The world has a verdict on 100 days of Trump 2.0: Wow, what a loser

There may be no way back to respectability for a supposedly major nation, let alone a global power, after “Vladimir, STOP!” Amid the daily storm of sewage and plague of frogs that is Donald Trump’s second administration, it’s difficult to say that anything beggars belief. But that the duly elected president would make such a plea to another world leader in public — if the third-rate social media platform he personally owns counts as public space — and would perceive such an action as manly and strong, as he clearly does, is inconceivably far beyond fiction, pathos or parody. 

Many people with my approximate job description have been trying to take the measure of the Trump 2.0 presidency after its first 100 days. That feels like one fallacious premise piled on top of another: First of all, it’s an entirely arbitrary benchmark, one that doesn’t strongly correlate with how a president will be remembered; second, the Trump presidency can only be measured in days or hours, sometimes in minutes. Whatever premise appears valid about Trumpism today will look stupid tomorrow; policies are proposed, enforced, insisted upon in court with gratuitous lies and then partly recanted or fully reversed. 

At risk of immediately being proven wrong, I will suggest that this past week was when the penny at least temporarily or conditionally dropped for Donald Trump: While the rest of the world views him as dangerous, it does not take him seriously. Trump has projected his fatuous fantasies about global domination onto the wall of world opinion — whether it’s more like Plato’s cave or the light show announcing the opening of a mall in suburban Indianapolis is a matter of individual judgment — while at the same time backing away from all forms of international engagement and obligation. The contradictions are embarrassing, abundant and obvious to everyone. As we supposedly measure these things, Trump is the most powerful individual in the world. He is also a massive global embarrassment, the glaring flaw that proves the entire Rube Goldberg machine is no longer working.

As you may have noticed, Vladimir Putin did not “STOP,” and Trump justifiably perceived last week’s Russian missile attacks on Kyiv as a personal insult. There may be only one subject on which Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy agree: Trump is an obstacle they must navigate around, but on critical issues of war and peace he is useless. Far too much smart-people thought has been expended on the relationship between Trump and Putin; I’ve never found it mysterious and see no need for conspiracy theory. Trump thinks Putin is awesome, longs to be his friend, and aspires to his model of pseudo-democratic state capture. Putin, who is shrewd, cynical, clever and possessed of a relatively consistent worldview, views Trump as an intermittently useful symbol (or symptom) of America’s global decline. He’s not wrong.

As for Trump’s bizarre and self-destructive fixation on Canada as a potential 51st state — what can we say? It’s beyond inexplicable at this point. I suspect this specific deranged fantasy, in fact, is a key factor in the collective global decision not to take him seriously. This goes beyond ideological questions of left and right, or even twinges of sympathy with the MAGA anti-immigrant agenda, which can be found all over the world. No one with a rudimentary grasp of how nation-states function in the 21st century could possibly entertain this notion.

Yes, in Trump’s second term he is surrounded by craven, servile yes-men who have convinced themselves that his ego can bend the real world to its purposes, but still: Someone, surely, has tried to tell him that a) this will never happen, largely because Canadian identity is inextricably involved with not being American; and b) his attacks have fueled an unprecedented upsurge of Canadian nationalism (even among Quebec separatists!), and have, by all appearances, rescued the Liberal Party and new Prime Minister Mark Carney from electoral defeat.

Some of the president’s yes-men, it would seem, have convinced him to stop talking (at least for now) about his extemporaneous proposal, some weeks back, to expel all the surviving residents of Gaza and redevelop the territory as a Mediterranean beach resort. That one belongs in a category of its own and given the unbearable, unforgivable and entirely avoidable human tragedy involved, offers no opportunity for humor. It is certainly absurd, but could be read as possessing a sinister strategic dimension: The likely reconquest and colonization of Gaza by Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal regime seems almost normal, or at least more closely aligned to reality, in comparison. 

Trump’s unrealizable fantasies about Canada and Gaza have cast his long-running Greenland fantasy in a new light. Superficially, that one is a whole lot more plausible. First of all, there is historical precedent, since several previous U.S. presidents have coveted the giant Arctic island for various reasons. Secondly, if Trump actually summoned up the will to order a military invasion of Greenland, no one could stop him. Sure, it would be a major diplomatic crisis. The U.N. and the European Union would condemn the seizure as illegitimate and demand negotiations; stern essays would be written casting America as a pariah state no better than Russia. Denmark would break off relations with the U.S. and insist, with a certain amount of hedging, that this was an act of war, sort of. But that, in fact, would be that.

Don’t get me wrong: I make no predictions about what this person will or will not do. But with Trump’s Maple Leaf delusion blowing up in his face, his incoherent tariff policies torpedoing the global economy and his purported deal-making brilliance accomplishing less than nothing in Ukraine, he looks nothing like an all-powerful stable-genius conqueror-slash-peacemaker on the world stage. He looks like a hapless loser. 

To be sure, Trump is an exceedingly dangerous loser, one with immense military and economic power under his theoretical control. In his wounded pride, blundering incompetence and massive ignorance he will certainly do more damage, perhaps immense damage, to the world and many of its people. Canada will never be the 51st state and there will never be a Trump Tower in Gaza. Greenland is still sitting there. 

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But the lesson for Americans couldn’t be clearer, even at a moment when the domestic carnage inflicted by the Trump regime feels limitless and irreparable. To everyone else in the world, his first 100 days have been a flatulent self-own, and an unexpected boon for normie centrist politicians all over the democratic map who seemed, only months ago, to be facing Armageddon. Right-wing populists like Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen have begun to back away in embarrassment: Sorry, new phone. Donald who? 

The fact that this country elected Donald Trump, not once but twice, speaks to deep and fundamental problems. (News flash!) But take half a step back and look at the guy as several billion other people do: He’s a lame-duck president with record-low levels of support, and a complete failure as a world leader. The sooner we begin treating him that way, the better.