The president’s primary audience is the American people, many of whom share his views about ‘America first’ and MAGA and are glued to their seats in the belief they are watching the American Dream become a reality. For Trump and his hand-picked, ultra-loyal acolytes (even if they don’t know the quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It) it’s a case of “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players.”
It is a sad reflection on the US democratic system that it can throw up and put such a person as Donald J. Trump to be America’s head of state, military commander and representative to the rest of the world. Even his first term was highly contentious, with an average approval rating the lowest of any president since 1945 (41%), and culminating in a failed attempt to overthrow a democratic election.
His second incumbency has shown him to be little more than a democratically elected despot and the majority Republican government, despite all the constitution’s vaunted ‘checks and balances’, is proving unwilling or unable to rein in his behaviour.
Trump’s failings
Trump’s decrees, many of them enacted as ‘executive decisions’ without congressional approval, impact on people both at home and abroad that he will never meet nor probably want to meet. His track record is abysmal and a year into his second term his approval rating continues to drop (39% as of April 2026).
The president has a noticeably poor command of the English language and in a recent survey fewer than half of adults in 17 countries think Trump is able to understand complex problems. He has been criticised by celebrities and others as a kind of global thug and one writer in a prominent legal journal has queried whether his pardoning of war criminals in itself makes him a war criminal.
Clearly, he is a convicted felon in his own country, exempt from punishment it seems merely by virtue of being held above the law (probably thanks to the decisions of his own appointments to the Supreme Court).
His mental state is often questioned and in a book published back in 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 27 psychiatrists found the potential of his presidency worrying: ‘Trump poses a great danger to the future of humanity and the planet.’
US now an ‘unreliable ally’
In the 1990s, following the collapse of communism, much of the world looked to the most powerful nation, America, to act as something of a ‘global policeman’. It seemed like an opportunity, albeit a brief one, to foster international peace and cooperation – and for a while the USA seemed to do its best to live up to that expectation.
A couple of decades on, we have a US leader who far from keeping the peace, speaks warmly of the warmonger Putin while disparaging Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy. Trump openly despises NATO, the defensive institution of which the USA was a founder member, and the US has in the eyes of many western leaders become at best an ‘unreliable ally’.
It beggars belief that the Republican party that put Trump where he is continues to support him, scarcely any one of them daring to question or criticise his more extreme decisions.
US citizens killed
Ironically, a nation built on immigration now has a president who victimizes immigrants and refers to them as ‘animals’. Immigration enforcement officers, in recent times particularly the notorious ICE teams, mistakenly kill innocent US citizens. Cruel immigration policies such as forcibly separating children from their parents have done untold harm.
Melania Trump’s recent speech at the UN declaring that education leads to peace, came just days after the US-Israeli coalition bombed a school, followed by two more schools since 28 February 2026 in Iran. If the coalition failed to take adequate steps to identify their targets these may be war crimes committed on Trump’s watch.
Trump continues the Iranian conflict in lockstep with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, who since November 2024 has been wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Where does Trump’s drama go from here?
We should be asking what will happen when the current Iran crisis finally ends (hopefully in peace). Will Netanyahu be joining Trump when he decides to claim Greenland? Plenty of empty space for property developers there. Plenty of experienced personnel from the Occupied Territories to help get the Greenlanders to move on.
And is Canada now off the hook, thanks to King Charles?
It is unfortunate, to say the least, that the US leader is at liberty to wield enormous power in the way he does without regard to the consequences. Trump is in the process of destroying respect for America around the world – especially the ‘soft power’ created by aid and diplomacy that takes decades to build up.
President Xi Jinping will be welcoming all the opportunities that this loss of power, combined with the imposition of heavy US tariffs on most imports, have created.
Welcome to the new World Order. We must learn to live without America as our ‘special friend’ and maybe that’s no bad thing. But President Trump should understand that when his show finally ends there will be no applause and he will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
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