The other tragedy of Trumpism is that it has tarnished just causes, turning them into battles best consigned to the archives

Among the countless disasters caused by the administration led by Donald Trump, there is one significant one that is rarely discussed, concerning an issue that deserves greater attention. The toxicity Trump has cultivated over recent years has not only served to undermine anyone who has come into contact with him, but has also served to trivialise certain sacrosanct causes which, when placed in Trump’s hands, have become a laughing stock.

The most recent – and perhaps also the most disheartening – case concerns the way in which the US President has managed to give a crucial and potentially cross-party issue, such as curbing the Iranian regime’s sphere of influence, a very different connotation from the one it deserved. The war waged by the Trump Administration against Iran was not based on false premises – countering an Iran eager to acquire lethal nuclear arsenals and determined to maintain its position as the undisturbed sponsor of global terrorism – but the ill-conceived strategy with which Trump built his offensive against Iran had the opposite effect to that intended, not only giving Iran room for manoeuvre in the Strait of Hormuz that it did not previously have, but also transforming the Ayatollahs’ regime into a piece in the grand mosaic of the commendable resistance to Trumpism. Part of this Trumpian disaster is also the attempt to shift the blame for the conflict with Iran onto Israel – ‘we didn’t want it, it was them’ – and we’re just a hair’s breadth away from Trump or Vance saying it’s all the Jews’ fault, just like any old ElSayed – thereby further contributing to the perpetuation of a false narrative according to which Iran must once again be regarded as a problem solely for Israel and not for the rest of the world.

The systematic way in which Trump has managed to drag certain just causes into the mudslinging fray is not limited to foreign policy alone – after all, even seeking to drive a wedge between Russia and China could have been a sensible foreign policy objective, provided one did not seek to build bridges with Russia whilst bulldozing Ukrainian resistance – but extends to a myriad of just causes that the American president has disastrously managed to tarnish. Trump has managed to trivialise the fight against anti-Semitism, turning it more into a generic battle against Islamism than a fight in defence of freedom. Trump has managed to trivialise the fight against the excesses of ‘wokeness’ by waging a parallel and opposing battle at the heart of which lay the simple desire to replace left-wing thought police with right-wing thought police. Trump has succeeded in trivialising the battle to hold NATO countries accountable for being less of a burden within the Alliance, because he built his campaign not on the idea of a stronger NATO, but on a NATO capable of making all member states more susceptible to blackmail by the United States. Trump has also trivialised the effort to counter the infiltration of extremists into the UN in the Middle East, not only by turning UNRWA in Gaza inside out but also by ordering the United States’ withdrawal from forums for international cooperation (see the case of USAID funding). Trump has also managed to undermine the sacrosanct battle against environmental extremism by drawing more on the spirit of denialism than on the spirit of innovation – understood as the desire to make America the heart of creating innovations that combine environmental protection with energy independence. The tragedy of Trumpism has therefore not merely been that it has wreaked havoc across the world, but first and foremost that it has created an opportunity for Trump’s enemies to shelve just causes – causes which remain just even if tainted by a global ‘radioactive’ presence whose first name is Donald and whose surname is Trump.