The contemporary crisis of democracy is best captured by a simple fact: many of the leaders of the world’s great powers today are in office because they have successfully changed the constitutions of their countries to hang around longer than envisioned.
This is true of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey. (It is true, too, of Xi Jinping, although China was never a democracy in the first place.) Soon enough, all eyes will be on US President Donald Trump. Will he achieve the constitutionally impossible feat of running for a third term? Is becoming a war president the prelude to an extended stay in power?
Democratic politics has transitioned to a different temporal regime. Past and present have somehow collapsed into each other. The most extraordinary thing about the current American president is that he acts as if he is his own father and his own son. While Putin planned his war in Ukraine in “secret consultation” with his long-deceased predecessors, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and while Erdoğan’s political choices have been conceived in the shadow of modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Atatürk, Trump namechecks erstwhile American leaders only to repeat how he is greater than all of them. His indifference towards the dead is matched only by his indifference towards those not yet born.
Perhaps Trump believes that it is useless to rely on the wisdom of past generations, or maybe he subscribes to the apocalyptic script of his Silicon Valley fellow travellers? The result is the same. The president’s practice of emblazoning his name on buildings and institutions is evidence of someone preparing to deliver a eulogy at his own funeral.
As a rule, revolutions are not only about a change in the power structure. They also reorient our conception of time.
The French Revolution inaugurated a new calendar. The Russian Revolution promised that the future would reorder the past. But the essence of the Trumpian revolution is something stranger: the implosion of time itself. Trump shows no interest in anything that has happened before him and is unconcerned with what will transpire after him. He acts as if history must come to a screeching halt when he exits the stage. This helps explain why he believes that all wars should be stopped in weeks, if not days.
Trump’s experience of time is central to his political behaviour. The president doesn’t think in terms of long-term strategy but rather in terms of deadlines. He’s like a director who does not shoot films but only trailers for movies that will never be made.
He is not really concerned with the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war. What matters to him is when it will end. He makes history in the way an indebted businessman negotiates with his creditors.
Trump’s revolutionary sense of time, in the absence of any revolutionary project, is a source of both strength and vulnerability. He weaponises the public’s growing sense of urgency. The existential anxiety that “there is no time” forestalls the question: “Time for what?” His willingness to attack Iran is divorced from any sense that he might bear responsibility for the future of that country.
The essence of this radically new temporal ontology is the assertion that nothing he does is meant to last. Trump offers deals that others could neither refuse nor accept. Should the Kremlin cut a deal with him because he offers them something no other American president would be likely to propose? Or should the Russians be worried that such a good deal will probably never last? Should Ukrainians trust his security guarantees if he himself is telling them that nobody should be trusted? Should the Chinese negotiate with Trump or wait him out? Can Europeans evade the Trumpian trap of revolutionary time pressure?
The shrinking of past and present in the lifetime of a single leader is Trump’s peculiar gift to contemporary politics. His moment is defined by the fact that both our understanding of the past and our dreams of the future are dramatically changed. When Lenin died, the Bolsheviks mummified his body and deposited him in a mausoleum on Red Square, explaining to the world that, although the great leader was gone, he would live forever. The desire for eternal life is not unusual in political leaders. What is new about Trump is his ability to make us believe that he will always be there.
*Author is Chairman, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia