One year after taking over his second term, Donald Trump is showing clear signs that:
- He feels absolutely invincible. He proclaimed victory over anything he touched with his magic hand as president – from the mind-boggling figure of seven to eight wars resolved; to the tariff wars which supposedly harvests hundreds of billions of dollars, only from Americans (consumers and companies), and not from foreigners, as he claims; up to the military operations against Iran’s nuclear program and the capture of dictator Nicolas Maduro.
- He feels sure of himself like no one else in this world, which is why he has come to somehow proclaim victory in advance over everything else he can think of touching with his presidential hand: for now, this is the case of Greenland, which Trump already presents as an annex, as is the case of the entire Western Hemisphere, which he already presents as tabulated under the name of the USA.
- He feels like the Lord’s envoy on earth, since he survived the attempt on his life in the summer of 2024. Trump personally presented this spectacular victory of life over death as divine grace and protection, while most inflamed MAGA supporters stated with a childish boldness that Donald Trump was thus invested with a kind of mission – a universal and evangelical one, what else?
Donald Trump’s fantastically good opinion of himself is not new, but in the last year it has become as dazzling as sunlight. And that’s precisely the problem.
Today, the few short-term successes and numerous aggressive propaganda and personal marketing operations that are portrayed as infinite successes are efforts that will harm America in the long run (tariff policy, undermining democracy in Europe, undermining the EU, and generally alienating U.S. strategic allies on the Eurasian plateau) make skepticism of Trump’s presidency seem like gratuitous malice at best.
But what seems to be a winning hand for Trump today, could easily be a losing hand tomorrow.
Two harmful character traits (paragraphs 1 and 2) and a strategic error that it has already made (paragraph 3) contribute to the anticipation of such a dynamic. Both can be traced back in time:
- Donald Trump lacks perspective – he thinks in relation to ‘right now’; he has gaps in his history; he is not interested in the intricacies of how institutions work, in the mechanisms and meaning of alliances forged over decades; and is incapable of projecting the U.S. interest other than through the lens of his personal interest.
- He is easily influenced – both by events and people and especially by authoritarian leaders who in reality perceive the US as an existential enemy, and its president today as a clown who offers endless opportunities for exploitation.
- Donald Trump has opened too many fronts, too many and too complex which would be an insurmountable challenge even for an individual more intellectually or more competent than him, even for a country stronger than the country he leads today. In betting on undermining democracy in the US and Europe, he has purged key areas of the American security institutions (in intelligence, diplomacy and at the Pentagon). He is trying to destabilize to the point of dissolution blocs allied to America – the EU and NATO – and seeking to annex territories and economies in various corners of the world and has launched tariff wars against the whole world. It’s a double trap at this point. Trump will lose if all of these succeed, but in the case that they don’t too. In the first case, where he has total or even partial success, the consequence will be a significantly weakened America – both economically, both as a hard and a soft power. In other words, a distant horizon, even antagonistic to the promised one, of a great America (MAGA). In the second case, of failure across the board, Trump’s aura will dim. Family, friends, and admirers would better pray for Donald Trump’s swift and total failure — better to keep him as a memory of mediocre failure than of the single president who destroyed a truly great legacy, a unique country of unparalleled, albeit imperfect, success.
All the stars are already aligned for the dynamics to be reversed, moving from today’s appearances, that everything is working out for Trump, to tomorrow’s certainty that everything is actually going down: intellectual deficit, lack of perspective, a blinding ego,no critics around him (in fact, this is also the most toxic difference between the first and this second term), and too many battles fought on multiple fronts.
It is enough for international actors (both friends of the United States, who see their friendship with the United States endangered, and enemies of the United States, who see an unmissable opportunity in the current White House tenant) to exploit one or more of these vulnerabilities of the Trump administration, and Trump and perhaps America’s star will soon begin to fade.
Europeans, no matter how gentle and hesitant they may seem, will not sit idly by but will respond appropriately to Trump’s actions. They will do so simply to defend themselves and limit the losses to which Europe has been exposed by the Trumpist madness.
The Chinese and Russians will not sit idly by, for two good reasons: because they have understood how much they have to gain, but also because they will want to diminish areas where they may have to lose.
From the story of Trump’s return to the White House, everyone will lose and everyone will fight ferociously to lose as little as possible. Some, however, will also benefit (except that, unfortunately, this layer of victorious opportunists made up exclusively of enemies of democracy and the free world).
Surely, however, the longer the Trump-MAGA phenomenon lasts, the more America will lose. It will become infinitely less grand and will live to regret the institutional and electoral failure of blocking in time the takeover of the Oval Office by a character who by a supreme irony of fate had not concealed his historical destructive potential.
PS: History does not leave us without precious lessons in this chapter: no weak intellectual leader has built or rebuilt a country; no messianic leader saved his people; no authoritarian drift and no weakening or elimination of democracy has made the economy stronger but has whittled it away. And no leader who launched offensives on several fronts escaped unburied in their own trenches.
