On Friday, with the Pax Americana in flames and burned almost beyond recognition, a Dispatch colleague observed that Donald Trump’s second term was shaping up to be what doomsayers thought his first term would be.
It sure is. The first six weeks have played out like a thought experiment that crossed over into reality: What if people with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in 2016 were right about pretty much everything—but premature about the timing?
Trump will appoint a Cabinet of lunatics. That didn’t happen in his first term. He wanted to appoint unfit toadies like Kash Patel to fill top vacancies but was deterred by his deputies. Now, however, Patel is the Senate-confirmed head of the FBI, joining embarrassments like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as America’s key policymakers.
Trump will engage in grotesque corruption. There was certainly corruption during his first term, beginning even before he was sworn in as president, but that was peanuts compared to the breathtaking grifts he’s running now. Just yesterday, he announced a new “U.S. Crypto Reserve,” a blatant scam to use taxpayer money to boost the value of investments held by his crypto-bro fans. Meanwhile, the main bureaucratic “reform” initiative in his administration is being run by a mega-billionaire with immense financial interests in industries regulated by the very agencies whose databases he’s been rummaging through for weeks.
Trump will let grudges and vendettas drive his policies. This too was true to some extent in his first term—ask James Comey—but it reached new depths last month when he moved quickly to strip John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mark Milley of their security details because each had offended him by criticizing him in the past. To a degree unmatched in his first presidency, Trump’s new government brazenly divides politics into friends and enemies. Friends show their appreciation; enemies are apt to lose every public privilege that it’s within his power to deny them.
Trump will govern chaotically and malevolently. Trump 1.0 was plenty chaotic, especially in its final year. No administration led by a man like him could be otherwise. But never did the first President Trump embark on a policy project as haphazard and destructive as DOGE, and not until Election Day 2020 did he do anything as nakedly malicious as pardoning violent loyalists or canceling life-saving foreign-aid programs on phony fiscal grounds. The latter is the “America First” impulse toward cruelty in its purest form: Better that a million foreigners die than that the tiniest insignificant sliver of precious taxpayer money be diverted to save their lives. It’s all about cost-cutting, you see—except it really, really isn’t.
Trump will destroy NATO and the American-led international order. There were glimmers of this in his first term as well, but in the end he never withdrew from Europe or from the Far East. He even approved weapons shipments to Ukraine. It took until his second term, specifically this past Friday, for him to fully immolate the United States’ credibility as leader of the free world.
Trump 2.0 is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. Since his first term in office, the president has gained a considerable degree of legal impunity from the Supreme Court, almost limitless political impunity from his supporters and the cowards in Congress who represent them, absolute administrative impunity from the slavish cronies with whom he’s staffed his government, and electoral impunity from the fact that, one way or another, he’ll never face voters again.
There were enough inklings in his first term of what his second term would look like to support two solid years of this newsletter, which is why every column of mine now reads as a variation of “I told you so.” Even the attempt on Friday to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky into a rotten “deal” had a famous analog in the president’s first term.
And so, six weeks in, Trump’s second term as president already looks like the sum of all fears that proto-Dispatch-ers felt nine years ago. If there ever were such a thing as irrational “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it died in the Oval Office on Friday.
Transactions vs. bullying.
“If your position was strong you wouldn’t have to lie.” So said Jonah Goldberg this weekend to Laura Ingraham, who’s under the impression that someone somewhere is proposing sending our “own sons and daughters” to fight in Ukraine.
Jonah has made that point many times since Russian troops invaded three years ago. The way you can tell that Ukraine’s opponents have an agenda, he’s said, is that they so often resort to arguments that are transparently in bad faith to justify their criticism. Take for example the populist bleating about how, instead of spending it on Ukraine, the United States should have spent $175 billion on Americans instead. That would be a defensible position—if the Trump administration were gearing up to boost entitlements and government services and looking for ways to fund that.
It isn’t. Just the opposite: DOGE keeps hacking away at federal agencies, seemingly indiscriminately, while congressional Republicans are considering steep cuts to Medicaid on which many poorer Americans (plenty of them Trump voters) rely for health care. The GOP appears headed for a sour spot in which it slashes spending enough to make life harder for many Americans without slashing it remotely as much as would be needed to balance the budget.
So the “we need this money for Americans!” argument is dishonest. If their position was strong, they wouldn’t have to lie.
But in fairness, and in case their personal vilification of Zelensky and his U.S. allies hasn’t already made it clear enough, relatively few America-First-ers are still pretending that their core complaint about Ukraine has to do with wasteful spending. How could they when Trump is, or was, on the cusp of securing a cut for the United States of Ukrainian minerals? Had that agreement been signed on Friday, every MAGA diehard would have been required to insist it was the best, biggest, most beautiful deal America has ever made. Which is why the Ukrainians were willing to sign it, of course: Once Trump’s own vanity was invested in the soil of their country, their thinking went, the White House would have no choice but to protect that soil from Russian conquest.
Shaking down Ukraine for mineral interests had a distinct Trump 1.0 feel, not unlike when he demanded that allies with U.S. troops stationed on their territory increase their payments to Washington. Because he perceives no strategic American interest in allying with liberal nations, he needs to believe that it’s in our financial interest to justify continuing that alliance. He’s a famously transactional politician; if you want something from him, you need to hand him some sort of victory, ideally involving cash.
But dressing down Zelensky publicly on Friday had more of a Trump 2.0 feel. It wasn’t about finances. If it had been, Trump wouldn’t have refused to proceed with the minerals deal after things went south in the Oval Office. It was about “respect.” Zelensky didn’t show enough of it, supposedly, and that was reason enough for the president and vice president to burn down the transatlantic alliance that’s prevailed since World War II on live television.
If I had told you in 2016 that America would switch sides in a major war involving Russia and part of the reason would be that the guy we’re allied with didn’t wear a suit to a meeting, you would have accused me of the most hysterical case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” you’d ever seen. Yet that’s what happened.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is dead.
Bad faith.
Starting at Friday’s meeting and continuing through the weekend, Republicans have strained to accuse Zelensky of being disrespectful or at the very least undiplomatic in arguing with Trump and Vance—surely the stupidest, most pathetic rationalization for a sea change in American foreign policy in U.S. history. Gregg Nunziata, a conservative lawyer, summarized the criticisms of the Ukrainian’s lack of tact aptly: “Zelensky failed to appreciate that our president is a moronic narcissist and our vice president is a disingenuous climber.”
If the right’s position on the meeting was strong, they wouldn’t have to lie. But they are lying.
The lying began when Vance accused the Ukrainian president of being ungrateful, scolding him during the Oval Office as one would a child by asking, “Have you said ‘thank you’ once this entire meeting?” Zelensky had—three times, by Steve Hayes’ count, and dozens of times on other occasions. But this is what foreign relations looks like under Trump 2.0: Only major powers like Russia and China—but not the European Union, oddly, despite it having a higher GDP than both of those countries—are worthy of respectful diplomacy from the United States.
Minor powers like Ukraine are to be disdained and bullied unless they engage in rank supplication, treating American aid not as a matter of mutual strategic interest but as a personal gift from Donald J. Trump himself. (If the Trump White House respected Ukrainians, the vice president wouldn’t have been included in the meeting.) That’s probably why Vance didn’t notice Zelensky’s professions of gratitude. So what if Ukraine’s president has thanked Americans many times? How many times has he thanked Donald Trump?
More bad faith followed the lie about Zelensky’s supposed ingratitude, this time from Trump himself: By insisting on defending themselves from conquest, the president claimed, the Ukrainians are “gambling with World War III.”
That’s a perverse way to apportion blame for a war that Russia started and which Russia alone has widened by deploying an allied nation’s troops on the battlefield. It would be one thing if Trump had accused both parties of risking escalation, but over the past month, only the Ukrainians have been browbeaten for resisting concessions. U.S. officials won’t even state frankly that Russia started the conflict, functionally volunteering themselves in a Kremlin propaganda effort to muddy the moral waters around the war.
The standard defense to all that is that antagonizing Russia won’t get us anywhere. “You’re not going to bring them to the table if you’re calling them names, if you’re being antagonistic,” Marco Rubio said this weekend. “That’s just the president’s instincts from years and years and years of putting together deals as someone who’s in business.” But this too was in laughably bad faith: No one uses antagonism as a negotiating tactic more liberally than Donald Trump, as we were reminded with our own eyes on Friday. Just a few days earlier, he had described Zelensky—not Putin—as a “dictator.”
And normally no one is more eager to project “toughness” toward recalcitrant opponents than Trump is. Russia is a ripe target for that approach: They’re the aggressor, the side that ultimately will determine whether the war continues, therefore they’re the ones logically whom the White House should threaten until they agree to a ceasefire. Nothing’s stopping the president from warning Moscow that America will give Ukraine another $200 billion in weapons unless the Russian advance halts this month. That’s how a tough guy would negotiate.
It’s not how Trump is negotiating. What he’s actually doing by leaning exclusively on Ukraine is prolonging the war, giving Russia a reason to fight on and inadvertently rallying offended Europeans to Zelensky’s side. Pressuring the weaker party in a conflict to make concessions makes sense in only two circumstances: Either you’re the world’s dumbest negotiator or you’re completely indifferent to the outcome, even if it means one side being steamrolled. If Ukraine surrenders, Russia rolls into Kyiv, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians end up murdered, Trump will take it. As long as he gets to keep his promise of ending the war and maybe getting that Nobel Peace Prize he’s coveted.
All of the impulses we’ve seen since Friday were there in Trump 1.0 but were restrained by advisers and the president’s own uncertainty about how voters would react if he followed those impulses to their logical conclusions. In Trump 2.0, the thoughtful advisers are long gone and the voters are no longer a concern. And so: At a moment when Putin’s own spokesman is crowing about the U.S. embracing Russia’s “vision” of the world, the Pentagon is halting offensive cyberoperations against Russia (even at the planning stage) and Trump’s Republican toadies have begun demanding that Zelensky resign for having dared to embarrass their leader by making perfectly valid points when debating him.
No one with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” could have foreseen it, just like no one could have foreseen Marco Rubio whining about—deep breath—“Ukraine-splaining” on national television. But here we are.
Sabotage.
All of it has the feel of deliberate sabotage.
That’s not to say that it is deliberate sabotage. But if Trump 1.0 was akin to a horse being loose in a hospital, Trump 2.0 seems altogether more intentional. We’re seeing things we’d expect to see if the goals of the administration were to reduce American influence internationally, undermine basic federal services at home, trigger a series of constitutional crises related to executive power, and convert the government into a kleptocracy in which there’s no limit to how much the president’s friends might benefit.
Significant decisions are being made with no explanations offered to the public, too. When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and several other top officials were recently fired and replaced, several former defense secretaries (including James Mattis) published a statement noting that “the President offered no justification for his actions, even though he had nominated these officers for previous positions and the Senate had approved them.”
I stress again: Trump 2.0 is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. The identities of DOGE staffers are so closely guarded, for instance, that it qualifies as a major scoop when a newspaper simply manages to identify them. And even that meager degree of accountability has offended some apparatchiks in Trumpist media and the activist class.
Were the voters who elected the president to a second term last fall prepared for this degree of Trump derangement?
Regular readers know what I think about that. The irony of me writing “I told you so” columns is that no one needed to be told who and what Trump is. We all watched television on January 6. That episode was the sum of all fears—I thought. If a coup attempt at the Capitol couldn’t convince Americans that those of us with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” weren’t so deranged after all, nothing will.
There’s a more optimistic possibility, though. Yes, Americans who voted for him knew that they were renewing the most dangerously irresponsible reality show in U.S. history, but they assumed the material benefits they’d receive from doing so would justify the cost. They were willing to accept the risk of the United States becoming a global villain in exchange for Trump solving their problems.
What happens, though, if the United States becomes a global villain and Trump doesn’t solve their problems?
What if they notice he’s not even pretending to care about them?
Perhaps some MAGA fans will slowly begin to question which side of the “Trump derangement” debate is actually the deranged one. It’ll be too late when they do (I told you so!) but it would be nice to have a solid majority of Americans on the right side as we proceed through the rest of this nightmare. Buyer’s remorse is the smallest of consolations, but I’ll take it.
