Back in more normal times, when Donald Trump was a simple real estate tycoon who dabbled in reality TV, I spent six months living in a small village a few miles south of Rangpur City.
Like Trump, the executive director of the local NGO I had been sent to help was a narcissist. He was a businessman not a philanthropist, who acted with impunity and reacted with anger. As my placement wore on, I became increasingly unsure of his financial and ethical integrity, until one afternoon in April 2013, he let his mask slip in more ways than one.
The uncovering occurred during the annual sports day at the local school, when my colleagues and I were co-opted into a short program of fun challenges to entertain the large crowd between races. For the final task we were handed a bamboo cane and invited to smash a clay pot around 30 metres away, while blindfolded.
After several people had missed, it was my turn. I counted the paces in my head, paused theatrically, and then drew my cane down in the manner of a cartoon ape trying to squash an ant. Removing my blindfold to much laughter, I realised my radar was also off - by about two metres.
Last to go was my executive director. With his nose tipped slightly towards the afternoon sun, his squinting eyes just visible to me but not the crowd, he strutted purposefully forward. Without breaking his stride, he slammed his cane into the pot, middling it like Mohammad Ashraful.
In a year when enough of the local people were conned by the crude pasting of Delwar Hossain Sayeedi's face over an image of the moon, this brazen act of deceit only confirmed his deity in the eyes of many villagers.
But I finally saw my executive director for what he truly was: A fraud. He was no different then, to how Trump is now.
It should be no surprise to anybody that the 78-year-old president was declared the winner of his own invitational golf tournament in Florida last month. Because the cheat who scores his own card is now taking a nine-iron to a rather larger clay pot: The decades-old global economic order.
As the world scrambles to pick up the pieces, it is worth recalling that for Bangladesh, the fragmentation began even before Trump. That’s because the week after the school sports day in my village, the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Savar gave way, claiming 1,132 lives. It was a collapse more heart-wrenching than any suffered by a global economy.
Mind the gap
In response to the tragedy, the United States suspended Bangladesh from the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP). This wasn't a tariff and it wasn't even Trump, but in broad economic terms, the move by the Obama Administration served the same purpose: Bangladeshi imports to the US became more expensive.
And what happened? Apart from the long overdue reforms to a readymade garments industry which had been allowed to run wild and unregulated for too long, nothing.
At least, nothing to trouble the turbo-charged growth of the Bangladesh economy. In the decade that followed, the country’s apparel exports to the US grew by more than one-third in value and over a quarter in volume, reaching $7.34 billion in 2024. Only Vietnam and China exported more.
But Trump’s problem is not only with the volumes coming in; he also wants to see more of his own stuff going out. Last year alone, the US had a net trade deficit with Bangladesh in all goods of $6.2 billion. According to an unnamed official quoted by this newspaper last week, the administration is demanding Bangladesh “takes concrete steps toward reducing the gap and delivering tangible benefits to US interests."
Strong hand
In such situations, Trump loves to ask who is holding the best cards. Although Bangladesh’s hand may look weak now, the long arm of its garments sector is strong. Faced with a (currently suspended) 37% tariff on his country’s imports to the US, Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus should look not despondently to its newfound foe to the west, but confidently at its direct competitors to the east: Vietnam and China. These fellow textile powerhouses are facing even higher US charges of 46 and 145 percent.
And that is not the only trump card in Yunus’s possession. Supply chains is another. The emperor wants his people to make more of their own clothes, using all of their own resources. But the Cotton Belt is also tightening, and across swathes of southern United States -- from the Carolinas to California -- growers are feeling the pinch.
Why? Climate change is one obvious reason, even if Trump denies it. But the prospect of crop failures is being exacerbated by falling global demand for US exports caused by a switch to synthetic fibres and -- yes, you’ve guessed it -- tariffs. Reactionary levies imposed by the traditional buyers of US cotton, of which prime target China has historically been the largest by far. After flexing his pincers, Trump is now the scorpion being stung by his own tail.
But he hasn’t always packed such venom. Back once more to 2013, and an article written by Trump for CNN: “The near meltdown we experienced a few years ago made it clear that our economic health depends on each other doing the right thing…We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability.”
While the Bangladesh I left in late 2013 was also sliding into its own sinkhole of authoritarianism, the country is now re-emerging into the light, and the US will surely do the same
Never mind the borders; Trump has since left his entire world view behind. But the view for the world doesn’t have to stay this way. While the Bangladesh I left in late 2013 was also sliding into its own sinkhole of authoritarianism, the country is now re-emerging into the light, and the US will surely do the same.
So let's be cautiously optimistic. Following the current trajectory of public opinion polling, Republicans will lose both chambers of Congress in the mid-term elections due at the end of next year.
Trump will be weakened domestically, and the longer the wars are allowed to rage in Ukraine and Gaza -- not to mention the precarious situations in Iran, Syria, and Yemen -- the more weight he will also lose internationally.
Far from being a feared scorpion, the Donald will become a lame duck. In such a scenario, Muhammad Yunus need only wait for the sting to leave the tail, and for the predator to become the prey.
Phil Humphreys is a British journalist and former Bangladesh development worker now based in Berlin.