This was the week Trumpworld collided with reality and the US President discovered he can’t bend everybody to his will.
Suddenly plans to take a chainsaw to Fema, the federal emergency management agency, no longer look so appealing after the weather turned against Trump, with catastrophic floods in Texas killing at least 120 people. Now officials say plans to ditch or cull the agency will amount to more of a “rebranding” exercise and the national weather service is rehiring after Elon Musk’s Doge cuts.
As a seasoned escapologist, Trump can bluster his way through problems that would fell most politicians. But, like the weather, certain problems are intractable and can’t be solved by White House boasts and Maga sloganeering.
Chief among these is the war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has given Trump a public drubbing by launching lethal bombing raids on the civilian population. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. But the conflict has also exposed a fault-line in the Maga movement over the meaning of “America First”. It has led to chaos in the Pentagon and a split between US isolationists and interventionists – who all think they are representing Trump’s true wishes.
At the Pentagon, the Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, and under-secretary for defence, Elbridge Colby, blindsided Trump and the State Department by peremptorily halting US arms shipments to Ukraine on 1 July, before the decision was quickly overturned. For once, the President seemed lost for words when asked by CNN who authorised the suspension.
“I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?” he replied.
According to a Politico source, Colby, a hard-line Ukraine critic, was “pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration… They all view him as the guy who is going to make the US do less in the world in general.”
Colby could be forgiven for thinking he was simply following the President’s wishes. Words are supposed to have meaning and Trump has stiffed Ukraine often enough in the past. But Colby had forgotten the Humpty Dumpty rule in Trump’s looking-glass world.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpy told Alice, “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. The question is which is to be master – that’s all.”
For Trump, “America First” means whatever he wants it to. “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along,” Trump told The Atlantic rather fancifully (given its 1930s origins), “I think I’m the one that decides that.”
Trump enjoys wielding US power as a blunt instrument to order the world to do what he says or face the consequences – whether slapping tariffs on recalcitrant trading partners, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities or turning against Putin (for the time being).
Congress is hoping to carry Trump’s threat to impose sanctions on countries that purchase Russian oil if Putin refuses to negotiate peace, but they’ll need to be quick about it. Trump says he is “strongly considering” backing a bipartisan bill after complaining about “a lot of bullshit” being thrown about by Putin in their last phone call, but could change his mind at any time.
square TARIFFS AnalysisTrump's bullying of other countries will come back to bite him
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For now, isolationists, such as the internet broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who has made sycophantic interviews with US adversaries such as Putin and the Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian his stock in trade, are as much at odds with Trump over foreign policy as Musk is over the deficit-busting “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress last week.
The Iranian president clearly likes to play as fast and loose with words as Trump. In his interview, he told Carlson: “When [Iranians] say ‘Death to the United States’… they don’t mean death to the people of the United States or even to the officials of the United States.”
Compare this to what Trump said to Time magazine in April about ending the war in Ukraine on day one. “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point… Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.”
Sometimes Trump lives in the real world, where Ukraine is under siege and Russia is the aggressor. Sometimes being president means facing the truth. This is one such time. If only we knew which Trump was going to show up every morning in the Oval Office.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Centre for International Reporting
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