Americans disapprove of Trump’s foreign policy. His escapades are likely to cost him

 Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg since his 3 January seizure of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has been guided by his triumph of the will, as he told the New York Times. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me … I don’t need international law.”

Trump treats the spectacle as a reality TV show in which he is both the executive producer and the host who ultimately declares himself the winner. At his 3 January press conference on the day of Maduro’s seizure, Trump mentioned “oil” 27 times, “money” 13 times and “democracy” not once. He trashed the democratic opposition as lacking “respect” and “support”. The capture of Maduro was a decapitation, not regime change. Indeed, Trump served as a convenient agent of an internal coup of the existing powers, whom he declared “an ally”. “We have to fix the country first,” he said. “You can’t have an election.”

Trump has dubbed his Venezuelan exploit as the “Donroe Doctrine”. It is of a piece with his rebranding of history, along with dropping mention of his impeachments from his picture caption at the National Portrait Gallery and coercing the Smithsonian not to focus on “how bad slavery was”. He told the Times that the civil rights movement of the 1960s resulted in “white people” being “very badly treated”. He presents himself anachronistically as the White Citizens’ Council president.

His “Donroe Doctrine” runs against the intent of the author of the original Monroe Doctrine, the then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who stated that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Trump announced that he would “run” Venezuela, “money will be controlled by me” and he would control the oil industry there “indefinitely”. His White House released a photo imitating a Wikipedia page that depicted him as “The Acting President of Venezuela”.

He invited CEOs of big oil companies to the White House to convince them to take the plunge into Venezuela, where the oil infrastructure is dilapidated and the oil resembles tar, difficult to extract and refine into usable products like gasoline. The ExxonMobil chief told Trump that realistically “it’s uninvestable” and that the country lacked a proper legal system.

Trump interrupted his meeting to say, “We have many others that were not able to get in. I said, ‘If we had a ballroom, we’d have over a thousand people.’ I never knew you had that many people in your industry.” He got up to gaze from the East Room window at the gigantic hole in the ground he had made of the South Lawn, where his gargantuan ballroom is being constructed. “Wow! What a view. This is the door to the ballroom.” When he returned to his seat he continued discussing the ballroom. “I don’t think there’ll be anything like it in the world, actually.” Later, he said about Venezuela, “I will probably be inclined to keep Exxon out.” Of course, Exxon did not want to go in. No matter. His foreign policy is like a vanity ballroom, or plastering “Trump” above the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts: schlock and awe.

In the meantime, Trump has turned again to his dream of annexing, purchasing or invading Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a Nato ally. The US has maintained military bases on Greenland under a separate agreement since 1951. “If we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way,” said Trump. He told the Times that he must have “ownership”, which was “psychologically necessary for success”. The leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom issued a rebuke that Greenland “belongs to its people”. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, would-be viceroy, declared that “nobody [is] going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” Danish and Greenland officials told the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, there was a “fundamental disagreement”.

Trump’s imperialism centers on his imperial self. Vladimir Lenin, in his determinist tract, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917, saw finance capital driving colonialism in search of profits, leading to great power rivalry, the world war and “proletarian revolution”. Trump turns Lenin on his head. He drives the reluctant capitalists into freebooting imperialist adventures with uncertain consequences. Trump represents, in Leninist terms, the lowest stage of imperialism.

His “Donroe” atavism fits with his other primitive throwback policies, from tariffs (recalling the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that deepened the Great Depression) to immigration, racial discrimination and restriction (recalling the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 excluding southern and eastern Europeans and barring Asians).

While Trump strides across the stage posing as a world conqueror, the Quinnipiac poll shows him to be an incredible shrinking man – 57% opposed to “running” Venezuela; 73% opposed to sending troops there; 55% opposed to taking over its oil sales; 86% opposed to militarily seizing Greenland; 55% opposed to buying it; and 70% against military action against Iran. According to the AP-NORC poll, 61% disapprove of his foreign policy in general. The Reuters-Ipsos poll showed only 17% in favor of Trump acquiring Greenland and 4% in favor of military force.

Public disapproval of Trump’s foreign policy now nearly equals the disapproval of his economic policy, on cost of living at minus 25 points. Trump has repeatedly derided the reality of the “affordability crisis” as a “hoax”, “scam” or “con job”, lately on 13 January, as a “fake word”, as though he could magically make it vanish.

The last thing that might occur to Trump is any historical lesson, especially a cautionary story about a president who was far more popular than he has ever been, achieved great military victories and yet was politically defeated.