Everything Donald Trump has said and done in his second term as president was lifted from the Autocracy for Dummies handbook he should have committed to memory after trying and failing on January 6, 2021, to overthrow the government he had pledged to protect and serve.
This time around, putting his name and face to everything he fancies and diverting our attention from anything he touches as soon as it begins to smell or look bad are telltale signs that he is losing the fight to control the hearts and minds of a nation he would rather rule than help lead.
To be sure, in the five years he has spent in the White House, Donald Trump has come closer to bringing autocratic rule to the United States than any previous president. No doubt, he will keep at it until his term in office ends.
For however long that is and well past the time his second term ends, Donald Trump will remain Americans’ avatar for all things autocratic. But his successes won’t come close to those of other past and present autocrats.
True, the list of bright shiny objects catching his attention both internationally and domestically has been impressive. His branding of things already built, eligible for a teardown, or in desperate need of overhauling under his careful gaze has been exhausting and distracting. But tearing things apart wasn’t a downpayment on building something better and longer lasting. It was the only thing he was interested in and good at doing.
The reason why Donald Trump’s second presidency is already showing serious signs of fraying is that he has ignored the two most important lines aspiring autocrats can’t stop themselves from crossing.
They act as if they are at the center of a universe they can push around and shape to their liking; but the breadth and audacity of their ambitions and penchant for corruption exceed their ability to carry out their grandest designs.
It’s no less true for Vladmir Putin and Donald Trump today as it was in the past for the likes of
Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler. In the case of Hitler, for instance, had he really been serious about building a thousand-year Reich, the late political scientist Sam Sharp observed, he wouldn’t have moved around so much in the first twelve.
Donald Trump’s attention-grabbing threats to “take over” Greenland, make Canada our 51st state, run Venezuela by proxy, bomb Iran into submission, or turn a post-apocalyptic Gaza into a tourist mecca are more scattered and fleeting than anything that Hitler had in mind to do. But the TACO-infused confusion spilling from Donald Trump’s brain makes his proposed do-overs look sillier and more delusional than they are dangerous.
Then there’s this.
Autocrats don’t fare well when the people they try to bully have had lots of practice and success at saying “no” to their would-be overlords.
Donald Trump has shown no familiarity or regard for this crucial piece of our history. Americans are, for better and worse, well-practiced in showing a cranky and sometimes violent face to leaders who push us harder than we like into places we don’t want to go.
The public anger on display in Minneapolis and elsewhere, limited as it may be, is a preamble to a history that’s already been written. We might dislike all the unrest, decry the loss of people’s lives and property, and scratch our heads at the modest changes our rebelliousness leaves behind. But it is the very evanescent quality of the hard and sometimes dangerous work undertaken by agitated Americans that keeps our unrest fresh and relevant.
Not long from now, the assault on our civic lives and constitutional norms occasioned by Trump’s anti-immigration campaign will be remembered for the same reason we should celebrate the insurrection and attempted coup d’état Trump provoked on January 6, 2021. They were dramatic and conspicuous failures.
We won’t have to defame the men and women who tried to take over the Capital or who want to throw out all our illegal immigrants to recognize that their actions were as historically unprecedented as they were incompetently executed.
The legacy of the everyday Americans protesting ICE arrests, incarcerations, deportations, and killings will be their restraint and programmatic modesty. The only thing they will have forced the rest of us to do is think about ideals we had come to take for granted but now, thanks to the trouble they’re making on the streets of American cities, we are practicing again.
The public fights over Trump’s anti-immigration policies are shocking. But they also make us reflect upon a long history of taking in people we weren’t expecting or thrilled to have here and letting them stay long enough to do better than expected for themselves and for the rest of us.
It would be good to keep all this in mind in the run up to our 250th birthday party. The irony that we would have President Trump to thank for reminding us about these important lessons is a pill I am ready and happy to swallow.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.