That does not mean that Trump is finished. Far from it. The United States remains the richest and most heavily armed nation on Earth. And Trump is contemptuous of the law and indulged by a supine Republican Congress.
But though he can still do enormous damage with his demented lashing out, the power and the appearance of power that he still has are two different things. One is all about image; the other about fact.
So let’s deal with some facts.
With more than two years of his second term remaining, Trump increasingly looks less like the irresistible strongman he pretended to be and more like an aging bully—in fact, a loser—discovering that the other boys in the schoolyard, in other words, other international leaders, have figured him out and no longer care about what he says or does.
They know he’s fake.
The war with Iran may turn out to be the moment that historians say broke the spell. I think it probably is.
After his operations in Venezuela, Trump apparently imagined the same could be done in Iran. A sort of made-for-television triumph could be repeated: bomb the place, decapitate the regime, declare victory, and go home.
Good luck with that.
He should have checked the history books on how other people have fared for the last 6,000 years in attacking the Persian Empire. Whether it’s an Islamic state or otherwise, it’s still the Persian Empire: 90 million people in an enormous and powerful country, most recently enriched by oil.
Instead of this easy war he was going to win, and pound his chest and say how great we are, six months later Iran not only is controlled by a new generation of hardliners that have survived and make the old leadership look like a Sunday school picnic. They survived the Israeli bombardment and now demand not only concessions, but clearly, clearly have won the war.
We have been beaten again.
Yes. This is the pattern we started in Vietnam that continued—the thing Trump and Vance railed against. We’re going to win wars now. Department of Defense is called the Department of War. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We just lost.
Ordinary Iranians have suffered terribly. The people we were going to liberate are in worse shape than ever. But the regime remains triumphant.
The war has not ended. The war continues.
Worse, America burned through a staggering quantity of billions and billions and billions of dollars’ worth of munitions losing this war. Iran can now control shipping with the launch of cheap drones and cheap missiles. America responds with a diminishing number of interceptors costing millions.
And those interceptors could be better used in Ukraine, which we have stripped through Trump’s perfidy and treasonous accountability to no one, siding with Vladimir Putin by not supplying the Ukrainians fighting on against Russia.
This is the problem with confusing swagger with strategy.
Trump spent years sneering at alliances as though they were protection rackets run by stupid Americans for ungrateful foreigners, I guess projecting his own mobster character onto world affairs.
He treated Putin with the deference normally reserved to a beloved ally while insulting our actual allies.
He threatened Greenland.
He belittled Canada.
He suddenly curtailed military exercises with South Korea while praising the murderous North Korean dictatorship as, quote, “unthreatening and respectful.”
Imagine treating Kim Jong-un more politely than the prime minister of Canada. And then imagine calling this America First.
It’s America last.
And that’s where we find ourselves after his leadership.
Trump’s bullying of allies has accomplished something American enemies spent decades fruitlessly trying to achieve. Trump’s activism of war and bullying has persuaded our friends that they need protection from US.
Europe’s growing desire for military independence is no longer merely sensible burden-sharing facing Putin’s aggression. It is an insurance policy against American unreliability.
The Gulf states have learned the same lesson. They hosted American bases. They gave Trump an airplane. They bought American weapons. They aligned themselves with American policy, while, by the way, also helping Hamas and all these other terrorist organizations. They played both sides. Have no sympathy for the Gulf States.
But now they find themselves on the receiving end of Iranian retaliation from a war they neither started nor wanted, and that they know as well as the Iranians know the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, have lost, while squandering our military ability to respond and to help Ukraine or to stand between China and Taiwan.
Canada has learned this lesson too.
Prime Minister Mark Carney finally walked away from trade negotiations rather than submit to another round of Trump’s last-minute demands and humiliations.
Because everyone now understands: every concession becomes proof that you can be bullied into making another one.
And people are saying enough.
They know Trump is a loser, an embattled loser.
This is how an empire of influence disappears.
You’re living through it.
Not necessarily because somebody defeats it militarily, although we’ve just been defeated by Iran. Make no mistake, they’re in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and all Middle Eastern policy. Israel knows it.
But because nobody trusts the power anymore.
Meanwhile, Trump has lost something equally important at home: his remarkable instinct for sensing what his own followers wanted.
Whatever else you think of Donald Trump—and if you’ve been watching me online, you know what I think of him—his political genius, yes, was real. Yes, it was real.
In 2016, he understood things professional Republicans did not and professional Democrats did not.
He understood that most Americans were furious about an open border. He understood that most Americans, left and right, whether they admitted it or not, did not think it was a good idea to have untold numbers of immigrants coming into the country illegally.
He sensed anger over, quote, “free trade.” He sensed anger over endless wars and economic abandonment.
He sensed that ordinary Americans thought both parties had stopped listening to them.
This was real.
His rallies were gigantic focus groups. Trump would throw out a line, watch the crowd, and keep whatever produced a roar.
That’s what he was good at.
But the man who once fed on crowds now lives increasingly inside a bubble of isolation, surrounded by aides who tell him what he wants to hear.
Everybody who might give him a little wisdom, a little real advice, has been fired or discounted or left or had their security cut once they were in the first administration and didn’t go along with everything he said.
He has a young woman who tails him around telling him nice things he wants to hear.
Consider the data centers.
Americans across the political spectrum increasingly hate these gigantic AI centers appearing on our doorstep, in our community, sucking up our power, increasing our electricity prices, water use, environmental damage, and the transformation of our own towns into wastelands.
And Donald Trump, the greatest populist political salesman of our era, somehow has missed this.
Why?
Maybe because people whispering in his ear now include tech billionaires and investors who need those data centers and have bought their way into Trump’s heart.
The irony is almost too perfect.
AI companies are constructing buildings capable of storing unimaginable quantities of information, while this president, this know-it-all populist promoting them, has lost touch with the public and doesn’t get the most basic information on the way the rest of us feel.
The same isolation explains his bafflement over Iran, inflation, and affordability.
Trump was elected twice by people sick of endless wars and inflation.
Americans complain about gasoline prices, and he says he doesn’t think about gasoline prices. Voters complain about affordability and he calls affordability a hoax.
Remember, he called COVID a hoax, too.
How did that work out?
The old Trump would have heard the crowd getting restless and changed the subject.
The new Trump, isolated, alone, embattled, having lost a war that he knows he’s lost, thinks the crowd is wrong.
America’s wrong, and he’s right.
And all this is happening while the world itself enters the most dangerous period that I, as a 74-year-old person who’s been involved with politics since my teens, when I was involved with the rise of the religious right and have changed sides, but have nevertheless remained a keen observer of what’s going on, know what the Europeans increasingly know, and that is they’re fearing a third world war.
Russia has discarded even the pretense of respecting international rules.
China speaks about Taiwan as if it already owns it.
Countries from Japan to South Korea to Poland to Germany are reconsidering nuclear weapons or nuclear deployments.
France is increasing its nuclear arsenal.
The post-war international order was flawed. It didn’t work. We lied. We were hypocrites. We were stupid. We did half-assed jobs all over the world.
Nevertheless, it was real enough to give at least a semblance of order and peace.
Now, might makes right.
Putin believes that he can do what he wants. Xi understands it. And Trump, with his threats against Iran, Oman, Canada, Greenland, and even American allies, has helped legitimize the idea that you can thrash around on the world stage and get away with it.
There is a surprising part to this you may not have thought of, and I’d like to share it with you.
The people of the world—that’s you and me, ordinary people, not the leaders—do not seem to want this world of chaos and bullying.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but there was a huge international survey recently of more than 36,000 people across 34 countries, and it found that 55% of us support international cooperation, even when it requires some compromise of our own national interests, compared with only 20% who are opposed.
More than 70% of us want government cooperation on human rights and climate change, AI, cybersecurity, and humanitarian aid.
Eighty percent in this huge survey support a global system aimed not at merely preventing war, but at promoting human dignity and combating poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy.
And this matters because Trumpism, Putinism, and these other nationalist movements all depend on the same dreary lie.
And that lie is that all human beings naturally want to divide themselves permanently into us and them.
But this international study of our actual feelings tells us the opposite story.
We are not as stupid, greedy, deliriously self-involved as our leaders.
Trump, Putin, Xi—they’re all cut from the same material, as are these idiots in the Middle East that put all their trust in war and our protection in places that have trampled human rights, and now we turn around and bite them.
And they get nothing in return for giving the president a jet and a plane, except drones and missile attacks from Iran that we’ve stirred up like a hornet’s nest.
Apparently, most of us don’t get the Trump message, and that is that he’s a genius.
Even more interestingly, people actively involved in our own communities and connected with neighbors across religious and ethnic lines are dramatically more likely to support international cooperation.
There is a lesson here, maybe bigger than Trump.
It’s worth paying attention to if you’ll listen for a moment.
If we want to rebuild the world, rebuild the neighborhood of the world, if we want nations to care about other nations, teach people again to care about the person living across the street.
You know, before I made this commentary this morning—it’s about 5 a.m. here where I live—I emptied the dishwasher.
I took care of my wife before she woke up. I put the cup out for her coffee.
We’ve been together 56 years.
So all that, a lesson in international relations.
It’s not the big things.
It’s the small gestures.
It is the continuity of love and care of the person next to you.
And guess what?
That’s what makes alliances work.
Maybe Trump hasn’t figured that out. He’s never stuck with one woman for a lifetime. He’s always dumped whoever’s on board for a younger version.
And that’s not a cheap shot. That’s his whole life.
And maybe from that life, he didn’t learn how to do international relations either.
It’s about getting up a little earlier to do the dishes.
Trump’s never learned that lesson.
Do you think he’s ever washed a dish?
I doubt it.
Okay, so perhaps the next international order will not be another American empire.
We have failed.
We have lost yet another war.
This one’s going to cost us forever, for a long time.
Australia, Italy, Japan, Britain, France, Brazil, South Korea, and other middle-power countries may increasingly work together when Washington, Moscow, and Beijing may not.
Maybe Moscow, Washington, and Beijing will find themselves out in the cold with all the power and none of the ability to achieve what they want because they forgot to get up at four in the morning and do the dishes.
They forgot that community means something.
None of these superpowers can order the world around.
Good.
We’re resisting.
We’re all pushing back.
The little countries—Denmark, Sweden—the mid-sized countries—France, Brazil—we’re all pushing back.
We’re sick of these guys.
Maybe ordering the world around was a problem.
And the alternative to Trump and these other bullies is not another bully.
We don’t need another bully.
What we need is cooperation among imperfect democracies.
They’re not perfect. We’re still the only game in town.
The Western alliance and the world that supports rights of human beings is where the hope lies, whatever our past iniquities.
And Trump’s reign is over.
He’s already done and he knows it.
He’s creeping around the White House, hanging on to his ballroom. Threatening, by the way, to tear down the Kennedy Center if he can’t get his way, whatever.
An absolute crazy person.
He remains a dangerous fool precisely because he is still in control of the machinery of America’s declining power, misdirected by him and Pete Hegseth, while his judgment deteriorates and his world shrinks down to one blonde aide following him around whispering good news into his ears.
This is folly.
This is the stuff out of history books.
Declining kings and fools and dictators in their last stand.
But mark this: something has changed.
And what’s changed is the rest of the world knows how to read Trump better than, say, his own Republican Party does.
Allies are planning around him.
Adversaries know he needs quick victories, and when he’s deprived of those, he loses patience and moves on and declares the war won, even when everyone else knows it’s lost.
Voters are discovering that the self-proclaimed master negotiator can be trapped by his own impatience.
He can’t make any deals because he won’t stick around. He just wants to move on.
He’s got the attention span of a drunken flea.
Republicans contemplating the November midterms can see the possibility that hitching their futures to one man who by day is clearly an all-time loser will carry a price.
The cult remains, but it’s shrinking.
The congregation is shrinking.
This church is splitting.
The emperor still commands the palace guards, but even the palace guards, except for maybe one blonde aide following him around with a clipboard, giving him news that he wants to hear, know that he has no clothes.
Not only that, this naked old emperor is losing it and out of touch.
And stripped of his makeup and his public image, there’s nothing much there.
Trump promised America dominance and he gave us a comeuppance, the like of which we haven’t seen since we walked out of Vietnam.
He may instead have taught the world how to live without us.
And if so, his twilight may illuminate something better in the coming years after we used to call what we lost character, accountability, and truth.
And I’ll repeat that one time as I close up here.
The alternative to Donald Trump is character, accountability, and truth.
Things Trump has squandered and we can rediscover in the twilight of his presidency.
