The mandate Americans gave to Donald Trump to be their 47th president for a second, non-consecutive term, is all the hubris he needs to imagine he is the president of the world, literally the world’s most powerful man. He goes around with the arrogance of that assurance. Even if his America First policy subsists on an isolationist foreign ideology that harks back to the pre-Second World War politics that separated America from the rest of the world, especially its Western allies that claim for themselves and America a so-called special relationship that was based on shared values, Donald Trump now behaves as if it’s America against the rest of the world.

He campaigned on the romantic idea of restoring the values that made America the leader of the world. He promised to Make America Great Again. His re-election was in fact his reward for the excesses of his opponents in the Democratic Party in particular. But more broadly, it was a revolt against the extreme liberalism (read wokery) that is the inevitable consequence of America’s identity politics championed often wrongheadedly in the last few years by the Democratic political infrastructure. Donald Trump has from his first term in office always been brash and unconventional. He was at pains to make it clear that he was different from the average Washington DC politician that he considered corrupt even as he was himself far from being above board. 

To signal his difference on coming into office, he placed a travel ban on people from particular countries, mostly Islamic. That decision as with many others he made then and has made since his return into office five months ago ran into legal barricades. American institutions stood strong and resisted his heedless nationalism that had to be checkmated through the instrumentality of the law. His arrogance had run its course by the time he left office virtually in disgrace in 2021. Following his failed attempt at executing a coup with the attack of his supporters on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, his political career was all but over. 

No one could have imagined his return after a four-year spell in the cold. He knew his America very well and was confident he could and would be returned to office. This, in spite of all his legal battles and everything else his opponents did to keep him far from power. He made his comeback in a most spectacular fashion. His 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton was in a sense the White backlash against the eight years in office of the first Black man to be president. This was a once-in-a-life-time feat that was pulled off by a new generation of voters. White America plunged into a withdrawal syndrome following Barack Obama’s two-term presidency. They could no longer bear to have in power anyone remotely connected to what must have seemed to many of the closet racists as a stain on their White banner of American exceptionalism. 

Not only Hillary Clinton but the Democratic party had to pay. Donald Trump was for a section of Americans the Great White Hope. It is a measure of the embarrassing disappointment he became that he allowed the opportunity he was given to slip through his fingers. Another White man would have been a consolation in spite of his emergence from the same Democratic Party that made the emergence of Obama possible. But Joe Biden could not hold it together mainly due to cognitive deterioration and advanced age. His forced exit from power was what opened the door wide for the Democratic party to suffer one of its worst defeats in recent memory. The enormity of their defeat defined the nature of the victory America handed to Donald Trump, a man whose political capital rose like a phoenix after two failed attempts on his life. 

It began to look to Americans like he was a man on a mission but who his enemies were determined to obstruct. Biden diminished to the extent Trump’s stock rose. His re-election was looking like a coronation which an eleventh-hour replacement of Biden with Kamala Harris could not derail. Americans not only deceived one another, they misled a largely Western world already jittery that Trump, now completely riled up and bent on retribution, was about to return to power. Harris was promised votes that never came. In the end, Trump swept the polls, winning both the popular and electoral college votes, the swing states and both the House and the Senate. It was astonishing given what the pundits had predicted. His was a comprehensive victory that nevertheless fell short of a landslide he claimed for himself. He has been operating on those terms. 

His Florida home instantly became a Mecca for the American elite and their foreign friends. Everyone wanted to be Trump’s friend. He was already taking important decisions and making appointments that flew in the face of the lame duck Biden administration, both in terms of his appointees and why he appointed them. His America First policy lacked limits. He wanted and promised to make Canada the 51st state of America, rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf and pull America out of the major international political and economic organisations that had defined its foreign policy for more than eight decades. He has since doubled down on and achieved some of those moves many thoughts were mere wishful thinking. 

He is an equal opportunity politician who has succeeded in levelling the field and constricted the political space that Western countries thought was theirs alone to graze with America. Trump goes where the money is and you are only as important as the size of your purse. As America’s former Western allies have been discovering to their cost. Trump has taken off the gloves and torn the veneer of pretense that is the hallmark of Western liberal politics. His friends are in the far-flung enclaves of the totalitarian states of Eastern Europe, North Korea and kingdoms of the Gulf States for whom CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says he has ‘’natural affinity”. 

To Trump’s America, we are all beggars. Not just Africa and the poor parts of South America and Asia but also those Western countries that have, according to Trump, been taking advantage of America’s prodigal wastefulness. It’s either you have what it takes to stand up to him or you are bullied into submission from his Oval Office Kingdom where he holds court, spews profanity, lies, misinformation and White supremacist ideas. He has turned that space into a lair where he either lures his prey into an ambush or they come of their own will to be disgraced. From Vladimir Zelensky, Mark Carney to Cyril Ramaphosa, it’s the same story. President Donald Trump is king.