NYT Columnist Thomas Friedman: “The World Will Push Back” Against Trump

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Bianna. And Tom Friedman, welcome back to the show.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Great to be with you. Walter

ISAACSON: Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney in Davos this past week gave a speech that – I think it may be the most significant or one of the most significant in 80 years since Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech. And it was about, he said, “the end of the American led world order.” Is that what’s happening now?

FRIEDMAN: Walter, you’re asking a critically important question. I think it could be happening. I think that there are people within the Trump administration who are acting in ways that will inevitably make it happen, but I don’t think we’re there yet. And I think there’s a lot of pushback against it, if from nowhere else than the financial markets, because you saw how the market reacted so negatively by Trump seeming to engage in what Prime Minister Carney called a rupture, basically, with the Atlantic Alliance.

ISAACSON: And Trump has talked about things that are America first, but you have a column saying he’s not really dealing with America first. It’s kinda “me first,” for him.

FRIEDMAN: Yeah. You know, I think that if you look at the history of American foreign policy, Walter, which which you have, going back to your Kissinger book, you would say that the kind of rupture, the kind of 180 degree turn that we’re seeing by the Trump administration on foreign policy, or attempted turn, is the kind of thing you’d only associate with a major war or a huge economic explosion to the downside. What is so striking about this moment is this is not happening in the context of a major war or some kind of economic collapse. It’s entirely driven by the moods, attitudes, and superstitions of a president who is more unbounded than any president we’ve basically had in the modern era. He’s a man of extreme views who is basically able to govern, at least for these two years, with the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, and the White House entirely in his hands. But not only in his hands, with a Republican party that is basically chosen to surrender its responsibilities for advice and consent from the Senate and, and spending power from the House to the President. So we’ve never seen this combination of a president with radical views on foreign policy unbuffered entirely by the administration.
And that’s why you get this moment where there’s no war, there’s no economic crisis driving this. It’s just the impulses of one man. So I’m loathed to describe this as a permanent shift because I don’t think underneath it is the plumbing and wiring that requires such a shift. I think this – so much is combusting in Trump’s own head.

ISAACSON: When Carney spoke at Davos, he talked about – he took up the cause of Václav Havel who talked about the collaborationist instinct and how systems only work if people go along with things they know aren’t true. Like they put the sign in the window saying, “workers of the world unite” in the old communist Soviet Union, even though they don’t believe it. And he said, it’s time for the rest of the world, especially middle countries like Canada to take the sign down and say, this is all a fake. We’re no longer gonna play along. What do you make of that?

FRIEDMAN: You know, Walter, by happenstance, I spoke at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver last week, and I was introduced by the director of the school. And in the process of introducing me, she referred to Prime Minister Carney’s remarks in Davos, which had just happened the day before or two days before. And the audience just erupted in cheers. He got a lot more cheers than I did. Okay? And my Canadian host, you know, pointed out to me that in their grocery stores now they have marked with Canadian flags, Canadian made products. This is really not only insulting to them, but frightening to them. But you know, the old saying, the enemy gets a vote – Canada’s not our enemy, even if Trump is trying to present to them that way – the world will push back. It’ll push back through markets. It’ll push back by – look at the price of gold just as a proxy. What is that about? Okay. It’s not just people, you know, worried about the instability of the moment. It’s central banks around the world putting their dollars into gold rather than US treasury bills. So the world gets a vote and Donald Trump can steamroll, you know, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and his own party. But you know, the world will push back. It will resist.

ISAACSON: One of the ways Canada’s resisting is it created an agreement with China now on more open trade. Do you think we could possibly see China taking advantage of all of this and becoming, in some ways a defacto leader of the middle countries?

FRIEDMAN: You know, China will attempt to do that. It has its own problems though, its own asymmetric economic relationship with so many countries because it’s overproduction. So I don’t think that would be easy. I don’t think there’s any replacing America. But what the reason China and Russia, Walter, have always voted Trump emotionally, if, if not otherwise is because they actually understand America’s secret sauce. They understand our single most important competitive advantage, which is they have vassals, China and Russia, and we have allies. And we have allies because we’ve had this kind of reciprocal relationship with them, or relationship where we are actually overly generous because we believe there’s strength in the system. And when the system strengthened, the biggest country in the system must benefit the most. So we have allies, they have vassals, and the one thing they have both tried to do for decades is – and that they’ve dreamt of doing – is breaking up NATO and breaking up the defacto American alliances in the Asian Pacific. And they never imagined a day where our own president would facilitate that.

ISAACSON: One of the topics was Greenland, of course. And I never – I thought when Trump was saying we may invade Greenland, I thought that was just his reality TV show thing. And indeed, I don’t think he ever was thinking of invading Greenland, but wasn’t it important to push our NATO allies to do more in the defense of Greenland?

FRIEDMAN: We have had a historic relationship with the sovereign in Greenland, the Denmark government in partnership with the Greenland government, that basically has allowed us since World War II to build, to build and stock and deploy both forward radar and whatever fighter jets we want anywhere in Greenland. We’ve had that relationship and the notion that either Russia or China are moving on Greenland is ludicrous. There’s no proof of that. There is concern that as the ice melts, there’ll be a mineral grab over the Arctic. But the fact is, we have had all the military access to Greenland we need. Now Trump insists, well, because we don’t own it, you know, somehow we can’t invest enough in it. Well, we don’t own Germany and we don’t own Japan, but we’ve had forward bases there you know since World War II. So the whole thing is just a ludicrous diversion by Trump for whatever reason or obsession or, you know, obsession. And, you know, this notion, I read that, oh, us silly people, we take him literally not figuratively. What the hell does that mean? When the President of the United States speaks? You’re not supposed to take him literally. When he tells you, you know, if you don’t gimme Greenland, you know, you’ll see what, what’s gonna happen to you. 

ISAACSON: Let me ask you about the Davos European internationalist consensus over the past 60 years or so. Didn’t it get some fundamental things wrong, including the rewards of globalization not being distributed fairly, that has caused this backlash and caused people like President Trump and others around Europe and the world to have a populist backlash against this?

FRIEDMAN: Well, let’s see. Last time I checked, more people grew out of poverty faster in India and China than any time in the – out of absolute poverty – than any time in the history of the world. Now you can say that their growth out of poverty came at the expense of American middle class in the Midwest in America. And that’s true to some degree. And as a country, we should have done more to protect these people, to undergird them. But you know, I do think that globalization has its upsides and its downsides. And our job was to take advantage of the upsides and to cushion the downsides. We didn’t do enough of that in America when we needed to. 

At the same time, if you go to a lot of these towns now, they have in their own way, lifted themselves up and transformed themselves with new industries and whatnot. It’s not perfect. It’s nowhere near what it should have been. But what’s the alternative, Walter? Should we have opted for autarchy? How did that work out when the world went that direction before World War I? So, you know there’s, there’s an easy straw man at Davos, and there’s an easy comfortable self-congratulation there of both our extremes. But at the end of the day, you know the fact is that the world that we have today, the world that has been relatively more prosperous, more peaceful than any period in history, is so much a product of America being the way America was. And the fact that you had a US-China trading relationship in the middle of it, that without both of which, well I don’t wanna live to see that world where both of those things break down. Because when that happens, you will miss this period when it’s gone.

ISAACSON: Another reason, I think, perhaps for the populist backlash we’re seeing in Europe and America, was immigration and immigration going too far, it seemed. Did we get some of that wrong and is there a way to try to solve that issue?

FRIEDMAN: I think we got it absolutely wrong, and I think Democrats and particularly the last administration have a lot to answer for. You know, I’ve been advocating the same message on immigration now since Trump really made it an issue in his first administration. I’m for a very high wall. I’m for a very high wall from one end of the Mexican border to another, with a very big gate. Okay? Because unless you can assure Americans that we are controlling our border, you are gonna lose a lot of them when it comes to immigration. I’m super pro-immigration. I’m for the high end, high educated immigration, and I’m for any Haitian who can build a boat outta milk cartons and, and, and get to our shores. Wow. I want that person, okay? I want both the high energy and the high IQ immigrants, but we are not gonna get them because we will not have a political consensus unless we can control the border.

And that’s what I urged in my column yesterday, my brothers and sisters in Minnesota, whom I’m so proud of for protecting their law-abiding, hardworking, culturally enriching neighbors, even if some of them are here illegally. Okay? But at the same time, it’s vital to me that Democrats, if they wanna do well in the midterms, need to make it very clear, they’re for a high wall with a big gate, they’re for legalizing immigration. Now, both parties, you know, have had challenges on this, but the fact is Democrats came together under the Biden administration with Senator Lankford of Oklahoma, with a plan to actually overhaul all of immigration reform to give us what I call a high wall with a big gate. And Donald Trump killed the bill because he wanted to use this as a wedge issue.

ISAACSON: Tell me, why is it coming apart so badly in Minneapolis? Why has this become the focal point for things?

FRIEDMAN: Well, you know, Minnesota is a classic example of a community that had some very rapid demographic changes, maybe too quickly for the state to fully absorb. Both immigrants from Somalia and more broadly. And so that tension was there. At the same time, it is a community that has a legacy of a real social consciousness and wants to kind of make this work. And therefore, you know, made itself, Minneapolis, a so-called sanctuary city that wasn’t gonna arrest or facilitate the arrest easily of illegal immigrants. And Trump knew it was a perfect place to try to, rather than calmly sit down, bring together, say, let me create a bill, you know for legalizing immigration and controlling the border. Let’s work together with the people of Minnesota. He saw this as just a great way to pursue his own politics, which is the politics always of division, not addition. How do I divide, divide, divide, divide, divide and so I win the election by 50.00001%? And that kind of leadership in this kind of hugely complex situation will give you this kind of explosion. 

Just to say one thing, though, I really emphasize this in my column, Democrats need to understand though, that there are a lot of voters in this country – and I’m one of them – and independents who are not good with just an open border. In my case, it’s ’cause I want immigration. I want more of it, but it’s got to be legal immigration. And if we don’t control the border, you will not have a national consensus for that. And that would be a tragedy.

ISAACSON: Well do you think that ICE has the right to be in Minneapolis?

FRIEDMAN: I think there’s no question that ICE, in theory, was created in part to control the border and to find illegal immigrants. We did that under Obama. We did that under Biden a little. We’ve done it all along. I’m for controlling the border. I’m not for what they did in Minneapolis, which was deliberate provocation of sending 3,000 people into a city to find not just illegal people, but to actually start pulling people out of their homes and stopping them on the streets just ’cause they looked foreign. I look foreign. Heck, they could have pulled me off.

ISAACSON: Let me read you something from your column that struck me as really strong words about ICE in Minneapolis. You say, “Hamas,” referring to the Palestinian group that’s been controlling the Gaza Strip. You say, “Hamas and ICE share one very visible strait that I never thought I’d see in the United States: Almost all of their foot soldiers wear masks. My experience as a reporter in the Middle East taught me that people wear masks because they are up to something bad and don’t want their faces captured on camera. I saw it often in Beirut and Gaza. I never expected to see it in Minneapolis.” Unpack that for me.

FRIEDMAN: Walter. I don’t understand. ICE is a federal agency charged with implementing the Constitution, federal laws. Why are they wearing masks? Why are they wearing masks? The Minneapolis Police don’t wear masks. The Washington police don’t wear masks. Why are they wearing masks? I think it’s something that really delegitimizes them, makes ’em look even more sinister and makes me wonder what they’re up to.

ISAACSON: Tom Friedman, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

FRIEDMAN: Pleasure, Walter. Thank you.