Trump and the egg: Real power lies with the small and the many
Donald Trump likes to do big things: He shakes up global markets with unprecedented tariffs, wants to make Canada the 51st state, and dreams of taking over Greenland and Gaza. As the most powerful man in the world, he wants the world at his finger.
The U.S. president is an extreme example of those who ignore the power of small and the many, seeking instead to belittle and exploit them. He is not alone. The world has always had powerful people who think big. Today, thousands of Trump-like individuals sit atop corporations, governments, and powerful institutions. Some of them believe they have superhuman missions to transform the world and drag countries irreversibly toward their imagined destinies.
These type of people govern in Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Iran, and now, in the United States. Even in our small and poor Afghanistan, a similar person sits in Kandahar, mired in the swamp of regression and reaching for the heavens. He treats earthly rules and the human requirements of the Afghan people — like the desire for bread, schools, and freedom — as trivial and worthless. In the image he has crafted for himself, he appears even more visionary than Trump, presenting his seat in Kandahar as the centre of the earth and the pillar of the sky and religion.
Behind those masks of grandeur are vulnerable human beings who carry real worries and struggles like all of us. Mullah Hibatullah may appear immersed in dreams of jihad and global conquest but he spends long hours counting, managing, and distributing money funnelled from Kabul to his office through threats and manipulation. He is deeply anxious about infiltration of rogue suicide bombers into his residence, and the ambitions of rivals keeps him up at night.
Trump, too, is deeply entangled in everyday matters and the pressure of the small and the many. As he came to power n January and revelled in his control of the most powerful people in the United States, millions of chickens across the country were slaughtered after being infected with avian influenza. In the corridors of the White House, chickens and eggs had become the topic of conversation, alongside names like Elon Musk, Canada, and Greenland.
By February, reports stated that poultry companies had been forced to cull 166 million chickens in an effort to contain the outbreak. That severely disrupted egg supplies nationwide. In just the first two months of this year, 30 million laying hens died. The price of eggs, which had remained relatively stable at under US$2 per dozen before avian influenza took hold, rose above US$3 in 2024 and then peaked in March of this year at more than US$6.20 a dozen.
These seemingly small and insignificant costs became an issue across the United States because of the sheer scale of the egg shortage. They were discussed far more in homes, shops, and on street corners than the shifting of hundreds of billions of dollars among America’s economic giants.
Even as Trump was humiliating Europe by sending his vice president, J.D. Vance, to speak contemptuously at once close allies at the Munich Security Conference and declaring his intention to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, he instructed other administration officials to approach Denmark and several other European countries to buy eggs.
Such a request to export European eggs to America reminds us that it is not the bluster and boasts of the powerful, but rather the actions and reactions of the small and the many that determine the course of history. The future of America will be shaped not so much by Trump’s lies and bravado, but at the dining tables of hundreds of millions of Americans — and how many eggs they can afford to buy. Behind every major transformation, it is the hands of the many that do the shaping.
Focusing on the decimal points of society
Mullah Hibatullah is encircled by tanks and guns in Kandahar as he and his coterie of armed men are gripped by the delusion that they are playing historic roles. He sees the people of the country as ignorant subjects, incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. With his “Emirate,” he is determined to blind the eyes, deafen the ears, and dull the minds of the people, molding tens of millions like wax to fit the shape of his fantasies.
Recently, he again declared that he is so righteous and confident in executing his inhumane decrees that he neither fears the collapse of his regime nor losing his own head. This arrogance and false certainty are precisely what guarantee the downfall of his emirate. Whether his head will remain on his shoulders until the end of his reign is uncertain. Nothing can substitute for popular support: People may seem powerless and insignificant on an individual basis, but their discontent outweighs any emir, government, or party when they rise up by the millions.
A new subject was added in our ninth grade school schedule: economics. The teacher often spoke of production, consumption, supply and demand, trying to familiarize us with the basics of markets and trade. One day, he talked about the importance of decimal points and small numbers. He wrote examples on the board to show us how even the tiniest figures matter, especially when they are multipliers. “In currency exchanges,” he said, “pay close attention to the decimals.”
Politics and society are no different. Rulers who ignore the decimal points of society — those small but powerful figures — fail in their missions. If opponents of the Taliban, especially the remnants of the former republic, are seeking a new political opportunity in Afghanistan, they must reflect on the disastrous consequences of neglecting public trust and participation. They must begin again, this time recognizing the vital role of popular support.
Younus Negah is a researcher and writer from Afghanistan who is currently in exile in Turkey.
