive financial capitalism, who built a government team full of mega entrepreneurs and financiers of Grido, all with nine -zero assets, which chooses – in the name of the reindustrialization of the United States – an aggressive and extreme protectionist maneuver. One of those decisions that, as a manual, produces immediate shock on the circulation of capital and can generate inflation, recession and crises on the markets. The incalculable account can pay it all, but in the short period the most evident beating certainly take the great managers of “Friends” assets of Trump. Not only them, of course, but also millions and millions of US savers and beyond.

It will then be said that when you have billions it is not a big problem to lose a few million, even in the order of the dozens, and it is certainly true. And yet, it makes a certain impression to see the Wall Street that cheered Trump so clearly affected in his reason for being main, that is, the maintenance and growth of the assets. And for the purpose – realistic for a few, crazy for many analysts – to report work and full employment in the USA: in order, that is, to restore breath to the less comfortable classes. It will be said: who knows if he succeeds, who knows if it is true, who knows, who knows, who knows. Legitimate and also dutiful doubts. However, it remains that in the first relevant act from President Trump makes Wall Street lose money declaring that he is a sacrifice useful for the future of his country’s workers.

A policy that decides

It is a nationalist, simplistic approach, explained with completely busted mathematical formulas, so spannometric as to seem even fake. And where the ball will really fall – let’s repeat it – we will understand it in a while. But beyond the propaganda of Trump and the panic he triggered, the translation in terms of what he announced and promised has an impression. A mechanism – to a promise of a politician follows a coherent action – to which we are not sincerely more used to. The promise seemed so absurd that even among his admirers and probably even among his collaborators many did not believe he would have maintained it, and certainly not fully. And instead, signed the executive orders, there are no more doubts that it really happened. Beyond the political direction of the decision, and the possibility that it is part of a negotiating tactic, what makes an impression and obliges to reflect is the fact that it was Trump, precisely he, the emblem of a policy made on a personal and humoral basis, long axes of thought that lead straight from the parts of reactionary, classist and racist nationalism, to think – with the facts, before with the words – that politics still has a supremacy on the economy and rules of free exchange only. It is not a defense of the merit of this decision, but a neutral observation: after decades in which leaders all over the world, especially of the progressive world, recited the part of those who had to obey the mantra del Tina (“There is no alternatives”), Trump acts shouting that another world is possible. Perhaps it will be a terrible world and these decisions will soon show nefarious effects, but his blow of hand says that acting decisively towards existing balance is possible.

The tactics ate politics

Among the objections sensible to this reasoning, the strongest concerns the type of power exercised by the American president, as well as its dimension. The US President really has power, a direct power, the result of the US Constitution, and the problem if anything will be to see if and how counterpoters work, this time. It can decide, act, not as here by us who, obsessed with totalitarian pasts, we filed, limited, limited to the paralysis. And yet, a sincere look at what happens in our house, in Italy and Europe, cannot fail to suggest that the limit of decision -making capacity, within our institutions, does not depend only on the distribution of powers, counterweights and the different interests represented, but also – now – on a disability to take responsibility for deciding.

Briga to be divisive. True, the Trump’s scheme is so decision -making that it seemed even irresponsible. Yet, they no longer seem to health democracies in which the political debate is monopolized by the squares in which the opposition alternate, trying to keep their feet in two shoes, and perhaps regretting not having one more foot, which would be useful to fit a third. And it is not a good show to see that those who govern cannot say exactly on which side it will, in this hypothesis of negotiation, between Trumpian America and a Europe that in turn hypothesizes, disputes, questions, but has never been able to give itself a single voice on the things that count in the world. In short, this very ugly Trump reminds us of something true: politics or is the protagonist of the choices that has the strength to head, or it is not. Then, of course, that God send it to us good.