How Trump runs the world. By Christopher Caldwell at The Free Press.
“Essentially I won every fucking time,” Donald Trump told Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in March, in a profanity-laced valedictory interview for their new book, Regime Change. “And I’m tired of winning and winning and winning and just getting bad fucking press.” …
He wasn’t prepared for his first term and had no idea:
The more closely one observed Trump’s first term, the more surprised one would have been by his second. Trump Phase I was a joke. The 2020 press conference that his team called at “the Four Seasons” in Philadelphia — thinking they were booking a five-star hotel and winding up instead at a landscaping company next to a pornography emporium — is the perfect symbol of it. Trump was incurious. He knew as little about the workings of Washington on the day he left office as he did on the day he arrived. No one around him ever figured out how to recruit even a handful of people who could master the basics of the executive branch. A lot of what he did worked — there was bold diplomacy in the Middle East, an outstanding economy for lower earners until Covid came, and thereafter an impressive emergency program to develop a vaccine. But even the triumphs were shambolic. In the end Trump, like Gatsby and Père Goriot, left town abandoned by everyone. As Haberman and Swan point out, “no elected Republican of any stature” was present at Joint Base Andrews to see him off.
But the Biden regime gave him time to prepare for his second term:
If Trump I was an error, Trump II is a terror. The hapless, almost slapstick first Trump administration, more embarrassing than threatening, was replaced after the four-year Biden interregnum by the most skilled and ruthless team of political operatives since the first term of Franklin Roosevelt. …
In the administration’s early days, Elon Musk used to spend nights in a sleeping bag on the floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. One Defense Department aide gathered classified videos of suspected terrorists being blown away by missiles and drones, and kept them cued up to show to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on his frequent visits down the hall. We meet an ever-present aide with the Trollopian name of Natalie Harp, who is always ready with a printout or a compliment, and handles the president’s Truth Social traffic. We learn things that cut against our understanding of Trump himself — he is a reader, or at least he likes information presented to him in printed form; his irregular adviser Laura Loomer takes care to have her presentations to him professionally printed and bound. And however piggish his comportment at times, he can surprise people with his humanity and even kindness. “You’ve got an elegant voice,” he told Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum.
Trump’s entourage has discovered the hidden levers of administrative power that generally lie dormant under Republican presidencies. During Covid, for example, his senior policy adviser Stephen Miller discovered that a law called Title 42 could be used to close the Mexican border. The groundwork for Musk’s access to government databases while running the Department of Government Efficiency was laid by the U.S. Digital Service, set up in 2014 to manage the Obamacare website. You can do a lot if you know where to look. …
During Trump’s first term, aide Miles Taylor wrote an anonymous book about the “quiet resistance” to presidential policies—the intentional misdirection, the slow-walking. That isn’t happening any more. …
Taking opportunities:
With its new mastery of the executive branch machinery, the Trump administration has liberated aspects of the president’s character that last time around had no room to flourish.
One is alleged corruption of an unrivaled flagrancy. … In September 2024, Trump’s and Steve Witkoff’s sons launched a crypto-focused company called World Liberty Financial (WLF), in which an Emirati sheikh secretly (until exposed by The Wall Street Journal) bought a 49 percent share. … Zach Witkoff announced in May that the Emiratis had made a $2 billion investment in Binance using a stablecoin issued by World Liberty. (WLF has strongly denied any wrongdoing or involvement in securing a pardon for Zhao.) …
In the days since the publication of Regime Change, financial disclosure statements have revealed that Trump made $2.2 billion in his first year back in office, more than triple his earnings from the year before, with $1.4 billion of it coming from crypto. …
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff’s main business associates are now in the Gulf States. The arrangement by which Kushner and Witkoff decide the fate of Middle Eastern countries in which they have large investments is one that Haberman and Swan explore in depth. At times, they are surprisingly positive about it. Kushner is “a crown prince in his own right,” they say, bound to the big man by marriage, not legalese, and therefore more trustworthy than anyone the State Department could send. The very things that make Kushner a suspect emissary in an American context make him an ideal interlocutor in the Gulf. …
Charlie Kirk assassination:
Something changed in Trump toward the end of last year. Perhaps it had to do with the September assassination of the 31-year-old campus organizer Charlie Kirk. As measured by internet traffic, Kirk’s death was the biggest story of the year, and for good reason. “Beyond Trump himself,” Haberman and Swan note, “arguably no one was more significant than Kirk for gluing together the modern Right.” That was particularly true in the movement’s youth wing, and polling this spring showed young Trumpians coming increasingly unglued. …
Gambling:
Trump is a gambler. On at least two occasions over the past year he has, seemingly without knowing it, placed his political destiny in the hands of adversaries.
The first time came during the madcap trade war with China in the spring of 2025, when Trump raised Chinese tariffs to 145 percent, under the mistaken impression that Chinese tariffs were much higher than they were. (When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed Trump the actual tariffs China and India were levying on the United States, Trump called them “bullshit numbers.”) China matched the U.S. tariffs and added an embargo of its rare earths, indispensable to American manufacturing and weaponry. … Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who despise each other, allied in order to talk Trump down from a course that both feared could destroy the world economy. China agreed to a cessation of trade hostilities at the end of the summer. It did not have to.
Similarly, Trump brought the United States into a war alongside Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability in June 2025. Within a few days, it was evident that Israel was having trouble replenishing its air defenses against the mix of drones and missiles launched by Iran. Through a ramped-up bombing campaign of his own, Trump was able to prevail on Iran to back down. Like China, it did not have to.…
But Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reopened the war last winter, and the consequences have proved baleful. If it persists, it will destroy his presidency. The promise of no Middle Eastern wars was the sine qua non of Trump’s rise. He was elected on an agenda of urgent domestic reform. Even the most ardent Republicans remember how the Iraq war put an end to domestic policy for the last six years of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Trump is the opposite of Biden in so many ways. Biden was hardly there, so the bureaucrats and the globalists in the White House ran the show anonymously. Trump, in contrast, oversees nearly everything — hence the foibles and weird successes.