At midterm election campaign rallies across the country, Donald Trump likes to tell his supporters that under his stewardship, the United States has entered a new “golden age”. But with each passing day, his leadership becomes increasingly volatile and extreme, threatening to drag America back to a much darker era.
The more politically vulnerable that he appears in opinion polls, the more radical his rule. Trump is now preparing for a midterms loss, and a combative final act in which we are likely to see him battle Congress tooth and nail to exert his will through alternative channels.
The last chaotic 10 days have given rise to a presidential U-turn over a threatened public execution, the appointment and then rapid defenestration of his new, hand-picked White House press secretary, the betrayal of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a proposed economic alliance with Vladimir Putin that has left European leaders and many of Trump’s fellow Republicans fuming.
Trump is sowing the seeds for anarchy by moving America directly into Russia’s orbit, a ploy that would undermine Nato and potentially even collapse the transatlantic alliance. Two months before Trump is due to host the G20 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, he wants to solidify relations with Putin and restore him to the world’s top table.
The Kremlin is still mulling Trump’s invitation to Putin. Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his G20 colleagues could be forced to decide how to respond if the Russian leader – wanted for Ukraine-related war crimes by the International Criminal Court – is walking alongside them among the palm trees in the Sunshine State.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported this weekend that Trump’s diesel deal with the Kremlin, and his decision to exempt Russia from sanctions legislation designed to punish it, were just the beginning of a much broader push to alleviate Moscow’s economic isolation.
In talks earlier this month in Miami, US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner reportedly held out the prospect of broader economic transactions between the US and Russia.
Top Putin aide Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s special envoy for investment and economic co-operation, celebrated Trump’s weekend decision to override Congress, calling the Russian carve-out from sanctions legislation sponsored by the late Senator Lindsey Graham “an important and truly historic moment”.
Trump may well view things through the same prism. His irritation with Zelensky has long been evident, and over the past week he has repeatedly characterised Ukraine as the troublemaker for refusing to solve the conflict, rather than Russia, which continues to terrorise Ukrainian civilians and demand 30 per cent of its neighbour’s territory.
At home, Trump is wearing his authoritarian mask with increasing confidence. His recent gambits have included a proposal to shoot anyone who leaks sensitive government information to the media.
Calling them “the scum of the earth”, Trump told a rally in Arizona that “leakers should be shot”. He appeared to indicate that members of the media might also be included in his proposal, gesturing at them and telling the crowd that some reporters “leak false information. That makes them a leaker, right?”
On this front, at least, the President’s hankering for “the old days” is rooted in mythical claims about them. The US has never routinely executed leakers, and only two Americans – Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953 – have ever been executed on peacetime espionage charges.
But while facts are stubborn things, they matter little to this American president. With all the major opinion polls predicting that election day will deliver a big win for the Democrats in the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate, Trump spent the week telling the world that he will simply extemporise if that eventuality occurs.
“Bottom line: It’s all gonna work out. You know why? It always does,” he told reporters outside the White House.
Having relentlessly insisted that the issue of “affordability” is a made-up concept concocted by the Democrats, blamed Ukraine for America’s economic woes rather than his fruitless war on Iran and done nothing to provide Republicans with tangible policy support in the final weeks of the midterm campaign, Trump would have been hard pressed to do more to undermine his party’s fortunes.
If he has now priced in the consequences of the Democrats’ triumph at the polls, he may actually relish the prospect of spending the next two years vetoing every piece of legislation they send to his desk, fighting back hard against efforts to investigate him and his top officials and blaming them for a string of fresh government shutdowns.
Trump’s approach to politics has always been unorthodox. His actions in the final weeks of the election campaign suggest that, at home and abroad, he is preparing to go into overdrive.