Trump's Administration of Comic Book Villains Is Making War on the World Order

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, wanted to change his agency’s dietary recommendations, he did something very simple. He took the food pyramid and turned it upside down. After years of promoting healthy grains, pulses, and vegetables, the agency was now favoring meat and dairy.

It seemed like a joke. It wasn’t.

Kennedy called his upside-down pyramid, with meat at the top and whole grains at the bottom, “Eat Real Food.” A better name would be “Support Cattle Farmers and Have a Heart Attack.”

The Trump administration’s topsy-turvy approach applies to every aspect of American policy.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it.

The United States needs undocumented immigrants to maintain the economy by filling jobs in agriculture, the construction industry, and the service sector. So, the Trump administration is deporting them.

The United States is the only major industrialized country without universal healthcare. So, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for people to access medical insurance.

The United States, before 2024, was the largest oil and gas producing nation on the planet, but needed government support to make the transition to clean energy. So, the Trump administration eliminated those clean energy subsidies and invested even more into expanding the fossil fuel sector.

In other words, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to harm people and the planet. They are like comic book villains, and they don’t even realize it

The upside-down nature of Trump’s approach to policy can perhaps best be seen in the foreign policy realm.

Donald Trump has talked over and over again about the importance of peace. He has lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. When asked about his New Year’s wish this year, he said, “Peace on Earth.”

But all he has done recently is promote war. His administration bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. The United States invaded Venezuela right after the New Year in order to kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The administration is now preparing to attack Iran. Trump has insisted that the United States must seize Greenland, by force if necessary. And the US president expects that the government in Cuba will fall as well, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will one day be that country’s leader.

The Trump administration has emphasized the critical importance of US sovereignty. It doesn’t want any other country or any international institutions interfering with US policies.

However, the Trump administration doesn’t care about the sovereignty of any other country. Trump believes he can intervene anywhere. Even close allies are not off limits. He has suggested absorbing Canada. And he seems willing to fight a fellow NATO member, Denmark, in order to control Greenland.

Respect for sovereignty is a bedrock principle of the United Nations. All states rely on this principle to safeguard their borders and protect against the interventions of other countries. Trump’s challenges to sovereignty in Venezuela and elsewhere threaten to unravel the world order.

This contempt for international treaties and institutions led the administration early on to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate as well as the UN Human Rights Council. This year, he has ordered the withdrawal from 66 international organizations, half of them connected to the United Nations. These include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body responsible for the yearly Conference of Parties (COP), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From 2005 to 2024, carbon emissions in the United States dropped 20%, a rare bit of good news from a country with the second-highest rate of emissions in the world. Last year, under Trump, US emissions made a dramatic U-turn, rising by 2.4%.

Trump has nothing but contempt for international law. He has done more than just denounce legal bodies like the International Criminal Court. He has actively sought to destroy the ICC with sanctions. And he has threatened even more sanctions if the ICC doesn’t rewrite its founding document to ensure that Trump and his cronies are never prosecuted for the war crimes that they have most definitely committed.

The violations of sovereignty, the withdrawal from international institutions, and the contempt for international law: These all form a different kind of war. The Trump administration has launched an offensive against the very edifice of the world order. He wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.

This is the world of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-right adviser. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller recently told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Power, as even authoritarian leaders learn, has its limits. Autocrats can’t change their societies by force alone. They are overthrown by peaceful protests. They are tried in court and sent to jail.

History is littered with the wreckage of empires that attempted to rule by force alone. That is the iron law since the beginning of time.

And it is just a matter of time before the Trump administration discovers that it too faces limits. The European Union is banding together to fend off any attempt on Greenland. The US courts are laying down limits on what the Trump administration can and cannot do, with even the conservative Supreme Court ruling recently that the administration cannot send the National Guard to Chicago against the wishes of the mayor and the governor.

And popular protests continue throughout the United States, most recently to protest the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of a young mother in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it. An upside-down pyramid is not stable. Eventually, it will collapse.