“I run the country and the world,” President Donald Trump boasted to reporters for The Atlantic in April, by way of explaining how his current presidency differs from his first. Even for the clinically braggadocious Trump, that was a mouthful.
Yes, alas, he does run the country, with a bold recklessness like no president before him, and often lawlessly. He’s virtually unchallenged by a supposedly co-equal Congress run by obeisant fellow Republicans who are scared of him and his voters, and he’s only partly limited by federal courts that are constrained, as he’s not, by fealty to the slow and deliberative rule of law.
But Trump running the world? That’s hardly clear. As often as not, the world seems to be running him.
Yes, Trump is wielding power and forcing global leaders and foreign economies to react to his diktats. He’s inflicting incalculable damage: by his hostility to the United States’ longtime democratic allies and to the 80-year-old international structure that’s bound them; by his shameful deference to the world’s dictators; by his global trade war; and not least, by his near-wipeout of U.S. humanitarian aid resulting in the confirmed deaths of uncountable numbers of the globe’s poorest people.
Yet there is no peace between Ukraine and its Russian invader, despite then-candidate Trump’s frequent claims he’d settle the worst European conflict since World War II even before he got to the White House. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doubling down on his scorched-earth war in Gaza, though Trump told his pal Bibi last year to end the killing, before Trump took office. Talks with Iran are reported near collapse on a deal to prevent the country from building nuclear arms, replacing the Obama-brokered pact that was doing just that before Trump scrapped it.