De-Niall

How Trump corrupts the conservative mind

Predictable as it was, Niall¹ Ferguson’s almost-support for a Donald Trump victory in Tuesday’s US presidential election is still crushingly disappointing to this fan of his sweeping, thematic histories.

The “rockstar historian”, who is now as knighted as actual rockstars Sir Mick, Sir Paul, and Sir Van, has been teasing his justification for a Trump endorsement for months. But, foolishly, I still hoped reason would overcome Ferguson’s instinct for siding with his enemy’s enemy - a hope dashed by a pre-election think piece for the Daily Mail (Why Kamala Harris poses a greater threat to democracy - both at home and abroad - than Donald Trump).

The headline was so ridiculous that I assumed the pen must have been wielded by a subeditor rather than the scholarly author of The War of the World, Civilization, and The Ascent of Money. But no, this really was his argument. To choose between Trump and Kamala Harris is to choose between “Republic and Empire,” he writes. “[I]f you believe Trump poses a threat to the Republic, you must vote for the Democratic candidate. But if you believe the Democratic candidate poses a threat to American primacy in the world, then you must vote for Trump”.

A passionate advocate of lethal support for Ukraine against Russia, undeviating backing for Israel over Iran and its surrogates, and a readiness to challenge rising Chinese military power, Ferguson claims to believe that Trump would be a more reliable ally than Harris. Apparently, the former president’s candid support for Russia over Ukraine, his desire to withdraw from NATO and the Korean Peninsula, and his awe of Xi Jinping’s governing style should be taken neither literally nor seriously. Only last week, he said: “I don’t want to go to war … Number one, it’s very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, I mean, it’s very, very expensive”. Cicero. Also last week, JD Vance, his running mate, said further US aid to Ukraine would be a “disaster” and sought “avenues of peace” with Moscow. These are the guarantors of continued “Empire”?

Perhaps I’m doing Ferguson an injustice since he did say that the loss of American primacy could be worth it if Trump “poses a threat to the Republic”. I’m not. “[T]he question is not how far Trump has authoritarian proclivities: it is how far he would be able to indulge them if re-elected to a second term,” he writes. Not very far, he argues. Confident in the democratic will of a Supreme Court that narrowed the scope of the constitution’s 14th amendment in Trump’s favour and assigned protections from criminal prosecution for his “official acts”, Ferguson expects its justices to block a third term and limit the use of executive orders to overhaul immigration policy. As for Trump’s desire to use the military to carry out domestic law enforcement – something his generals say he sought repeatedly during his first term – the officer class would probably refuse to obey.

Probably. Why take such an enormous risk with the Republic when this anti-war isolationist doesn’t even want to protect or project the Empire? Well, says this former Harvard professor, in August 2022, two other Harvard professors wrote a New York Times opinion column advocating an overhaul of the constitution. “[W]ho is to say that, if elected president with majorities in the Senate and the House, Harris would not be open to such revolutionary schemes?” Even Ferguson seems embarrassed enough by this epic reach to look for another Harrisian threat to democracy: shrinking relative military budgets as, for the first time, the costs of public debt service exceed the costs of defence. Fair enough, but every analysis – fiscal and political – of Republican and Democratic budgetary and defence plans show this trend will continue under Trump.

Living history

Ferguson’s capitulation to Trumpwelt maddens me when I couldn’t care less about Kelsey Grammer and the two Buzzes – Aldrin and Lightyear. The professor knows better. What makes his histories so good is how they reframe narratives – the Second World War as multiple conflicts staggered over decades and often fired by ethnic divisions dressed up as ideology, to give just one of many examples – and emphasise uncertainty and risk.

When we read history, we know what happened but history’s decision-makers didn’t. Especially when it came to the big questions of war and peace, they were assessing risk then making decisions they could regret. And often did. Throughout his career, Ferguson has made this thinking central to his writing and formalised it with counterfactual scenarios: What if Britain hadn’t entered the First World War? What if Hitler hadn’t survived one of the assassination plots? What if South America had developed economically and politically in line with North America?

So important is robust risk assessment to his thinking that he founded the Greenmantle² advisory firm in 2011 to apply it to today’s macroeconomics and geopolitics. And yet, when it has come to big contemporary questions – Brexit and Trump being the most obvious – he seems to choose his tribe over sound analysis. Unlike the Cheneys and the Never Trumpers or Brexit-sceptical Tories David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, and Rory Stewart, Ferguson couldn’t stomach the new company he’d have to keep in exile from the right. He opposed Brexit before the 2016 referendum, then declared his conversion to withdrawal, and now seems to have returned to lightly held Bregret. In 2016, before he was born again as a conservative, this “liberal fundamentalist” dismissed claims that candidate Trump was a fascist and saw him more as a late-19th-century populist in the mould of William Jennings Bryan. “The violence of populism is mostly verbal. Populist leaders are demagogues in suits, not jackboots”. A reasonable risk assessment then. Less so in November 2024.

The risk landscape today isn’t the same as 2016. Yes, Trump is fading physically and mentally, is personally and programmatically chaotic, and lacks the standing militia of a Benito Mussolini. But he is also angry, bent on revenge, has a record of using the street in his support, and has a more consistent foreign policy built around tariffs, military withdrawals, and a dislike of America’s traditional allies. Trump lacks the self-discipline to be a true fascist but he long ago moved beyond Bryanism into something that threatens both Republic and Empire. I believe the writer of some of our most thought-provoking recent histories can see this. He just can’t bear to disappoint his friends or comfort his enemies. With luck, voters will drive a metaphorical stake through Trumpism’s heart next week and Sir Niall can spend four blissful years criticising President Harris for not doing enough to suppress Russia, China, and Iran or reduce the public debt stock.

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Afterwords

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16 March 2025

Unfortunately, Professor Ferguson had no such luck and was condemned to months of torment - explaining why Trump’s protectionist economics, peace-through-weakness diplomacy, and brinkmanship with the rule of law are alt-Reaganism.

On 20 February, he (briefly) cracked after Trump criticised Ukraine for starting the war with Russia. He took to X to lament how much had changed since George H.W. Bush reacted with fortitude to Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in 1990 - the proper "reaction of a Republican president to the invasion of a sovereign state by a dictator". The Trump court allows no deviation so, within the day, Sir Niall was subjected to public abuse from none other than the vice president. JD Vance denounced his "moralistic garbage" and "lazy, ahistorical nonsense" in likening an interests-driven foreign policy to "appeasement".

Responding with an essay in The Free Press, Ferguson stood some of his ground. In preparing for negotiations with the Russians, the Trump administration had made "a series of unforced errors”, he wrote. By conceding that Ukraine's pre-2014 borders would not be restored, that Kyiv would never join NATO and that the US would leave security guarantees to European powers, Washington handed Putin “freebies in return for nothing”. He wrote: “I simply cannot understand the logic of this administration beginning a negotiation this difficult by conceding so many crucial points to Russia”.

In case this was too much, he accepted the never-explained mantra that "the war would not have happened if President Trump had been re-elected in 2020". Is this because Putin would have been so terrified of Trump's potential response or so assured of his non-intervention that the Battle for Kyiv really would have been the much-mocked "three-day war"? Repeating his Brexit autobiographical revisionism, Ferguson claimed to have "supported [Trump's] campaign for re-election last year, consistently predicted his and Vance’s victory". He didn't. He predicted Trump's victory - although not consistently - and implied a preference, but stayed on the pot.

He ended the piece with: “Despite our little spat, I am rooting for the Trump-Vance administration to succeed. And I will give them the benefit of the doubt. We are just one month into this administration, and many key positions have yet to be filled as the nomination and confirmation processes grind slowly forward. The latter process will allow the many senators who share my concerns to voice them”. They didn't. Fear of Trump and Elon Musk, his prime minister, ensured that cabinet nominees opposed to the Ferguson view of the world sailed through.

Putting the betrayal of Ukraine to one side, how have the first weeks of Trumponomics landed with a man who classified himself a “classic Scottish Enlightenment liberal" only seven years ago? In another Free Press column on 16 March, Ferguson questioned the fundamentals of the Trump economic project – sweeping tariffs and a weaker dollar. The plan was always flawed but the execution is leading to a “marked slowdown this year” – and not the deliberate type to force rate cuts. “The coming weeks and months will be a bull market only in a few things: gold, German defence stocks, Chinese AI companies—and “I-told-you-so” criticism of Trump by the usual suspects. Those—and I include myself—who cheered the president’s victory will have cause to ask ourselves the old British-English question: “Ever been had?”

Yes, he has and he knows it. But we are going to have to wait. “Keynes’s heirs today—led by Larry Summers—have already written off Trump 2.0. But, like Keynes in 1925, I’ll give Trump the benefit of two years”. I empathise; I too tend to put off the uncomfortable but inevitable. But it is inevitable and I give it a lot less than two years.

5 April 2025

Two years? Try two weeks. What exactly did Ferguson violently agree with the prolific George Mason University economist in yet another Free Press column? To save you $8 on this Trumpversteher and selectively free-speech publication, I will summarise.

Writing after Trump unveiled his latest tariff package - a $1.5-trillion, 10-year tax increase - Cowen said: “This is perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime. I cannot think of any credentialed economist colleague—Democrat, Republican, or Independent—who would endorse it. And I haven’t even mentioned the risk that some foreign nations will retaliate against American exporters, damaging our economy all the more. You might think there is something to be said for a reciprocal approach to tariffs. Usually, it consists of cutting off your nose to spite your face, but if it can sometimes work, it requires a president (and Congress) who is predictable and trustworthy. That is not how foreign nations view the current administration”.

Even if a “cowardly” Congress rebels and Trump retreats in readiness to reimpose tariffs anytime a country upsets him, this shock will add “high and persistent uncertainty about the basic rules of the game”. The design of the new trade policy makes it strategically incoherent and provides no negotiating pointers to trading partners short of a willingness to surrender to a customs union with the US. Why do the UK and Brazil start at a 10% tariff, the EU with 20%, and Japan with 24%? If part of the aim is to drive manufacturing out of China, why tariff Vietnam at 46%, Sri Lanka at 44%, South Korea at 25%, and Cambodia at 49%? And, if the strategic goal is to weaken China, why tariff Taiwan at almost the same rate as Beijing at 32%? That’s a pretty comprehensive demolition of Trump’s economic and strategic positioning after less than three months in office. “Violent agreement” can’t be too far from disavowal.

21 April 2025

Disavowal - an admission that almost-support for Trump’s re-election was mistaken - came a step closer in an 18 April column (Donald-25: the new virus that’s devastating the world economy ) for The Times in which Ferguson compared the global economic impact of tariffs to the Covid pandemic. “[T]he cause of this new shock is not a coronavirus from Wuhan, but a mind virus from Palm Beach, Florida” … Like the Covid virus, the protectionist mind virus spreads through contagion … In 2020, Covid-19 spread through the global social networks connected by the world’s airports — and permanently altered those networks”.

“The equivalent uncertainty in 2025 is that no one knows where US tariffs will be tomorrow, much less in three months’ time. The result is a lockdown of a large part of the trade between the two largest economies in the world. Like the pandemic, this implies a huge hit to the world economy as a whole”.

“It is all such a wasted opportunity. Much of Trump’s programme was potentially popular: the crackdown on illegal immigration; the pushback against ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ in education; the attempt to reduce bureaucracy and wasteful government spending; the deregulation of the economy. Even a return to the use Trump made of tariffs in his first term — as a negotiating lever, not a revenue source, much less a tool to reindustrialise America via autarky — would have been tolerable. However, you may as well say that gain-of-function research on coronaviruses might have yielded scientific benefits. Trump without his mind virus just wouldn’t be Trump. It’s just a pity the whole American economy had to catch it too”.

In other words, without saying it out loud yet, changes to immigration and education policies and for different public spending priorities weren’t worth a pandemic-level threat to the world economy and (see above) the betrayal of Ukraine. Yet.

5 May 2025

In his inevitable “first 100 days” Free Press column (Donald Trump Is Crushing His To-Do List, But is he crushing the economy in the process?) and a CNN interview on 4 May, Ferguson seemed to have blasted through the denial, anger, and bargaining stages of neocon support for Trump and landed on depression.

The two policy successes are, he asserts, the terror Trump has unleashed on undocumented migrants and asylum applicants, which has collapsed border “encounters”, and his assault on the universities. But even this Counter Wokeformation has considerable downside, he writes, since “in practice, research scientists appear to be paying the price of ideological excesses” in the humanities.

Then there are the failures. Elon Musk’s $2-trillion “chainsaw” to the federal budget has been scaled back to a theoretical $150 billion with only just over $60 billion identified. This project was always theatre. Instead, if they’re lucky, Congressional Republicans will pay homage to the Reagan years by passing a front-loaded tax-reduction bill with the promise of spending cuts that never come. “On fiscal policy, to put it bluntly, the first hundred days have been a fail,” admits Sir Niall.

Never mind. This was always a trade-off between risky, republic-threatening domestic policy to maintain the empire, right? At least American power is being extended and the foes of the free world cowed. Sadly not. The efforts of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Chauncey Kissinger, to “broker a Ukraine ceasefire with President Vladimir Putin recall the negotiations between First Little Piggy and the Big Bad Wolf”.

Beyond Ukraine, it is genuinely entertaining to watch Trump-aligned neocons and the Israeli right panic at Trump’s revival of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran - a deal he killed in his first term. This is what happens when you switch off your analytical faculties for the sake of your tribe. Like Obamacare, he only opposed it because of its branding. Except when it comes to walkovers in Greenland and Panama, Trump is a big-talk pacifist. Always was.

Two months in, a depressed rockstar historian admits to CNN that there is no empire at the end of this lost republic. "The president's foreign policy seems to me to be very contradictory and hard to understand because part of it is a kind of braggadocio where President Trump talks about annexing Canada and Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal. But when you look closely, his foreign policy is really based on a sense of American weakness”.

Next stage: acceptance.

20 May 2025

Sadly, the acceptance has turned out to be mine, making this the last epilogue. Listening to Ferguson’s 16 May Firing Line interview with Margaret Hoover, I realised I’d become Carrie Fisher’s character in When Harry Met Sally. The film’s tragicomic running joke is that, despite years of evidence to the contrary, Marie deludes herself that her married boyfriend will leave his wife.

Marie: I don’t think he’s ever going to leave her.

Sally: Nobody thinks he’s never going to leave her.

Marie: You’re right, you’re right. I know you’re right.

This interview takes us back to where we started: Ferguson’s implicit opinion that maintaining an “empire” (continued American strategic primacy) was worth the risk of losing a “republic” (liberal democracy and the rule of law). Yet, even though he has never been more explicit about the risks to American primacy or about the Trump family’s corruption, he frames this as a tactical warning only.

“It really discredits the enterprise to have what amounts to [meme coin] scams emanating from the White House,” he says. “The President has to be more careful than he’s being. He has to remember that the constitution still exists and that he is not king and he is not emperor. And if he makes as many mistakes as I believe he’s made with the economy in the last 100 days, he runs the risk of defeat in the midterms, he runs the risk of a major economic problem, and he runs the risk of suffering, ironically, the fate of Richard Nixon”.

What Trump is doing isn’t unethical or a threat to the democratic system that should be fought. It’s a tactical mistake that jeopardises a project that should have started and ended with containing illegal immigration, inflation, and DEI, and reducing the budget deficit. This is reminiscent of Ferguson’s earlier criticism of Trump for refusing to accept the result of the 2020 election and encouraging the March on Washington. "I thought this was the end of his political career,” he said a month before the election. “I was dead wrong, he's back”. So, it was just an error of punditry.

Catastrophically so, when it comes to Ferguson’s priorities: the continued success of American capitalism and its external projection through hard power. Domestically, Trump’s tariff games have caused “enormous uncertainty” for business, which will hit growth and widen the budget deficit. As a debt-reduction exercise, Musk’s public-spending cuts were performative since Trump won’t touch federal healthcare and retirement outlays. Even if the tariffs succeeded in reshoring manufacturing on a large scale (which they won’t), much of the assembly work would be automatised.

Externally, Ferguson is even more despairing. Of the administration's three competing foreign-policy factions, neoconservatives have lost their place to China-focused hawks and a group around Vance interested in nothing but the Americas. In this interview, it’s clear that Sir Niall fears Team Vance would advise Trump to trade Taiwan for peace. "There is a strategic option open to Xi Jinping to throw down a gauntlet over Taiwan, to change this from a debate about trade into one about geopolitics. And I worry that we’re not ready for that. I worry we could find ourselves faced with an impossible choice, either a major war with China, which I don’t think President Trump wants, or ceding Taiwan to Beijing with all that that implies".

The Chinese "calculation must be: if ever there was a president who would do a deal that would give us Taiwan, it is Donald Trump. So that’s the moment of truth, I think, for the administration - when we move from the realm of tariffs into the realm of pure geopolitics. Is this going to be the administration that lets Taiwan go? And if it is, I think that’s the end of American primacy in the Indo-Pacific”.

As Ferguson keeps telling us, Trump never hid his second-term agenda and, central to this, were tariffs and an expulsion of the “warmongers”. It was never a choice between empire and republic. Trump never wanted an empire except in the near-abroad and couldn’t care less about the republic. I know this and Sir Niall knows this too. But, I have to accept that a man who knows better is never going to leave Trump. You’re right, you’re right. I know you’re right.

7 September 2025

I know I promised to stop. This Substack Note doesn’t count.

24 November 2025

Nor does this (relatively positive) one.

24 January 2026

But this one on “Niallwashing” did.

1. Yes it’s pronounced Neil, but I wanted the pun.

2. Full disclosure - in early 2020, I emailed Niall Ferguson about working for Greenmantle. In a kind and respectful reply, he said there were no suitable roles. No hard feelings.