Will Trump’s entire presidency be as damaging as his first month?
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
| Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
From blowing up at Zelenskyy to fast-tracking Executive Orders, what can we learn from Trump’s recent behaviour?
Donald Trump’s presidency has barely entered its second month, and the change he has brought about has already been so significant and so rapid that it is hard to imagine how his administration will evolve in the long term.
The substantial changes are, in part, due to the extensive planning done in anticipation of his winning a second term. The 900-page Project 2025 put together by the Heritage Foundation has provided a blueprint for Trump’s far-right conservatism that, combined with the decision to act very fast, has allowed him to already issue more than sixty Executive Orders – catching opponents off-guard.
Looking to the future may be better helped by understanding both Trump’s behaviour and his overall outlook on life, with two recent examples pointing the way. Some commentators see the president as an unpredictable figurehead who is hardly able to direct affairs, but that doesn’t face up to his being the locus of power for now and, in any case, he has plenty of determined advisers who have been waiting years for his second presidency.
The first example of Trump’s behaviour was shown by his reaction to a tragedy that happened just after his inauguration, when an American Airlines flight and a US Army helicopter collided and crashed into the Potomac River close to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. All 67 people on board the two aircraft were killed.
While the cause of the crash is still under investigation, within hours Trump had blamed the diversity-linked hiring policies of previous Democrat administrations, claiming they had lowered personnel standards in air traffic control. A tragedy became an occasion for immediate political point scoring.
More recently, we have seen Trump use social media to promote the new ‘Trump Gaza’. The president shared a bizarre AI-generated video in which the area had been ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population and transformed into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Perhaps most telling is the full-colour representation of the main street, which Trump envisages as being dominated by a 60-foot high golden statue of himself.
Together, these instances point to someone who is comprehensively self-obsessed. He might be seen as an egotist or narcissist but certainly has an element of the solipsist in his make-up as well. He is, in other words, beyond egocentric.
But Trump’s impact on the world stage has to reckon with how the world is already changing, especially the rise of the global oligarchy, with vast power concentrated in the hands of a few hundred super-rich individuals. It’s clear that the president views these people as the true exemplars of success – he has formed a singularly powerful group of them around him.
Most notable among Trump’s circle of favoured oligarchs is Elon Musk, who supported his 2024 election campaign to the tune of $277m and has since been given an unofficial role in government and attended Cabinet meetings and Oval Office press conferences.
The wealth of Musk and two other oligarchs close to Trump, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, extends to $905bn, as US Senator Bernie Sanders reminded us last month. Writing in the Guardian, Sanders pointed out that this is “more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 170 million people”, adding that “since Trump’s election their wealth has grown by $217bn”.
This is in line with the findings in Oxfam’s 2025 Davos Report, which last week reported that while the number of people in poverty has remained near stagnant for the past 35 years, extreme wealth is surging. Four more people become billionaires each week, and the world is now on course to have five trillionaires and well over four thousand billionaires within the next decade.
The rising global oligarchy is not easily mapped with precision. Some members of the super-rich stay well out of the public eye, a few become patrons of the arts and philanthropists, but many others are heavily involved in the use of political power.
Though a degree of oligarchic power is evident in many countries worldwide, there are particular concentrations in a handful of nations, particularly Russia, China, India and the US – where Mark Twain’s quip about having “the best government money can buy” still stands.
Between Trump’s personality and his billionaire associates, the best guide to the next four years is to simply assume that ‘self’ and ‘wealth’ will be the president’s constant driving forces. It is not a happy prospect and will require persistent opposition, combined with repeated expressions of more positive ways forward. But is there anything that might limit him as he works to remake the US?
The first answer might just be his very associates. Many incredibly wealthy people are used to getting their own way, which could easily lead to disagreements sufficient to unbalance the administration. That will be much to the dislike and anger of Trump, who may well end up causing great disruption as he finds and disposes of the scapegoats who can keep the blame well away from him.
Then there is internal opposition stemming from numerous legal challenges that are already being mounted, many of them in recognition of the mass use of executive orders, which may undermine the authority of Article II of the US constitution.
Trump is also likely to run into problems due to the huge and vast array of experience and knowledge that will have been lost as a result of his administration’s decision to fire many thousands of federal employees from the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Forestry Service, National Parks, US AID and elsewhere. This is eventually likely to lead to numerous mistakes and delays right across government.
Then there is the matter of US foreign policy, where the ‘Trump Gaza’ fiasco is the clearest possible indicator that Trump just does not have a clue how many people feel. Beyond that, though, is the question of Trump’s view of Vladimir Putin. It is becoming uncomfortably clear that either the Russian president has some kind of hold over Trump or else Trump really does see him as simply another very powerful and hugely rich person just like himself – a kindred spirit in a new oligarchic world of disorder.
This leads to one other question: how long will Trump even be in the White House? A clue may come from Friday’s notorious press conference with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. People across the world will have seen clips of Zelenskyy being hung out to dry by Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, but watching the entire 45-minute video, not just the blow-up, reveals a rather different element.
The conference was largely good-natured for the first 35 minutes, with Zelenskyy comfortably holding his own and Trump even praising Ukraine while doing his usual trick of claiming to be the greatest American since George Washington. It is only at the end that Vance moves in aggressively on Zelensky in a manner seemingly designed to get Trump to lose his cool.
Perhaps it is Trump, not Zelensky, who should be worried when reflecting on the experience – and who should watch his back. It may have been on the last day of February but Vance’s behaviour was not too far from the Ides of March.
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
