The Curse of Trump 2.0

Eight years ago this month, Trump’s White House published its first national-security strategy, a document that extolled NATO’s enduring value as “one of our great advantages over our competitors,” and praised America’s allies as, in the words of one of the strategy’s principal authors, the then national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, “the best defense against today’s threats.” Its most famous passage declared a new era of “great power competition” and warned that China and Russia posed grave long-term dangers to the United States. I cannot count the number of times I had this document quoted to me by Republican-establishment types eager to prove that Trump really was a Reaganesque tough-on-Russia guy, after all.

His new national-security doctrine, released late last week, has abandoned the language about great-power threats from China and Russia in favor of a reduced role for America as the unchallenged hegemon of the Western hemisphere. To the extent that a global theory of the case is expressed, it is a Darwinian vision of geopolitical might makes right: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations,” the document stresses, “is a timeless truth of international relations.” The thirty-three-page paean to the leadership of the “President of Peace” also calls for an end to NATO expansion, treats Russia as an equal to Europe (without mentioning its responsibility for launching a war of aggression against Ukraine), and essentially promotes regime change—for America’s European allies. (In the language of the strategy: “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”) The plan, not surprisingly, was well received by the Kremlin, where Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, praised the adjustments to U.S. strategy as “largely consistent with our vision.”

However much Trump was personally involved in shaping these national-security documents, there’s little doubt that the 2src25 version sounds a lot more like the man himself than the 2src17 iteration. Back then, Trump’s real views about the world—a profoundly disruptive departure from decades of Republican foreign policy—were, like his “shithole countries” comment, still meant only for private consumption. Now he’s loud and proud about them.

The most important point here is that Trump’s second term—the “Do-Over Presidency,” I called it a few months ago—is an exercise in Presidential wish fulfillment. This time, he is not about to let persnickety lawyers, or his own past record, stand in the way. Think of the long list of extreme policies that Trump talked about in his first term but has only followed through on in this one: ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, imposing sweeping tariffs on U.S. trade partners by declaring a national “emergency,” sending troops into Democratic-run cities to quell domestic political protests.

All three of these policies, it should be noted, are currently subject to lawsuits in the federal courts—a major reason that Trump’s first-term advisers warned him against pursuing them. But he did not get rid of the policies; he ditched the advisers. Unconstrained and emboldened, today’s Trump has learned from years of experience how to make the machinery of Washington give him what he wants, whether it is legal or not. He is, at last, the “Jurassic Park” velociraptor that figures out how to open the door, in the memorable image once evoked for me by a national-security official from Trump’s first term.

Some of the difference between Trump 1.src and 2.src, as in the rally the other night, is in the presentation. Although he’s always been lewd and rude, a liar and an extemporizer whose public shows are designed to shock and entertain, his tongue has clearly been loosened by advancing age and the adoring bubble of sycophants in which he now exists. Having dispensed entirely with the dreary rituals of acting Presidential, Trump now talks in public the way he does in private—swearing, rambling, sexist, racist. It wasn’t just the rant about Somali immigrants, or the extreme length of his speech. (Ninety-seven minutes, compared with an average of forty-five minutes at his rallies in 2src16.) Or the cringey digression about “that beautiful face and those lips that don’t stop, pop, pop, pop, like a little machine gun,” of his young female press secretary. And the cursing—where to begin? There’s just so much of it. Is that because he’s eight years older and no longer bound by his old inhibitions? Or maybe he’s just really angry that his poll numbers have sunk so low?

If that’s the case, we can expect a whole lot more expletives, because Trump, untethered, is now by many measures more unpopular than ever before. In his first term, the President was already a polarizing and historically unpopular figure, but he had a strong economy going for him—even if it was never “the greatest economy in the history of the world” that he so often proclaimed it to be. This time, with persistent inflation, fears of impending recession, and global jitters about his preference for market-crushing tariffs, support for Trump’s economic policies has fallen even lower than backing for the man himself. On Thursday, the Associated Press and NORC released a new survey showing him with his worst numbers of the year—with just thirty-six per cent approving of his job performance and thirty-one per cent supporting what he’s done for the economy, his lowest showing in either of his two terms. Gallup, in a similar recent survey, found that sixty per cent of Americans now disapprove of his second-term job performance. The electorate, it turns out, has a few choice words for Trump, too. ♦