US President often appeared to conduct diplomacy the way someone plays a video game.
As the world watches a US President struggling to recover from the catastrophic war with Iran, he himself created, a word keeps surfacing which is not typically associated with the most powerful office on earth: “impulsive”. Not decisive. Not bold. Not even reckless, which at least implies some awareness of risk. Impulsive, acting before the thought is finished, before the advisers are consulted, before anyone has considered what comes next. That quality, more than ideology and more than any particular policy, is what defines Donald Trump’s second term; and it will define his legacy. By any measure, Trump has stretched presidential power further than any of his predecessors. He has governed by instinct, by social media post, and by gut feeling in the middle of the night when the impulse struck and the phone was in his hand. He has done this proudly, treating restraint as weakness and process as obstruction. The results have been as consequential as they have been chaotic and the American people, as well as those around world, are only beginning to experience the full weight of them.
Consider first the question of law, which every president bends somewhat. The temptation to use the machinery of government for political ends is not unique to Trump; it is one of the oldest corruptions in democratic politics. But Trump has deployed that machinery with an aggression and a transparency that has no modern parallel. The US Justice Department has become less a department of justice than a department of settling scores. Indictments are being brought against critics on grounds so thin that grand juries and Republican-appointed judges alike dismissed them. Immigration enforcement has descended on American cities before anyone has fully thought through the mandate or constitutional guardrails. Many American citizens have been swept up in the process by out-of-control enforcement officers, and many deported. All the while the president cheers, because the images are playing so well. Meanwhile, Trump’s family and associates have shamefully found ways to profit from their proximity to power that would have consumed any prior administration in scandal. But not this one. Partly because the threshold for outrage has been raised so high, and partly because Trump has mastered the art of overwhelming the news cycle by creating crisis after crisis, so that no single transgression can ever fully land. This is not governance. It is performance and the distinction matters hugely.
On the economy, the improvisational style has been even more striking and the stakes even higher. In normal times, the United States does not run on gut feelings. Supply chains are built over years, and trade relationships are scaffolded with treaty, law and mutual expectation. Central banks derive their power almost entirely from their credibility and their perceived independence from political pressure. These are not abstractions; they are the architecture of prosperity. Trump, however, treats them as obstacles. He imposed tariffs on allies and adversaries alike, not through a coherent strategic framework, but through a series of lurches, retreats, and social media announcements that left trading partners unable to plan and American businesses unable to predict. When markets turned bad enough the pullbacks came, creating what observers began calling TACO, Trump Always Chickens Out. But a pullback is not a reversal. Supply chains that moved don’t simply move back. Business decisions made in uncertainty don’t unmake themselves when certainty belatedly arrives.
The pressure applied to the Federal Reserve was something else entirely. Half a century of central bank independence, a norm that has survived wars, recessions, and the full spectrum of ideological difference, is treated by Donald Trump as an “inconvenience”. He ordered a criminal investigation to be opened against a sitting Fed chair for the apparent offense of not doing what the president wanted. That the investigation came to nothing is less important than the fact that it was opened in the first place. The message was sent and the norm was weakened. The question of whether the norm can be fully restored is genuinely open. Policy announcements, such as fifty-year mortgages, and two-thousand-dollar tariff dividend checks, arrived on Truth Social without legislative language, without a detailed framework, and without even a rudimentary plan for implementation. The world’s largest economy was steered by Trump like an out-of-control speedboat.
In foreign policy, the consequences may be the most durable of all. Trump often appeared to conduct diplomacy the way someone plays a video game; reacting to the screen in front of him, optimizing for the immediate visual, with little thought for what happens after the game ends. NATO allies who have anchored American security for eight decades found themselves mocked, threatened, and publicly humiliated. Fighting for its survival, Ukraine was treated sometimes as a partner and sometimes as a burden, depending on how Trump felt at the moment. Canada and Denmark were subjected to territorial taunts that would have seemed like satire in any previous administration. These were not negotiating tactics in any recognizable sense. They were impulses, amplified by the reach of a presidential platform. The war against Iran, launched at Israel’s urging, is the starkest illustration. A military operation of enormous scope, undertaken without a clear plan for the aftermath – the long, expensive and brutal aftermath that is now predictably unfolding. America learned this before at enormous cost; under Donald Trump the United States is learning it yet again.
A number haunts this presidency more than any other: 70. Seventy percent of Americans, according to polling conducted this month, disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. That figure never crossed fifty percent during his first term, not even during the pandemic. His overall approval sits nearly twenty points underwater, also a second-term low. These are not the numbers of a president who has miscalculated on the margins. They are the numbers of a president who has lost the public’s basic trust.
There is a case, made by Trump’s defenders, that a president who acts boldly and alone is at least acting. They insist that process and deliberation are just other words for inaction dressed up in procedure, and someone had to break the mould. But governance is not the same as breaking moulds. Moulds, such as the norms, the institutions, the checks and balances exist because human beings in positions of power make mistakes. Moulds are there to catch those mistakes before they become catastrophes. Remove the moulds, and the mistakes land at full weight, as is evident in Trump’s second term in which he has governed alone, with an ineffectual Congress and without law.
Many of Trump’s policies, of course, can be reversed when a new administration arrives, and executive orders can be unmade by executive orders. But the world will not instantly trust America again simply because America asks it to. Generals pushed out of service during wartime do not un-retire. Institutions bent by pressure do not always snap back to their original shape; the memory of their bending is part of them now.
The presidency that Donald Trump has built is powerful in the way that a flooding river is powerful: immense, fast-moving, and largely indifferent to what lies in its path. What it is not, is controlled. What it is not, is wise.
Power, as every serious student of the American experiment has understood, is only as good as the judgment of the person who wields it. That judgment, tested by markets, by courts, by allies, and by the slow accumulation of consequence, is what this second term is now, finally, being measured against. The verdict, so far, is not kind.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.
