Trump In His Pomp

Today is January 20^th 2026.

Nine years ago today, Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States for the first time after his shocking win over Hilary Clinton in the 2016 election. His inauguration is remembered both for his speech decrying the preceding Obama administration as a period of ‘American carnage’ and his insistence that the attending crowds constituted ‘the largest ever’ at such an event in spite of the preponderance of evidence that they were not.

Five years ago today, Joe Biden was inaugurated as US President after defeating Donald Trump in the general election of 2020. This followed a tumultuous transition where Trump had refused accept the reality of his defeat and called upon his supporters to resist what he characterised as a steal, culminating in the assault by his supporters on Congress itself on January 6^th (Trump would later rewrite these events to his own liking).

One year ago today, Trump was inaugurated for his second term as President after winning the 2024 general election as Biden’s Presidency came to an ignominious end, a product of the Democratic leader’s own refusal to accept his physical and mental decline or to accept that Americans did not believe his overly rosy and out-of-touch analysis of their economy. The election also saw Trump’s Republican Party retain control of the House of Representatives and capture the Senate, delivering unto him unified control of American government. And we have all seen how he has used that power.

I am not going to pretend to be unbiased in my assessment of the man. His followers and he himself have termed those with a passionate revulsion at his actions as suffering from ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ but he represents everything I, and many others, despise in politics.

The vulgarity and pettiness rather than the dignity of aspiring for better.

The gleeful exaltation of division at home and abroad when he should be binding together and soothing.

The wallowing in ignorance. The veneration of his own ego. The ceaseless placation of his insatiable id.

The contempt for institutions better men and women than him sweated blood and bullets to slowly build and his wanton destruction of those institutions.

The hatred of fellow democracies and long-standing allies. The admiration of thugs who have brutalised their own peoples and who wage bloody war. His unwinding of the world order because of his infantile conviction it is everyone else taking America for a ride.

The sheer inability to comprehend the existence of mutually beneficial agreements, the insistence on dividing the world into winners and losers, and his own, desperate pathological need to always, ALWAYS be a winner.

Yes, I despise him, but not due to any made-up condition that seeks to pathologize his detractors. I despise him because he is demonstrably the worst President to ever ascend to that office, displacing the previous holder of that title James Buchanan. That was the man whose inaction and indecision directly contributed to the outbreak of the American Civil War, but unlike Donald Trump he wasn’t actively pushing his nation towards catastrophe (he just did nothing to stop it).

Why has the American experiment gone so badly off course?

First, know that Trump is not the cause of what has gone so badly wrong. The roots of this frightening failure of American governance are multi-faceted and deep and a proper examination of each cause could fill a library by itself never mind an essay.

There’s the xenophobic and nativist ideal at the core of his MAGA movement which has long been a force in American politics. After all there was the ‘Know-Nothing’ or American Party which flowered for a brief period before the civil war. It has never gone away; it has come to the fore at several times and its re-emergence and consolidation in the MAGA movement is merely its latest incarnation.

And there was the Civil War itself. Even those of us abroad are familiar with the rough outlines of that history, how the United States tore itself apart in a bloody conflagration over the institution of slavery where the Union, and emancipation, triumphed. What might be less well known is that the former Confederates were never forced to confront the reality of what they had done in tearing the Union apart in the first place and in the name of reconciliation their culpability and treason was allowed to be reframed as a romanticized struggle in defence of an idyllic way of life. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy became as mythologised in American folklore as the Cowboy, and it was just as false, but it too has been percolating in the social undergrowth for generations and it too has found renewed expression in MAGA as a hatred and disdain of government.

Then there was the rise of the Christian Right from around the time of President Carter in reaction to the social progressiveness and upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Having previously disdained the exercise of worldly power, evangelicals were now encouraged to make their numbers felt at the ballot box and thus become a powerful constituency from whichever politicians sought to harness their votes. Those politicians were invariably Republican.

Next was the coming of Reagan and George W. Bush heralding neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. Whilst an absurdly simplistic reading of both ideologies, many feel that the policies they espoused destroyed American industry, impoverished the working class and sent their sons and daughters abroad to bleed in foreign wars.

Finally there is the Supreme Court, three of whose number were appointed by Trump, which is now firmly ensconced on the right of politics. This is the apex of a decades-long project by American conservatives to shape the court more to their liking. It is one of the greatest fictions in American law that a body whose membership is so obviously partisan can itself be impartial on inherently partisan political issues. And we have ample evidence to this, the Supreme Court has handed the conservative movement, and President Trump in particular, victory after victory in recent years as the right-wing majority has strengthened, often disregarding precedent and reinterpreting otherwise settled doctrines to advance Conservative priorities. The Court rarely finds against President Trump or other Republican politicians, though the upcoming ruling on Trump’s tariffs may prove that some of his requests are too much even for them and it is expected they will at least narrow his authority to unilaterally impose the measures.

The court in particular has connived in the entrenchment of the original sin of America’s political rot, the corruption of the electoral process through the institutionalizing of partisan gerrymandering and the removal of any limits on political funding from corporate America. Those two changes did more than anything else with the exception of the rise of mass disinformation disseminated through social media to corrupt American politics, by allowing Politicians to choose their voters and then allowing the super-rich to effectively buy elections by bankrolling their preferred candidates.

Taken together, this sickening brew of xenophobia, racism, frustrated evangelism, elite exploitation and institution capture found their expression in the personality cult of Donald Trump. Others had hoped to control those dark forces in American society that were unleashed by the various facets of conservatism, but as he rose he either swept them away (as with Cheney) or bent them to his will (as with Rubio, Cruz and others who decried him in 2015 yet who all now bow before him).

Perhaps they never imagined this outcome. Perhaps they felt they could keep stoking the various poisons to empower themselves or achieve their own ends. But at the end of the day all they had worked for to benefit themselves was co-opted by Trump’s dark charisma, his unparalleled self-belief and his insatiable ego’s need for validation from adoring crowds chanting his name and confirming what must be his unshakable conviction in his own greatness.

And so empowered he bestrides the world, betraying his nation’s allies, cozying up to his nation’s enemies and single-handedly demolishing an international order that, while not perfect, brought greater peace and prosperity to the Western world than any other time in history. Right now the West is convulsed by his betrayal of Ukraine, his fawning over Russia and his obsession with controlling Greenland but who knows what else is to come? I’d wager not a Pax Americanum, but an Imperium Americanum in all but name.

At home he terrorizes, turning the institutions of the state against its own people, deeming acts of protest that were once the hallmark of the freedoms Americans enjoyed into acts of insurrection worthy of using the American military to disperse. At the time of writing 1500 US soldiers are on standby to go into Minneapolis to deal with the protests that followed the murder of Renee Good should he decide to send them in.

What then will separate Trump from the tyrannical Ayatollah Khamenei who conducted his own bloody crackdown recently? His Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has also escalated its efforts in detaining those whom they deem to be potential illegal immigrants. The agency did its task far more subtly and even effectively under both Obama and Biden, indicating that the spectacle and terror maybe the point.

Through it all he corrupts the government, hollowing out the Civil Service to replace steadfast neutrality with committed partisanship, where experience and moderation is treated as evidence of potential disloyalty and opposition. Filling the ranks of the civil service with the compliant strengthens his hand in the here and now, even if the elimination of experience and the promotion of the mediocre who say the right thing will have dire impacts further down the line.

And while you may hope the media will hold him to account, the media finds itself under assault as never before. News organisations are cowed or sued or punished for purported unfairness, when in reality they aren’t towing the line. Their wealthy owners, with their fingers in other pies, defer to Trump and thus pressurize their journalists to not antagonize the President by asking too many awkward questions. Social media and political eco-chambers have filled the void. The public are not challenged or confronted or educated, their prejudices and pre-conceptions are confirmed and reinforced in the modern era.

He has also learned from his first term mistakes and replaced those who counselled restraint and caution with sycophants and yes-men who have enabled his worst impulses. He has completely cowed the Republican party, threatening retribution to any legislator who crosses him, as former arch-loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene found to her cost and rendered Congress supine.

Trump is at the zenith of his powers, his Presidency in its full and glorious pomp.

Who will stop him?

At the moment, nobody.

But I want to end this piece pointing out that there is hope, even now in these darkest days where all our old certainties crumble.

One year from now, if the polls hold, the Democratic Party will have taken back control of the House of Representatives. With luck, they’ll be able to take the Senate too. With power, the Democrats will be able to gridlock Trump’s agenda and hold the administration to account, consuming huge swathes of time of what remains of Trump’s term and hopefully making his life miserable.

And that ultimately is something to hold onto. One thousand and ninety-five days from the moment this article is published, Trump will be in the dying hours of his Presidency. He is forbidden from running again. If we are fortunate, several kilometres away from where he will have spent his last night in the White House, a far better man or woman, one fit for the Presidency and one who rejects everything Trump and his noxious MAGA movement stand for will be preparing for the most momentous day of their lives. The task that person faces will be awe-inspiring, to FINALLY turn the page on the most consequential political figure of the early 21^st century. A man whose impact is of the same scale as that of Washington, of Lincoln and of both Roosevelts, the sole distinction being he has torn asunder and destroyed what his predecessors built up and created.

Three years from now, we will hopefully be on the cusp of a new era, not because who comes after will rise to the moment, not even because who comes after maybe a true believer in his methods and aims who seeks to continue his work, but because he himself will finally, at last, be gone from holding direct power. For as long as he lives and has access to a mobile device we will live in the shadow of his words and how they can shape the hearts of his followers for considerable ill, but he himself will no longer be there and he will inevitably diminish, even as the idea he represents will live on.

We will have to hope the world after him is reshaped for the better, though in fairness it will probably be difficult to make it much worse.

One thousand and ninety-five days to go. Seems like a lot. But you’ve already done three hundred and sixty-five days of his final term, twenty-five per cent. You’ve done the one thousand, four hundred and sixty-one days of his first term. And you’ve done the three thousand, eight hundred and seventy-one days since he descended his golden escalator and entered politics. He will do much more damage before he is done and the next year will be particularly brutal but mark the time and mark the days.

He won’t be there forever.