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Donald Trump retains the ability to shock; the day he loses that, he will, like the biblical Samson—another man notable for his coiffure—lose his power entirely. When Trump started his second term as president a year ago, however, I doubted whether there was much more to learn about how his mind works. Even before he’d entered politics, Trump was overexposed. Since then, he has become the most scrutinized person in the world. His tendencies and foibles are well known to voters, politicians, and world leaders.
Yet one of his most entrenched patterns has provided perhaps the biggest surprise of the past year. During his first term, Trump was defined by his tendency to back down in any negotiation or fight: As I put it in a May 2018 article, he almost always folded, agreeing to concessions whether he was negotiating on trade with China or a budget resolution with Senate Democrats. More recently, though, he’s been following through, no matter how aberrant his ideas. The exact reason for this is difficult to pin down, though it likely includes the fact that he has more experience under his belt, fewer prudent voices in his ear, and a lame duck’s liberation from having to worry about reelection. In any case, his new determination is forcing countries around the world to reassess how to deal with him.
Nowhere is this so clear right now as with Trump’s continued pressure to acquire Greenland. In the wee hours of this morning, Trump went on a social-media spree, posting (among other things) an illustration of himself, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and J. D. Vance planting a U.S. flag in Greenland. European leaders seem to slowly be coming to the conclusion that this isn’t just a feint.
When the president began making noise about taking the Danish territory early last year, many observers were baffled but not necessarily all that concerned—an impulse reinforced when the matter receded from Trump’s attention in the months that followed. They also had a long track record to draw on. In May 2017, I wrote that “foreign leaders have realized Trump is a pushover.” This held true for adversaries (China) and allies (Taiwan, NATO) alike throughout his first term.
It was especially true for rivals such as Russia and North Korea. Trump talked a fierce game—promising “fire and fury” for Pyongyang, for example—but his counterparts understood that despite his insistence that he was a master dealmaker, all they needed was to get him to a negotiating table. “Faced with a tough decision, the president has consistently blinked, giving in to his opponents,” I wrote in my 2018 article.
This pattern was clear enough that when Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, even his allies were dismissive. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official told The Washington Post in November 2020. “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20.” That was exactly what he was doing, however ham-handedly. The effort to subvert the election was also a warning of things to come.
Even so, Trump’s return to office initially suggested more of the same tendency to back down. This past May (why is it always May?), I wrote about Wall Street’s “TACO trade”—short for “Trump Always Chickens Out”—in which stock traders bet against the president following through on tariff threats and then profiting when he folded and markets went up. And they were right, to an extent: Although Trump did impose extensive tariffs, the eventual levels were much lower than initially announced, thanks in part to lobbying by foreign governments. Trump’s resolve remains weak in some areas; he’s swung wildly on Ukraine and Russia, his position shifting depending on whom he last spoke to.
But in other ways, the pattern has started to break. Just ask Nicolás Maduro, who reportedly rejected negotiated exile in Turkey, perhaps wagering that Trump would never actually launch a military strike on Venezuela to capture him. It was a bad bet. Now Trump seems energized and has turned his attention to Greenland. U.S. allies—or people who until recently thought of themselves as allies—are scrambling to figure out how to react. Can they draw things out long enough for Trump to lose interest? Can they appease him somehow? Or do they need, as Eliot Cohen argued in The Atlantic this past weekend, to show a willingness to resist the United States militarily?
Trump is acting emboldened domestically too. He is once again threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops to Minneapolis, where he seems determined to immiserate the entire city. Before his first term, Trump had threatened to prosecute political rivals, but he was stymied by his aides during his presidency. This time, he’s going through with it. In a New Yorker profile this week of Representative LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat charged with assault for a fracas at an ICE facility, Representative Lateefah Simon, a California Democrat, said, “Typically, we would say, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to scare her.’” But this is much more than fearmongering: “They’re actively litigating this case,” Simon noted. (McIver has pleaded not guilty.)
Signs of new resistance have started to emerge in parallel with Trump’s newfound resolve. Republican members of Congress have begun pushing back—far less than one would expect even in a normal presidency, but more than in Trump’s previous term or in the early days of this one. They were able to force his hand on the Epstein files, though whether they have the courage to hold him to account for slow-walking the files’ release is not yet clear. As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote yesterday, Congress will need to do much more to halt any Greenland fiasco. Foreign leaders will need to take a harder line too. When Trump was a pushover, it was more understandable, if not wiser, to wonder, What is the downside of humoring him? Now the downsides are clear and dangerous.
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- What happened to Pam Bondi?
- Trump Exhaustion Syndrome
- Anne Applebaum: Trump’s letter to Norway should be the last straw.
Today’s News
- President Trump’s renewed threats to seize Greenland drew sharp criticism from European and Canadian leaders at the Davos conference. U.S. officials have said that there are no imminent Pentagon plans for military action; Denmark sent more troops to Greenland yesterday, and the island’s prime minister said that a U.S. attack cannot be fully ruled out.
- Congress unveiled a bipartisan funding bill to avert a January 30 shutdown; the package omits the ICE restrictions many Democrats demanded and sets up a tense House vote, expected tomorrow, amid backlash over ICE enforcement and a fatal shooting in Minneapolis.
- Federal prosecutors subpoenaed at least five Minnesota Democrats, including Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Attorney General Keith Ellison, expanding a Justice Department probe as part of an investigation into the alleged obstruction of federal officers during an ICE crackdown in the state.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores stories that reveal the surprising relationship between happiness and intelligence.
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Evening Read
Trump’s Golden Age of Culture Seems Pretty Sad So Far
By Spencer Kornhaber
Trump’s return to office was widely portrayed as christening a new definition of chic. Young voters and voters of color had swung in his direction, thanks partly to the influence of podcasts, livestreams, and other media formats that now compete with traditional news outlets and cultural institutions. The attendance of tech barons, comedians, and content creators at Trump’s inauguration indicated that the so-called alternative media was now the mainstream—and openly pro-Trump. Its touchstones appeared to be recently booming phenomena including country music, TikTok tradwives, and mixed martial arts.
Trump quickly began consolidating his cultural power by focusing on the old media that hadn’t fallen in line.
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- The levers Trump isn’t using
- Tom Nichols: The military is being forced to plan for an unthinkable betrayal.
- Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s attack on democracy is faltering.
Culture Break
Read. Exercise isn’t just a break from sitting at a desk—it also acts as an extra twist to open the tap of creativity, Bonnie Tsui argues.
Explore. “Looksmaxxing” reveals the depth of the crisis facing young men, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post What We Learned About Trump This Past Year appeared first on The Atlantic.
