The Democratic Party’s blowout in the midterm elections has generated a number of obituaries for Trumpism. Trump himself still has two years left in his term, but the press has begun to treat him, too, as a “dead man walking.” At 80 years old, he has no political future after the next 24 months, unless you count his lifetime appointment to the Board of Peace. This explains his fixation on legacy, whether he measures that in spurious peace deals, catastrophic attempts to effect regime change, or grandiose building projects around Washington, DC.
Trumpism is another matter. It’s a personality cult, so it’s hard to imagine that it will survive for long without Trump at its helm. On the other hand, Stalinism remains powerful in Russia today, despite the unimaginable horrors associated with his reign. And Fujimorism is alive and well in Peru, despite the conviction, jailing, and death of right-wing founder Alberto Fujimori. In July, his daughter Keiko became president of the country after several unsuccessful bids for the office. Eric, Donald Jr., and Barron are probably scanning the relevant Wikipedia pages on Peru to nurture their own dreams.
Trump has comparable ambitions to cast a long shadow over his country’s future. And that’s why the next two years will be perilous ones. It would be bad enough if the president focused only on expanding his personal wealth at the expense of the republic or on remodeling Washington DC at the expense of its residents. Infinitely worse are the consequences of Trump trying to cement his legacy by forcing a punishing peace upon Ukraine, turning Iran into a huge crater, and/or triggering regime change in Cuba.
Along the way, Trump will defy Congress by continuing to prop up the fossil fuel sector and deport as many people as possible from the United States. Together with his newly minted chief-of-staff Stephen Miller, the president will attempt to destroy what little faith American citizens still have in the idea of government by gutting agencies, eviscerating critical government services, and putting the least competent people into key roles (I’m looking at you, Pete Hegseth).
In matters big and small, Trump will spend the next two years acting like a derelict renter who has decided to trash his place of residence out of anger, pettiness, and vengeance. Congress and the lower courts will try to do what they can to prevent him from burning down the house. But Trump, an accomplished pyromaniac, is holding all the matches. His opponents, alas, deploy only the thinnest of firehoses.
Can the voters who communicated their views so forcefully in the midterms do anything in the next two years to limit the damage and prepare for regime change at home in 2028? Let’s first look at the potential for mayhem in Trump’s foreign policy.
Iran and Cuba
It’s no surprise that an uber-narcissist like Donald Trump has an ego problem. He has pursued foreign policy goals largely to demonstrate that he can cut through the Gordian knots that bedeviled earlier presidents. Sure, he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. But he also has a long-shot desire to top the list of America’s best presidents.
In his first term, Trump surprised everyone by reaching out to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Addressing North Korea’s nuclear program promised no economic dividends for himself or his family. Sitting down with an authoritarian leader of a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world won him no points with his Republican allies, given that the country lacks oil and lucrative investment opportunities.
No, the reason Trump zeroed in on North Korea was because his predecessors—particularly Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—had failed to prevent North Korea from going nuclear. Resolving that particular geopolitical problem was equivalent to purchasing a distressed property that had cycled through several unsuccessful owners and turning it into a luxury hotel.
Trump’s fixation on Iran follows a similar script. One of his first acts in office in 2017 was to rip up Obama’s deal with Iran and promise a more effective substitute. Trump thought that Benjamin Netanyahu was offering a deal of a lifetime earlier this year to do Obama one better by removing the Iranian regime from power.
But the resulting war has only made matters worse by revealing U.S. military and geopolitical weaknesses. Suddenly, it turned out, the Pentagon didn’t have enough weapons to get the job done or keep the energy flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. Since power in an age of deterrence relies heavily on perception, the optics of these U.S. failures are very bad indeed.
This kind of impulsive, hubristic decision—to wage war on a significant military power that can quickly restrict the flow of fossil fuels—has marked Trump’s style from the beginning. This time, however, it cost his party its control of Congress.
Trump continues to vacillate between a desire to visit retribution upon Iran and the hope of achieving a big peace deal that would justify the war. The administration has readied an attack plan that “would likely go beyond efforts to simply ‘mow the lawn’ or maintain the status quo by striking radars, launchers and other Iranian assets that can be quickly reconstituted,” reports CNN. Although details of the plan have not leaked to the press, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), who called it “insane” after receiving a confidential Pentagon briefing.
Since the election, however, Trump has waxed more conciliatory. He has touted the current negotiations with Tehran—much as he has played up negotiations in the past—and has promised to hold off on any strikes as long as Iran is committed to making progress.
But Trump faces some structural impediments. He is not a patient man, and diplomacy requires patience. To achieve a deal, he also needs able negotiators. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff simply don’t know enough to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. Finally, Trump is desperate to reduce gas prices, and Iran knows that it has the U.S. president over a barrel (literally).
Trump hates one thing above all: losing. He doesn’t want to lose at war or at peace. To avoid either result, he might prefer to spend the next two years in a state of sporadic conflict with Iran rather than accept a losing verdict.
Trump’s fixation on winning, until he took on Iran, explained his preference for grabbing at low hanging fruit. He has claimed to resolve wars that weren’t even ongoing, like the conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia. He conducted a raid to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro—against a relatively weak military—and didn’t bother with the heavier lift of regime change. He has bullied weaker parties—Ukraine, Greenland, Colombia—in order to get his way.
With stronger adversaries, like Russia and China, Trump has rolled out the red carpet. His general approach has been to punch down and toady up.
This approach may impel him to turn next to Cuba, where he has combined an economic pressure campaign (tightening an energy blockade) with a Venezuela-like cultivation of an insider (Raul Castro’s grandson, nicknamed “the Crab”). Since neither of these strategies has panned out, the administration has turned to a perverse form of crowd-sourcing.
Last month, the CIA posted on social media a Spanish-language solicitation to snitches along with a quote from Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba — now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.”
Here, too, Trump hopes to trump his predecessors. The Bay of Pigs debacle hung over the presidency of John F. Kennedy much as the Iran hostage crisis doomed the presidency of Jimmy Carter. By tackling these intractable conflicts in his last two years, Trump hopes he can one-two punch his way above both Carter and Kennedy in the presidential rankings. Good luck with that.
Then There’s Ukraine
Among the countries that have disappointed Trump, none ranks higher than Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to serve as Trump’s servant by digging up dirt on Joe Biden’s son or promote the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections. Zelensky then had the temerity to challenge Trump’s tenuous grasp on modern history in a public appearance at the White House. And those pesky Ukrainians continue to refuse to acknowledge that Russia is bigger and stronger—and accordingly surrender their land and sovereignty to the bully next door.
Democratic control of Congress might jumpstart an effort to restore aid to Ukraine. In the meantime, Trump will no doubt continue to believe that his personal touch—and relationship with his soulmate, Vladimir Putin—will produce a “big, beautiful” deal on European security, including an agreement on Ukraine. Downgrading NATO and welcoming Russia back into the European fold is only the latest Trump effort to brown-nose Putin back to the negotiating table.
It doesn’t seem to matter to Trump that no one shares his opinion on such a deal. The Ukrainians have not been part of negotiating the terms. The Europeans don’t seem to know the details. Even the Russians have expressed some skepticism.
The talks this week in Abu Dhabi focused instead on small, grubby deals—more micro-ceasefires like the one secured for Oleshky, another agreement covering grain shipments out of the Black Sea—but managed only to achieve a prisoner exchange. No grander agreements are likely when Putin believes that he can press his air superiority and bomb Ukraine into submission. Ukraine, meanwhile, has blocked Russia’s advance on the ground and inflicted over 50,000 casualties in October. It is truly a punishing stalemate.
Trump has a couple months before the new Congress takes office and pushes U.S. policy back in the direction of Ukraine. But because Putin hopes to use General Winter to subdue Ukraine, Trump is basically shouting into the wind. Just as Henry Kissinger turned an opening with China into personal profit, Trump salivates at what he could accomplish by ending the war in Ukraine and midwifing a raft of corrupt business deals with Putin and his family of oligarchs. He’s willing to give Putin just about anything to make this wish come true. But the Kremlin is not a Make-a-Wish foundation, far from it.
Distracting Trump
In action movies, when a crazy shooter is holed up in a difficult-to-reach spot, the police will deploy a dangerous tactic. They’ll pop up in open areas to draw the shooter’s fire. By distracting his attention in the front, other law enforcement officers can sneak around back to catch him unawares.
Trump is obsessed with vengeance. So, over the next two years, it will be necessary to distract his attention from the big, terrible things he could do by drawing his ire with pesky lawsuits, investigations, and civic challenges. That’s what Congress can do, and Democrats might find common cause with enough Republicans to infuriate the president in this fashion.
It’s not so much that such actions can actually tie his hands. Rather, they will rely on Trump’s capacity for tying his own hands. He just can’t resist lashing out at his enemies.
Democracy, after all, is not just about voting. It’s about the power of institutions and processes to limit autocratic actions. Trump has proven that he has no problem ignoring such institutions and processes. But he never backs down from a fight.
So, in the end, democratic actors here can help limit the amount of damage Trump does on the international stage by absorbing his anger and his energies on the home front. It won’t be pretty. Trump, close to his political expiration date, can still be very dangerous. But luring the president into a congressional mud fight will be a lot better than cleaning up the messes he wants to inflict on the rest of the world.
The even more important task is to go after Trumpism. While Trump focuses on wrestling his opponents—in Congress, in lawsuits, in public pissing contests—everyone else can work behind the scenes on rebuilding democracy. At the state and local level, where Trump allies suffered huge losses, politicians and average citizens of various political stripes can spend the next two years strengthening the institutions that Trump has tried to destroy. Only a true rebirth of democracy can send Trumpism into an irreversible death spiral.