Donald Trump is very nearly a year into his second term as President, with the anniversary of his inauguration on January 20. He began with a blizzard of executive orders – 26 signed that first day back in the White House – and left his opponents breathless and wrong-footed. But it is in 2026 that we are seeing Trump reduced to his very essence, all constraints cast aside.
Since the beginning of this year, Trump captured and arraigned Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. He defended and doubled down on the killing of an unarmed US citizen, Renee Good, by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to suppress protests.
Trump warned the Iranian regime the US was ‘locked and loaded and ready to go’ with military strikes if it continued to kill protesters; there are rumours that the US Navy’s Carrier Strike Group 3, centred on the USS Abraham Lincoln, will be deployed to the Middle East. And he revived and intensified his belief that the United States should ‘own’ Greenland (a sovereign territory of the Kingdom of Denmark) because ‘we need it for national security, right now’. Over the weekend, the President said he would impose tariff sanctions on those European countries which have moved to defend Denmark’s legitimate jurisdiction over Greenland.
Both internationally and domestically, these have been dramatic and shocking moves, shattering any remaining norms or constraints of protocol or law. But they should surprise no one, because they are an undisguised and unvarnished demonstration of Trump’s attitude towards the world and his regard for his own position and that of the United States.
The Right is fond of characterising the ongoing horror many people feel at the President’s policies and behaviour as ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. But there is a similar derangement which has afflicted parts of the Right: either finding satisfaction in the anguish of liberals, or in enjoying the vicarious rush of almost absolute power, some conservatives have tried to portray Trump as a crude but effective and shrewd political actor who produces results. There have also been attempts to impose post hoc rationalisations on his policy impulses to suggest an internal consistency and logic, as if the President is following a hidden but sophisticated masterplan.
This is a false reading of Donald Trump, only possible for those who refuse to take him at face value. The past few weeks have illustrated who he is and how he operates, and there can no longer be any excuse for failing to understand what is right in front of us.
Trump sees the world as a succession of zero-sum games, underpinned by a fundamental binary of the strong and the weak. In any interaction, he believes someone has the upper hand, and the other party is by definition the loser. There is no place in the Trumpian thought-world for Adam Smith’s concept of mutual benefit.
Given this starting point, he always wants the United States, which he identifies with himself almost inseparably, to be the ‘winner’. That is not an unusual stance for a head of state, but in Trump’s political and emotional chiaroscuro, it leads to the inevitable and necessary corollary that other parties must be ‘losers’: their loss is central to his perception of success.
The current crisis over Greenland exemplifies this. Even a passing knowledge of the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement between the US and Denmark would show that Trump could make whatever arrangements he desired for national security, and Denmark would have neither the inclination nor the formal power to obstruct him. But such a consensual and mutual arrangement holds no attraction. He told reporters, ‘Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don’t defend leases. And we’ll have to defend Greenland’.
Ownership reframes the issue as one of winners and losers. America will win by taking ‘ownership’ of Greenland – which it has never previously had and to which it has no conceivable right under international law – while Denmark will lose because it will yield something to the US. Using coercion to achieve that only reinforces America’s powerful status and Denmark’s subordination. That is part of the point.
Tariffs fulfil a similar role. However often Trump may seek to defend the economic illiteracy and self-harm of tariffs by the revenue they will supposedly generate, they are essentially coercive instruments, weapons for delivering financial and economic punishment beatings. He believes, wrongly, that the burden of tariffs falls on foreign manufacturers, who thereby become ‘losers’, rather than, as is overwhelmingly the case, leading to higher prices, poorer quality and less innovation for American consumers. The US wins, while everyone else loses.
Trump’s motivating force is dominance. He was recently interviewed for The New York Times and spoke with astonishing candour. Asked if there was any constraint on his actions, he replied ‘there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good’.
Western countries struggling to deal with Trump have to be clear-eyed about his nature. He recognises no limitations or obligations on himself and sees his role as being to dominate other countries, so that he and the US are winners, and everyone else loses. He has no grasp of give and take, because giving is surrender, the imposition on the weak of the will of the strong.
Facing Denmark and Nato, Venezuela, drug cartels, illegal immigrants, left-wing protestors, judicial restraint, the powers of Congress, the electoral system – he must always have the advantage. It is an unappetising truth which darkens the skies ahead, but we all have to accept it before we can try to find ways to deal with it. Donald Trump was always like this: he is simply no longer hiding it.
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