How far does Donald Trump want to go? The question is not rhetorical, it is urgent. Nearly a year and a half into his second term, his presidency looks less and less like a flawed democracy and more and more like a grotesque caricature of autocracy. Meanwhile, the planet slips to the edge of the abyss. Since the beginning of his mandate he has ignited at least one war (Iran) and unleashed numerous raids on sovereign countries (starting with Venezuela). It doesn’t mediate, it doesn’t negotiate: it affects. Is there anyone who can stop him? There are signs of intolerance, such as the No Kings movement which saw hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marching through American streets. But this type of demonstration seems to have the opposite effect.
The warlords, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, seem to know no limits. One leads the superpower, the other acts as if it were a branch of it. Relations with European allies have deteriorated, corroded day after day. Israel, in fact, has become the fifty-first American state, the most powerful and aggressive. Not by law, but by practice.
Trump’s second term has a precise characteristic: arrogance, wrote the Wall Street Journal. It is no longer the improvisation of the first round, it is a method, the political program of Make America Great Again, whose adherents, however, are starting to ask themselves some doubts about the self-defeating effects of this type of policy. Another blow was struck by the Supreme Court, rejecting most of its customs duties that had infected the world. In the elephant party, however, we are almost completely empty. He is supported by a cabinet of loyalists and a Republican Congress reduced to a claque.
«Trump is convinced – and here is the point – that he can do everything. Really everything. With a country, with a skyline, with the White House itself”, reports the New York Times. He stormed the White House and leveled the East Wing and Jackie Kennedy’s backyard before anyone could even see a blueprint. He decides, he breaks down, he remakes. As in the days of his construction sites, only here the concrete is the symbol of American power, of the democracy celebrated by Tocqueville.
He blows up boats suspected of drug trafficking. He took Nicolás Maduro directly from his bedroom and then let his deputy be in charge, because another of the problems is that he never finishes “the job”, leaving behind rubble, victims and tragedies, as in Gaza. He talks about plundering Greenland, about attacking Cuba with the enthusiasm of a conqueror out of time.
“I really believe I will have the honor of taking Cuba,” he said. «It’s a great honor. Take Cuba somehow. Let him free her or conquer her. I think I can do whatever I want with it, do you want to know the truth?”
You can do anything. This is the refrain.
During a cabinet meeting last Thursday, he joked: “I could go to Venezuela and run against Delcy,” referring to Delcy Rodríguez.
On Monday he threatened Iran: if it does not submit, “we will continue to bomb it relentlessly.” But in America doubts are being raised about a totally wrong war. He is furious with NATO, guilty of not obeying enough. «If you don’t, we will remember. Remember this in a few months. Never forget.” The language is that of blackmail, not of diplomacy.
An oddity that is not an oddity is also striking: Trump has made the September 11 slogan his own, “never forget”. «The same man who, as the Twin Towers fell, observed that one of his buildings, 40 Wall Street, had become the tallest in Lower Manhattan. Even then, he counted the plans,” the New York Times always reports.
Yet there was a time when Trump said the opposite. That the war was a waste. That it was not necessary to overthrow regimes that are unknown. After defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016, he promised to stop these adventures. He declared that he would end the conflict in Ukraine in one day by talking to his friend Putin. He has stopped the massacre in Gaza, although he has no intention of continuing the peace process by ensuring reconstruction for the benefit of Gazans exhausted under pressure from Israel.
The new thirst for global violence finds faithful shores. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, for example, has already demonstrated his idea of the army: he blocked the promotion of two black officers and two women to the rank of general, the American press reports. The result is a promotion list made up mostly of white men, the profile preferred by a supremacist who wants uniform and obedient power.
«When Trump was a real estate developer, we laughed at his obsession with putting his name everywhere. It was American folklore. Today it’s no longer funny”, comments the New York newspaper. «It’s something darker. He imposed his name on the Kennedy Center. He deleted “USA” from the Institute for Peace, turning it into the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. It is branding warships, public buildings, even memory.”
A huge banner with his face hangs from the Department of Justice. He attempted to rename Washington Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after him. He plans a monumental arch in front of the Lincoln Memorial, so large that it interferes with air routes. It’s not aesthetic: it’s a symbolic occupation.
Trump tries to impose the bad taste of his residence in Mar a lago, in Florida, everywhere. His art commission approved a 24-karat gold commemorative coin featuring his face, hunched over a desk, fists clenched. King Midas, but without irony. Now he’s pushing the Treasury Department to mint a dollar coin with his face, like a postmodern Caesar.
And that’s not enough. In his quest for omnipresence, he decided to leave his signature on banknotes. Treasury announced he will be the first sitting president to do so. It’s not a technical detail: it’s a political gesture. It means removing the treasurer’s signature and replacing it with your own. A gesture of appropriation.
Treasurer Brandon Beach spoke of a “historical footprint,” of a “golden age rebirth.” Words that sound out of date while military operations cause prices to rise and markets to collapse. According to The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump is “unfit for office”, while CNN calls him a “serial liar”. Two opinions with different origins, but they agree in outlining an unreliable and controversial leader. Even the conservative Fox News broadcaster, which was generally supportive, deemed him “reckless and undisciplined.”
And so, while everyone tries to understand this more aggressive Trump, the truth is simpler and more uncomfortable: it is always the same, the one from The Apprentice, from the world of Hollywood, the Times glosses.
Only now it has a bigger stage.
And real weapons.
