If you thought Donald Trump had asserted himself globally this year, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The political ground is shifting beneath the US President’s feet, and the early evidence is that he is going to lose. His approval rating sits somewhere between 32 and 38 per cent, depending on the poll, the lowest of either term, with disapproval approaching nearly two-thirds of all Americans. The generic congressional ballot has Democrats up by an average of five to seven points, and statistician Nate Silver’s team notes that the picture is “virtually identical” to where it was at this point in the 2018 cycle, before Trump suffered a devastating midterm defeat.
Trump’s own pollsters can read these numbers as well as I can.
The reasons for the collapse are mysterious to no one. War and tariff-driven inflation have eaten away at the President’s standing on the economy, where Democrats are now more trusted to handle costs for the first time since 2010. Americans are suffering. Yet the White House seems to manufacture a new presidential vanity project each week to show how far out of touch Trump is — a gilded billion-dollar White House ballroom, a triumphal arch built in his honour to dwarf the Lincoln Memorial, repainted reflecting pools, renovated fountains, his face on coins and passports and buildings, and a $1.8bn (£1.3bn) slush fund to gift taxpayer dollars to Trump allies who’ve been criminally prosecuted. Trump’s domestic agenda is, in short, a radioactive mess for Republicans to run on.
The odds are now that he loses the US House. He may even lose the Senate. He will almost certainly be impeached and after the elections, Trump will be distracted, embattled and very likely humiliated.
If history is any guide, he will respond angrily and set his sights abroad.
I remember this happening in his first term. I was working as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security when power changed hands in the House, and at first, the White House was panicked.
We were summoned to secret meetings about how the administration would stridently resist oversight from House Democrats. We were told to deny information requests, delay inquiries and prepare to defy subpoenas. The White House offered to assign auxiliary lawyers to each of our agencies to fight the coming barrage of investigations. If Democrats wanted documents in their corruption probes, they would get the middle finger. The conversations were as brazen and as unethical as you’d expect.
I quit not long after. But not before it became clear what Trump intended to do to satiate his almost limitless appetite for power.
With his hands tied at home, he put his foot down abroad. Against our protestations, he harassed America’s allies, who baulked at Trump’s schemes, and cosied up to longtime US foes, who appeared to relish watching a wannabe strongman doing their work for them by chipping away at American democracy and alliances. He became, in plain language, a belligerent bully on the world stage.
Taylor says his old boss, Trump, has a limitless appetite for power (Photo: Miles Taylor)The shift was unmistakable. Within weeks of the 2018 midterms, Trump abruptly announced the withdrawal of all US troops from Syria, blindsiding the Pentagon, abandoning the Kurdish forces who had fought alongside us against Isis, and prompting then-defence secretary Jim Mattis to resign in protest.
He picked a tariff war that rattled global markets. He sided with Saudi Arabia over the CIA on the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He extorted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a phone call (the now-infamous “I would like you to do us a favour, though” call that got him impeached) to try to leverage military aid to manufacture dirt on a domestic political rival. He floated buying Greenland, picked fights with Canada and Germany, schmoozed with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and exchanged “love letters” with Kim Jong-un while North Korea expanded its nuclear arsenal.
That storyline held all the way until he was forced to leave office. The angrier he got at home, the more he lashed out abroad.
To be fair, it’s not unusual for American presidents to pivot to foreign policy when their party loses the midterms. George W. Bush did it. So did Barack Obama and Joe Biden. There is something almost constitutionally gravitational about the phenomenon. A president denied power at home tends to reach for the one arena where his authority is least constrained.
But with Trump, it’s different. We’re not talking about a president spending more time on diplomacy, forging agreements or grinding through hard challenges. I’m talking about the most powerful man in the world searching for new countries to invade, exploring fresh ways to monetise his influence, teasing genocide and nuclear strikes and toying with breaking the global order that emerged from the great wars.
He’s not shied away from any of this in his first year back. With more time on his hands, he’ll lay waste to what remains of the Western institutions and alliances that have kept the free world standing.
What does that look like in practice? In my view, we should watch four areas.
First, the invasions. Cuba is already on his radar, and if Trump doesn’t attempt to seize the island this year, he almost certainly will project power there after the midterms. Latin America will rise on the agenda. Venezuela was the beginning, not the end. Mexico and other Central American immigration waypoints are in the crosshairs. Trump has reportedly already ramped up CIA activity in the region. There’s no telling how far he might go.
‘There’s no telling how far Donald Trump might go,’ writes Miles Taylor (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty)In his first term, he toyed with sending hundreds of thousands of troops to the US-Mexico border and launching missiles into our neighbour. We’ve not heard the last on Greenland, either. A president with nothing left to lose politically will flex military might for the sheer satisfaction of it, even if that means territorial aggrandisement the likes of which we haven’t seen in the West since the Second World War.
Second, he’ll resume selling out allies. Trump will be emboldened to leave the vulnerable out to dry in order to curry favour with autocrats. Prepare for him to sacrifice Ukraine’s hard-fought interests to Russia without much of a fight. Anticipate he will cut a deal to turn the other way to China’s efforts to take over Taiwan, if he hasn’t secretly done so already.
Expect him to cede these territories to their oppressors, or at least to pull back American support, in the name of “deals” and “resetting” relations with our adversaries.
Third, the withdrawals will be sudden and shocking. Trump will either pull the US out of Nato or let it wither in favour of a Trump-centred alternative. I suspect he might announce something modelled on his vainglorious “Board of Peace” – a body he created because he got fed up with the UN, and which exists, in part, to pay him for the privilege of membership.
Trump could effectively break the alliance by declaring the creation of a parallel club that only the faithful are allowed to join. To say nothing of the longstanding trade agreements he’ll threaten to abrogate or refuse to honour as a way to get leverage over friends.
And finally, Trump will double down on the election “meddling” overseas, if you can be so charitable as to call it that. Expect him to interfere in the internal affairs of US allies in a bid to install more Maga-friendly counterparts in foreign capitals. France goes to the polls in April 2027 for the post-Macron presidential race, and Trump won’t just sit back and watch. Germany may see its fragile Merz coalition collapse and trigger snap elections that the White House would love to use as revenge against a leader who’s opposed Trump’s military adventurism.
And, of course, he’ll relish building on Reform UK’s efforts to steer Britain in the direction of Maga-like populism in general elections. Each one is now a potential theatre for a President who’s keen to find his next Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s former prime minister.
I say there will be at least two years of this because it’s unclear whether Trump will peacefully transfer power when his term expires. It’s not irresponsible to predict an unconstitutional third term, as absurd as it would have sounded to our ears only a few years ago.
Trump tried to remain in office illegally last time. Any rational observer should plan for the possibility that he will try again.
US allies are presumably already making preparations for what’s to come. If they are not, their people may suffer the consequences. Many Western leaders will spend the rest of this year working quietly and assiduously to batten down the hatches. They will focus on deepening relationships with fellow democracies who will have their backs in any economic, diplomatic, or – God forbid – direct conflict with a rogue United States.
For what it’s worth, I’d advise them to speed up those contingency plans.
Despite warning for years of the seismic geopolitical outcomes of a re-elected Trump, it brings me no satisfaction to report that those forecasts are now proving accurate. If anything, it’s one of my greatest disappointments as an American to tell our friends abroad that we’ve lost our step because our leader has lost his mind.
But denial won’t secure deliverance. The only consolation I have to offer is that we will be back. The US is having its reckoning and, in time, will do what it takes to repair our republic. In the meantime, someone has to preserve the free world – because for the moment, the land of the free no longer is.
Miles Taylor is the former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator, and democracy reform leader
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