In the first year of his second non-consecutive term as president, Donald J. Trump sought to redefine the American presidency and reorient America’s place in the world. He used federal power to brazenly reward his supporters, punish his enemies and line his family’s pockets. He dismantled large portions of the federal bureaucracy without approval from Congress. He rewired global trade relationships with punitive tariffs. He tossed aside the eighty-year post–second world war international order in favour of a foreign policy resembling crude nineteenth-century-style imperialism that some academics have deemed “neo-royalism.”
All this radical and rapid change poses a challenge to politicians, businesses, analysts and journalists trying to figure out the long-term significance of what’s going on. In an end-of-the-year wrap-up story, for instance, The New York Times argued that only a handful of presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had “comparatively momentous first years” and posed the question: “How much of what he has done can be considered irreversible, and will Washington ever be the same?”
It’s not hard to find experts with pessimistic answers to those questions. “The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable,” said Robert Kagan, foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. “By the end of Trump’s term … there will be nothing left of the America we knew four years before. All institutions, norms, government, you name it, all of it gone,” Robert Litan, an economist who is also a fellow at Brookings, said. “Trump is also creating structural problems to which there are no solutions,” argued Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offered a nuanced take: “On balance, I think the United States can recover from Trump at home. I’m less confident that the United States can fix the Trumpian mess internationally.”
Such gloom and doom may help stir voters to action by showing the need for an urgent change in course, but we should not lose sight of the fact that most of what Trump has inflicted so far is reversible. He has not spent most of his energy crafting painstaking legislative compromises that produce durable new laws. He has not forged international alliances that want to carry on his foreign policy vision. He has impulsively asserted executive power to satisfy personal indulgences, not pressing needs or public demands, which has weakened the political standing of both him and his party…
