Donald Trump plays Hans from “The Magic Mountain”

The run-of-the-mill Western media treats the meeting between Putin and Xi Jinping as a spectacle of the brave new world. Analysts are quick to comment on outfits rather than ideas, colloquial with the subliminal, yet utterly incapable of reading, let alone understanding reality. Bistro journalists (the brasserie scribblers) pick up slogans mid-flight and chew them up like snarky teenagers mocking the old world. They have a faint and fixed idea (delivered straight from propaganda labs): Trump will “sell” Taiwan in exchange for a trade deal favoring the USA. The act of removing the phrase “we do not support Taiwan independence” from the US State Department’s website was interpreted as a declaration of war against China. Holy naïveté. Dime-store analysts claim the American president will relinquish the US protectorate over the island in exchange for the jewels of Xi’s kingdom.

Trump’s descent upon China bears a striking resemblance to that of Hans Castorp, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”, written over the course of eleven years. Arriving at the tuberculosis hospital for a short visit to his cousin, he ends up staying a long time to treat some concealed health problems. He falls in love with Clavdia, the eccentric Russian woman, horribly negligent solely because of the striking resemblance of her narrow Kyrgyz eyes, a gray-blue (“the color of distant mountains”) matching those of Hans’ schoolmate, Pribislav Hippe, who had once bewitched him in mysterious ways.

Trump hasn’t always been a cynic. The complex of unfulfillment drives the American leader, hence his arrogance and conviction that he can move mountains.

An increasingly fragile world judges developments only in black and white. Nuance is dead. Style, harmony, subtlety – all gone. Putin announces his new plane-launched, nuclear-propelled missile. Trump snaps back, flashing to his dazzled Air Force companions the images of his giant submarines.

Propaganda media croons at the thought that the Budapest moment, the historic Trump-Putin summit, has been canceled. Few realize that the old spinner of time zones, today in Beijing, tomorrow in Kuala Lumpur, isn’t globe-trotting out of boredom in the Oval Office, but is in fact trying to save America from collapse.

A multipolar world now orbits a dying West. While the world’s so-called democratic political elite suffocates under the pressure of the military-industrial oligarchy, the Global South redraws poles of influence and rearranges interests. Hence the Beijing leader’s posture – an ode to mystic silence.

While the Chinese are truly the best in the world at table tennis (once a drawing-room pastime of British aristocrats), it would be interesting to study why every Trump retort is perceived as a shot that hits the very edge of the table.

Before being a president, Donald Trump is first and foremost a merchant. Every second of his time is about trading, much like a broker, his eyes fixed on Wall Street’s great bell. Only the naïve in the media chew on his alarms about imposing or lifting tariffs, as if they were stock market disasters. In fact, through simple declarations of intent and calculated reversals, Trump moves money from others’ shares (the so-called ancient regime) to his own. Fundamentally and realistically, the principle “follow the money” is the litmus paper for decoding the Axis Mundi of the collective West, past and present.

Watching behind the spotlights, like a seasoned actor, he seeks to rally followers and seduce trusting figures.

Make no mistake: Donald Trump is under enormous pressure from the military-industrial complex. Any end to military conflicts cuts into the profits of weapons manufacturers.

It was toward the end of Joe Biden’s term that the dawn of Trump-the-Peacemaker began to appear. A group of investors announced the opening of shell factories in Iowa and Texas, worth 700 million USD. No one invests to lose. Entrepreneurs don’t gamble blind – they work with minimal inside knowledge.

The wars of Trump-the-Peacemaker exist only on paper. And he knows it. He is in a frantic rush for damage control to maintain American hegemony. The man plays his particular, well-known style: quick to inflame, red with rage within seconds, only to sprinkle parlor jokes shortly after. He may seem colloquial, but he is not. A wolf in sheep’s clothing? God’s envoy? Not even close. He is just a transactional leader, much like a professional hunter who kills the deer with a single shot and then poses as the forest’s savior.

His force and contempt for rules, his mild grandfatherly figure, and his colorful, boorish insults mask the anxiety of a man pressed for time. Trump senses he won’t complete all he has set in motion, and so he starts missing his targets.

The Trump-Putin summit in Budapest was postponed sine die because Trump has nothing to offer Russia. He is caught between the shield of military businesses and his Nobel dream. No one in the collective West wants to end the wars in Ukraine or Gaza. The new world order, prefigured by the initiates of the Western world’s oligarchy, makes casus belli a principle of life, economic growth and supremacy. Having the most modern and expensive weapons doesn’t necessarily make one the happiest. Frontlines shift, and colonies are liberated. The East seems to understand better than the West that empires are fleeting.

Trump is ready to lower his terrifyingly high tariff demands in exchange for Western market openings for Chinese rare minerals and industrial components. In Beijing, he poses like a Texan oilman at the casino’s gate. But his performance falls flat.

Americans have expensive Swiss watches, but the Chinese have time and the vitality of an empire whose rebirth is in full swing.

At the opposite end of the planet, Putin pets his dogs, while Europe prepares for the biggest economic freeze, due to an absurd “Green Deal” – the Cinderella slipper of EU policy.

P.S. In Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, Hans Castorp kept Clavdia’s X-rays for years. We don’t know how long Viktor Orbán will be grateful to Trump’s USA for rescuing him once again. The long-awaited Trump–Putin summit in Budapest will be, above all, a gift to Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister.

By Marius Ghilezan