How Trump passed the peak of his power and began to lose influence
At the UN General Assembly last month, US President Donald Trump delivered a victory speech. A decade after telling his supporters that he’d stack so many victories that "you may even get tired of winning".
He offered a list of successes, including the settlement of eight wars, action against "the bully of the Middle East" in Iran, a deal with Denmark on Greenland, and the arrest of Venezuela’s "outlaw dictator," Nicolás Maduro.
To Trump’s credit, some of these wins are significant.
But his speech also revealed something else: the growing limits on his power.
Read more about the waning influence of Donald Trump in this article by Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media: Trump the lame duck: why the US President’s influence is waning and whether he can still disrupt the world.
Trump enters the lame-duck stage of his presidency, experiences collapsing approval ratings, and interacts with leaders whose tenures will extend far beyond his own. Previously the most powerful, unpredictable force on the international stage, Trump has now passed the peak of his ability to disrupt the international order.
The evidence of Trump’s fading influence can be found across his top priorities: tariffs, the Iran war, and immigration enforcement. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down his use of emergency powers to institute tariffs, and even before that decision, Trump was confronted with the limits of his power in his brief trade war with China, which responded to his 145% tariff rate with a 125% rate of its own and a halt on critical mineral exports.
As a result, Trump has not only moderated his policies on China; he has almost entirely reversed his position, rolling out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping during his recent visit to Washington. Trump even greeted Xi at the airport–the first time an American leader has offered such a welcome for a state visit since 1962 – and offered to sell China weapons (in violation of US law).
Trump has run into similar limits in the Iran war.
After attempting to engineer a rapid regime change without the boots on the ground required to do so, his administration was surprised by the Iranian seizure of the Strait of Hormuz and has found itself unable to reach a durable agreement to reopen it.
Trump has tried to signal that he will not back down–by threatening to "annihilate" the country, emphasizing that a loss in the midterms will not alter his strategy, and dispatching new forces to the Middle East, but Iran remains unmoved.
Domestically, Trump’s flagship immigration policies are facing pushback as well.
Earlier this year, Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota triggered such widespread unrest that Border Czar Tom Homan had to end the initiative.
Now, congressional Republicans, many of whom are running for re-election this November and facing long odds as a result of Trump’s sagging approval ratings, are breaking from him.
Trump of course remains a consequential figure on the global stage, since he is in charge of the world’s most powerful military, and can point to a dynamic domestic economy.
But with the gulf between his ambitions and capabilities widening, the level of global risk associated with him is declining in all areas except for one: AI, where his capacity to disrupt the global order is growing.