Considering his recent antics have taken tens of thousands off the retirement savings of some in Britain, and led others to fear World War III is about to break out, it’s rare to find anyone now who has no opinion on the second Presidency of Donald Trump. Of course he’s always been a polarising figure. But I don’t remember him being quite this universally enraging last time round.
This time, though, it’s not a spectator sport: everyone has skin in the game. Back when he was elected, it still mostly felt like something happening over there in America. As I reported in those innocent days, the voluble cabbie who drove me from Washington’s Dulles Airport to the Capitol the day after Trump’s election win attributed it to American grocery prices, Ukraine, and the southern border: issues that, back then, all felt relatively abstract from my perspective. One hundred days into the Trump presidency, judging progress so far against these three key issues, only one is a clear win. And if, over the same period, most Brits and Europeans have come to feel personally invested in Trump’s progress, this is because we are — in ways that are themselves bound up in those three policy areas.
In particular, the two out of my DC cabbie’s three retail policy topics where Trump’s success is more ambivalent are so precisely because they have ramifications well beyond the USA — including potentially far-reaching negative ones, among polities that hitherto considered the USA to be an ally. And in turn, this has produced interesting new fractures in the “international Right” that amplified the Trumpian phenomenon and provided its theoretical backing — and whose non-American affiliates now find themselves, at times, in a deeply ambivalent position.
It was this Right, or at least that portion of it that spends a lot of time posting on X, that conjured the “You can just do things” sensibility I noted on election day as broadly associated with Trump. A key element in his mystique, the “just do things” meme frames Trump as a kingly figure, reclaiming executive power that, according to New Right lore, was progressively stripped from the Commander-in-Chief by the “Deep State” and bled away into faceless, structurally Left-wing bureaucracies.
It’s clear enough that undoing this perceived fait accompli of institutional capture, in favour of “just doing things”, is a central project for the Trump administration. His team learned from institutional resistance to their projects 2016-2020 and, ahead of Trump’s 2024 re-election, set out detailed plans for re-tooling the machinery of government such that things would, once again, just be doable.
So has Trump succeeded in Making Things Doable Again? Perhaps the most unambiguous success story on this front, in cabbie terms, is the southern border. Just this week The Times reported from El Paso, which under Biden was a notorious migration flashpoint but where now, as the The Times puts it, “the only migrants crossing were quail, the little birds darting between gaps in the fence”.
Critics denounce the stringent methods Trump has instituted to deliver this result as evidence of his administration’s cruelty. But it’s working at least in the sense of preventing many new migrants from arriving. Last month, according to The Times, US border enforcement intercepted less than 8,000 attempts to cross the border — the lowest figure on record, and a sharp contrast to the Biden administration, which sometimes recorded 8,000 encounters a day. Unsurprising, then, that a recent Fox poll listed border security as Trump’s only net positive approval rating, with 55% of respondents approving of his measures.
What about prices? Here the record is more mixed. Trump claimed in mid-April that the price of oil and groceries is down and “the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS”. CNN disagreed, which is perhaps to be expected, while NBC’s grocery price tracker is equivocal. For ordinary grocery-buying Americans, things don’t seem either markedly better or markedly worse than a year ago.
How about Ukraine? Here, again, the scorecard is ambivalent. There’s been a lot of noise and arguing; several rounds of apparently fruitless talks have been had. There was that notorious spat with Zelensky live on air at the Oval Office. But Trump promised his voters that he would end the Ukraine war “on day one”, and to date that promise has slipped by 99 days and counting, though he later insisted he was only joking about “day one” and has further declared that a deal is “very close”.
“How about Ukraine? Here, again, the scorecard is ambivalent.”
As this has rumbled on, there was also the whole “Houthi bombing group chat” thing. And the US defence Blob has continued its standard manoeuvres with reference to the Middle East, such that the longstanding Trumpian commitment to exiting “forever wars” looks if not hanging in the balance, at least complicated by a range of stakeholder views and variable competence levels internal to the Republican home team.
Only the most swivel-eyed partisan could point to either of these policy clusters and declare them clear wins from my cabbie’s point of view. Nor, indeed, could we claim the same for the follow-on promise to Trump’s pledge to close the southern border: deporting the millions of illegal migrants that have already crossed it, and are now residing in America. Though some efforts have been made — along with some controversial memes — making good on this promise is a task of such magnitude, and such ramifying legal, logistical, and humanitarian complexity, that even the first tentative steps already appear mired in multiple forms of judicial trench warfare.
Amid the partisan mud-slinging this has all produced, it is perhaps unsurprising that even Fox reports Trump now mustering less than majority support among Americans, across every area except border control. Europeans, meanwhile, have seized on and amplified this reported shift in the American electoral mood, with the UK progressive press reporting a “polling plunge” and “Americans, including Republicans, losing faith in Trump”.
But how much of this is just wishful thinking? One of the less often-discussed corollaries of “America First”, among even those Europeans broadly supportive of Trump, is that this means “everyone else a very distant second”. And so it has transpired, over the last 100 days, from every vantage-point except that of MAGA devotees.
Global business, finance, manufacturing, and logistics have been rudely jolted from decades of developing complex, cross-border trade relationships and supply chains by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the subsequent flurry of walk-backs, carve-outs, and equivocations. Many people are materially poorer as a result of these policies. Even those European Right-wingers who welcomed the Trump presidency could be forgiven for wincing at the negative impact, perhaps including on their own pocket, of measures that even Julius Krein, editor of the New Right policy journal American Affairs, described as a “costly mistake”.
As a tool for rebalancing global trade, it’s at best too early to tell whether tariffs will ease my DC cabbie’s cost of living. Is it possible to mitigate the negative effects on American manufacturing of dollar hegemony, while also keeping the political upside of printing the reserve currency? Colour me unconvinced. As for “the USA getting RICH ON TARIFFS”, perhaps the only sense in which this is true is if you define “the USA” as those who benefited from early knowledge of shifts in Trump’s tariff policy to clean up on the stock market.
What about the bigger picture? Is this all just the price we have to pay for dismantling the End of History era? As Krein drily observes, “[s]tructural changes to the ‘international order’ and global economy are needed”, but this is not to help the ordinary American consumer, or even because of meme-powered objections to “the GAE”, but on more grimly realist grounds. As Krein puts it: “the United States occupies a much weaker position than it has in the recent past.” And this reality also drives the most internationally divisive set of radical Trumpian policies: his desire unilaterally to end the rules-based international order America created and dominated for almost a century, along with America’s role as global policeman. That’s what “no more forever wars” means; and in cabbie terms, that’s what it means to end American involvement in Ukraine.
But whatever the ordinary American thinks of dismantling this international order, from a European vantage-point it’s wildly unpopular. The American wing of the online Right’s peanut gallery likes to claim this is because “Europoors” are freeloaders, who prefer to spend their money on welfare for Afghans and locking their citizens up for social media posts. But the reality is that Europe has been generally peaceful since 1945 largely thanks to continent-wide military subservience to America.
Should this end, this raises the possibility of cracks appearing in that peace and unity. In his memoir, the great diplomatic historian George Kennan describes the “abnormal” dominance of America over Europe after the Second World War as a kind of “paternal tutelage”. Kennan observed: “Some day, it appeared to me, this divided Europe, dominated by the military presences of ourselves and the Russians, would have to yield to something more natural — something that did more justice to the true strength and interests of the intermediate European peoples themselves.” But if Kennan thought this “something more natural” should “come into being when the time for it was ripe” that time was, for successive generations of American, yet to arrive.
Until now. But at this point Europe has grown accustomed to its subservience, to an America-led status quo. This is why, so far, Europeans have said a lot and done rather less about re-arming themselves, while Starmer has promised “boots on the ground”, only more recently to prevaricate about how “risky” this would be. More plainly: most of America’s satrapies in Europe remain governed by adherents to the internationalist ideology Trump has set himself to dismantling, and are going through the motions in the hope of inducing their protector to return.
The aggregate result is an ugly mixture of insults and pleading tailor-made for Trumpian recirculation to a domestic audience, as evidence to support established beliefs about European rudeness and ingratitude. And yet even those Brits and European Right-wingers fond of criticising “the GAE” might balk at the pan-European can of diplomatic worms that would be opened by full withdrawal of the American security guarantee.
That can may open itself in time, anyway. For the best way to understand Trump’s role is to ignore the braggadocio and hyperbolic all-caps announcements, and watch his presidency not only through the lens of his promise to “Make America Great Again”, but also what this concedes: the reality Krein observed of relative American weakening. And this, above all, helps make the most sense of Trump’s first 100 days.
This period has seen the clearest wins in those areas where it’s less “America First” than America Only: that is, domestic border control. Where promises to his electorate implicate the world beyond North America, though, things get stickier. It turns out it’s not easily possible unilaterally to re-order the global economy by shouting at it. Wartime diplomacy, too, is a delicate thing. As the leader of a post-hegemonic America in search of a new equilibrium, this Trumpian presidency is less the new multipolar age than the riptide, dragging all in that direction.
As we smaller nations struggle not to drown, we can expect everyone to flail between trying to salvage old ways of thinking and acting and trying to create new ones. Trump sympathisers in geographies beyond the American core should remember that this applies to us, too. The grand-scale ideological coalitions to which we’ve grown accustomed were, to a great extent, artefacts of that globe-spanning American empire. I suspect that as interests fracture, harden, and diversify, we will find the international coalition that amplified Trump’s campaign and cheered his election will not long survive its own moment of triumph.
