Opinion | Trump’s war on everything will lead to his eventual downfall

Those who forget history are bound to repeat it, but history is not something that US President Donald Trump appears to think about very much. Instead, he is more likely to think about the possibility of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted despite the fact that his primary contribution to peace so far has been to bomb people.

The energy shown by the second Trump administration during the past six months has been extraordinary. The United States has never seen a presidency so disruptive, but Trump has neglected the crucial lesson forgotten by French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 and the Germans in 1941. You can never be so strong that you can open up hostilities on too many fronts.

The year so far has largely been successful for Trump and his far-right Project 2025 acolytes, but their dedication to doing too much too fast is an underlying weakness in their efforts to re-gild America in Trump’s likeness. Things can break quickly, but fixing them takes much longer. Rather than bringing about any kind of reform, the result will be that Trump’s only lasting accomplishment is political and economic damage to the US.

Far from being “America first”, many of Trump’s initiatives – and certainly the way in which they have been imposed – are likely to undermine the prime position the US holds in geopolitics and geoeconomics. Abroad, he has roiled the global economic system with a series of tariffs, made opponents of America’s friends and threatened to annex Canada and Greenland and to take over the Panama Canal.

At home, he has unbalanced the US legal system, targeted immigrants and foreign students, threatened unsupportive journalists, sought to destroy America’s pinnacle of higher learning at Harvard and deployed the military against US citizens in California. He has supported weak industries over advanced areas of tech and space and dropped some of the world’s biggest bombs on Iran without Congressional approval.

Trump is able to do this because his slight majority in the popular vote in the 2024 US presidential election is treated as sufficient to bully and strike when the other side is on the defensive. He pushes through executive orders, supported by loyalists who know that one wrong word means the end of their position in high office. He chickens out when faced with resistance and quickly pivots to attacking another target.