Key topics:
- Trump’s monarchical ambitions face legal and political hurdles.
- “America First” risks long-term global distrust.
- Presidential power is cyclical; Trump may overreach.
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By R.W. Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
There is a temptation at the moment to believe that the changes made by Donald Trump are irreversible, in particular his “America first” attitude to allies and his enormous expansion of presidential power to almost monarchical proportions. Currently he even talks of having a third or fourth presidential term and he has just lined America up to vote through a UN resolution together with Russia, China and North Korea – both utterly unparalleled departures from the norm.
What makes this a difficult judgement is that the populist movement that Trump heads has finally won through with a complete victory in both houses of Congress and with a backing majority in the Supreme Court. This has produced an exultant euphoria among the MAGA crowd. Trump not only fully shares this but is enjoying the gratification of his own overwhelming personal needs for attention, praise and psychic rewards of every kind.
In many respects Trump is a childish character with an uncontrollable ego. European leaders, as they prepare to visit Washington, prepare themselves by planning their interactions with Trump in terms of “toddler management”. Trump is unusually ignorant for an American President – it was only during his first term that he discovered that Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican.
Trump doesn’t like reading. He not only doesn’t read books or even good quality newspapers but refused even to read his presidential intelligence briefings during his first term. Instead he is permanently tuned to Fox TV because it flatters his ego and confirms his prejudices and he picks up bits and pieces from there and from casual conversations. He has a very short attention span and jumps from subject to subject.
Trump is also prone to self-pity and like any spoilt child has a variety of stratagems to get his own way, ranging from charm to threats to shameless bullying and extortion. Freud high-lighted the way such a child can see only his own wants and needs when he referred to “His Majesty the baby”. Trump also decides on what he wants to be true and then insists on it regardless of the facts. His fury against any media which does not give him the adulation he craves means that he is a natural enemy of press freedom. His attempt to take control of the White House press corps and banish Associated Press – one of the world’s leading press agencies – is symptomatic.
It is extremely unlikely that Trump will be succeeded by anyone with a comparable personality so to that extent it seems clear that his presidency is a one-off. The question is, though, whether he will succeed in permanently altering America’s constitutional balance and its role in world affairs.
Trump has unleashed a blizzard of executive orders, attempting to legislate on everything from the name of the Gulf of Mexico/America to the abolition of whole agencies or birthright citizenship. These orders should be seen mainly as an expression of ego and the usual Trump gambit of opening the bidding by making an outrageous demand, thus setting the terms of the discussion. But many of therm are flatly illegal and have run into judicial opposition. Trump is trying to over-rule the judges by repeating Napoleon’s maxim that nothing that is done in order to save the country can be illegal, but this too is merely a gambit. Meanwhile various Administration spokesmen, including the Vice President, have insisted that no judge should obstruct the people’s will – expressed through the President. This is an obvious attempt to intimidate the judiciary into lying low.
This will not work. There are bound to be enough judges who refuse to be intimidated and who will rule that various presidential executive orders are illegal. Ultimately, cases may be appealed to the Supreme Court which is clearly pro-Trump but which knows that any hesitation on its part in upholding the Constitution will do great and lasting damage to its reputation and credibility.
Similarly, Trump’s attempt to by-pass Congress and the Senate – and to intimidate dissenters there by threatening them with primaries – will not work for long. Congressmen and Senators know that if they continue to bend the knee to Trump they are undermining their own credibility. They may be willing to vote for a broad brush budget resolution apparently agreeing to the main thrust of Trump’s policies but the budget process proper is Congress’s main job. It is a matter for detailed consideration and legislation – a process of many months – involving a vast number of pressure groups and lobbies. Tthere is no way that this can be short-circuited.
In addition, of course, Republican Congressmen are already nervously aware that the 2026 mid-term elections are only 20 months away. The Republicans only have a majority in the House of 218 to 215 (with two seats vacant) and are thus vulnerable to even the slightest negative swing. They are already aware that Elon Musk’s mass firings of public employees are unpopular. Musk is unelected and enjoys posturing with a chainsaw about his keenness to slash bureaucracy but this stirs unease. “He’s only just been naturalised, nobody elected him and those are perfectly good Americans that he’s firing”, is a typical comment. There is even greater unease over talk of cutting Medicaid and other programmes on which poorer citizens rely.
Already Trump shows signs of retreat on several issues after it became clear that he couldn’t win. Thus his proposal to take over Gaza and turn it into a beach resort met a solid wall of Arab opposition and complete incredulity among many Republicans. Trump quickly fell back: “I think that’s the plan that really works. But I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it.”
Similarly, his claim that Zelensky was a dictator and had started the war with Russia ran into strong Republican opposition in the Senate where John Thune (Republican Majority Leader) spoke against it, as did John Curtis (Utah), Kevin Cramer (North Dakota), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), John Kennedy (Louisiana) and John Cornyn (Texas) – that is to say, all people from Deep Red states who would probably survive primaries against them. Several other Republican senators made it clear they couldn’t go along with Trump. And it should not be forgotten that Marco Rubio was an outspoken foe of Putin whom he called “a butcher, “a war criminal” , “bloodthirsty” and “a monster”.
What this boils down to is that Trump can’t get the most extreme version of his anti-Zelensky policy through the Senate. He may also have realised that his attitude to Greenland is not widely shared – he has gone rather quiet on that of late.
The key point to realise is that presidential power in the US tends to follow a cyclical pattern. The previous peak of the “imperial presidency” was under Nixon, re-elected in a huge landslide in 1972. But Nixon over-reached himself – demanding lists of Jews employed in government agencies, compiling an “enemies list”, using the tax authorities to persecute those he didn’t like and, ultimately, authorising Watergate. The result was a complete collapse and a resurgent Congress cutting back on presidential powers. Before that presidential power had peaked under Franklin Roosevelt but he too over-reached himself with his court-packing scheme in 1937. He was never so dominant again and his successor, Harry Truman, was often run ragged by Congressional opposition.
True, Trump is pushing for almost monarchical powers – but he too is likely to over-reach. His peak power is now. But he is likely to lose next year’s mid-term elections and face a difficult last two years as a lame duck. He talks now of a third and fourth term but there is absolutely no way that he can amend the Constitution to allow that. In any case, by the time he finishes this term he’ll be 82 and after the experience of Biden Americans will be very wary of aged presidents wanting to go on longer.
But will Trump’s changes in foreign policy be lasting ? This is far harder to say because America’s declining dominance is a linear, not a cyclical process. To be sure, we could easily see a liberal Democrat elected in 2028 who then reverses most of Trump’s changes – though that too might only be a short-term change.. The difference is that Trump has merely accelerated a movement that began some time back. Previous presidents had warned Europe that it must spend more on defence and step up to look after itself, and they have also warned that America must now concentrate its attention on the Indo-Pacific where the great contest with China will take place. Trump has simply accelerated that trend – and he has not only gone further but he has treated Europe almost as an enemy. A major result is that Europeans will find it difficult ever to trust America as fully as before.
But Trump’s America First-ism is actually illogical. As the US becomes a less dominant player in the world economy and the international political scene it can gain only temporary relief by shrugging off old alliances and responsibilities. It is not really to America’s advantage that it should become “America alone”, reviled even by Canada and Europe. In its gradually reduced state it will need allies more than ever. Moreover, it was much to America’s advantage to be seen as the “leader of the Free World”, standing up for personal liberty. To replace that with “America the Selfish Bully” may immediately intimidate smaller states but it risks uniting the rest of the world against the USA.
Imagine if an American president had approached Denmark, Greenland and Canada offering an Arctic Pact, with American investment and an American defensive umbrella. This might very well have succeeded in building a powerful, American-led bloc. Trump has tried the same thing by bullying and threats. He is not only likely to fail but he will end up with Canadians and Europeans (especially Danes and Greenlanders) resentful and suspicious of American power. The moral is surely obvious.
So, on balance, Trump is likely to test the constitutional limits of the Presidency and indeed the entire political system but ultimately the system is likely to bend but not to break. In the end Trump’s importunate insurgency will be held – and overcome. Internationally the damage Trump does may be more lasting, indeed even perhaps irreparable. It already seems unlikely that we will ever return to the balmy days of the American supremacy inaugurated by FDR. Instead we have a world ruled by three autocrats – Xi, Putin and Trump. Even those who have cheered the arrival of a multipolar world will find this a lot more uncomfortable than the world we are losing.
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