Having known a US president or three, the memory bank says the most powerful man in the world is always likely to hit a bump (even a wall) sooner or later, especially when he listens only to himself or the sycophants around him. But the way Donald Trump – such a consummate performer for his own people until recently – has stripped himself bare, warts and all, in this first, tumultuous month of the year defies belief. It makes you wonder not just how deep the rupture is for our global landscape, but whether we will be left with any world order at all.
Remember the New Year hangovers were still with us when we woke to the dramatic hit-and-run operation in Caracas that had erstwhile tyrant Nicolas Maduro and his despotic wife Cilia Flores dethroned and hurtling towards a New York prison, visual highlights posted online by Trump himself from his Mar-A-Lago resort (where else would a US president be on the night he storms another country?). The fact that virtually nobody, outside of Cuba and Iran, had shed tears for the Maduros or seriously cried foul made for the kind of triumph Trump loves.
But within a few hours, the raw shell of the man’s thinking became so clear. He had no plan to move the country towards democracy. No, instead he handed power to Maduro’s number two, Delcy Rodríguez. Likewise, he bad-mouthed the opposition leaders who had so obviously won the last election, specifically María Corina Machado, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize he so lusted after. So much for “the big, beautiful future” he promised Venezuela.
Within 24 hours, the man who would be king showed us all that the real goal was control of the country’s oil wealth, with an old buddy or two (big-time donors to his presidential campaigns) waiting to capitalise on it. The tears were left to the families of Maduro’s hundreds of political prisoners, who waited for the Rodríguez government to release their loved ones as promised, and the millions of Venezuelans in exile, paralysed as to whether to return home. For all of them, what dawned was the bitter realisation that the all-bestriding colossus Trump, with such naked ambition to be master of all he surveys, had already moved on.
To Greenland, of all places. Leave aside the rather pathetic attempts to portray that vast island of ice as the next battleground for the superpowers (Trump’s repeated claims of Russian and Chinese military presence were denied by even his own intelligence services). Just look at the tactics employed ahead of his grandstand performance in Europe. First, the threat of tariffs, laced with contempt for the NATO allies, signalling the end of the transatlantic alliance. Then a robust, but far from united, pushback from the Europeans, called “The Bazooka.”
“I know the President doesn’t drink but the Bazooka surely sobered him up,” to quote one economist at European Union HQ. “Think trade quotas, think denying access to financial markets, consider revoking intellectual property. Above all, it could throttle America’s exports to Europe, and remember we’re the largest market in the world.” Ah yes, see what you mean, Sir. In short,“quite the weapon to play against the man who so obviously weaponises his hold on global economics.”
Given that, Trump’s about-turn, suggesting he will win Greenland through negotiations, not force, made him look every inch that new TACO meme: “Trump always chickens out.” Maybe. “But we will have control of Greenland, make no mistake on that one,” according to one member of his National Security Council. “You see, it will be Trumpland.”
Of course, in this semi-chaotic mélange of brutal diplomacy, military muscle, and the king’s vanity, the likes of the ongoing tragedy in Gaza, or the nightmarish forever war over Ukraine (two million casualties so far, we’re told now, and the number rising every week) seem largely forgotten in Trump’s world. Far from being the driver towards any peace, he launched a “Board of Peace” that didn’t even mention Gaza or Ukraine. While Argentina’s Javier Milei signed up, many more did not.
“The man has no clothes when it comes to doing the real work of peacemaking,” says one veteran US State Department hand, who has survived the culling of many who don’t genuflect to Trump. “Every day we’re seeing kids die in Gaza, and old folks perishing in Kyiv without heating, let alone on the battlefield. The president no longer cares about either.”
It’s back home, however, that you see the starkest evidence of how Trump has done untold damage to his own Presidency and truly unmasked himself, courtesy of shameless games with the truth. It was inevitable, tactically, that the man elected on the promise of ridding the US of millions of illegal immigrants would take the issue to the streets. But the strategy, writ large in Minneapolis these past few weeks of this New Year, has led to killings of ordinary citizens who are then accused of being “domestic terrorists” while the shooters (aka federal agents) are not even questioned about why they shot to kill.
“Here perhaps is the moment of truth for this President” says Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “People see videos of the killings, they hear the lies the president’s people tell, and they make their own minds up. This is one he can’t win with bluff and bluster. It is simply un-American.”
This month is ending with Trump ordering a large force to the Middle East – everything from Strike Eagle jet fighters to an aircraft carrier to 5,000 troops – the overt purpose being to prepare to carry out his threat to attack the Iranian regime after the Ayatollahs ordered the mass murder of thousands of protesters.
Much as we will be told that any strikes on Iran represent the president’s commitment to confronting a murderous, and dangerous enemy, the irony can be lost on nobody. The President of the United States, promising to attack a regime for killing its own people for protesting, while on Main Street America his forces have gunned down, yes…. protesters. Never count Trump out, but even among his own faithful, the warning voices abound. “Are we really going to be the Gestapo?” asked Joe Rogan, a die-hard Trump podcaster, the other day. “Is this what we’ve come to?”
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