Donald Trump’s real-estate politik is working

Barack Obama tried to be the first Pacific President. He attempted to pivot America’s grand strategy eastwards in order to adapt to a changing world. He failed, by and large. After his meeting with Kim Jong-un today, Donald Trump has shown that he is moving further east. In fact, Trump could be turning into the first truly Global President.

No doubt that sentence sounds ridiculous. Trump is an ‘American First’ nationalist who believes in tariffs and borders; he stands for everything we’ve been told globalisation isn’t. But there is a difference between globalisation as a supranational faith in the free-market; and globalisation as a process that is actually happening. In the real world, globalisation has replaced the old divisions that existed between Capitalist West and Communist East; Trump, more by instinct than anything else, appears to understand that.

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Matthew Parris

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Trump doesn’t care much for Nato and the defence of the west. He cares about international hotel chains, golf courses and beach-condos, about ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the game of life. He doesn’t speak the language of diplomacy; he speaks the language of real-estate and the luxury global lifestyle. This doesn’t make him a beautiful orator, like Obama. But it means he communicates across cultures in a way that no other leader of the free world has done.

And it means that, more than any other western leader, Donald Trump speaks Asian. His gestures to the east strike us, exhausted western snobs that we are, as intolerably cheesy or naff. But Asians are less familiar with capitalism, and not as sensitive to the trashiness of consumerism as we are. Trump is himself a global business brand, and for most Asians that is a good thing. It’s why, as Boris Johnson put it last year, Trump is able to penetrate ‘corners of the global consciousness that I think few other presidents have ever done.