MAGA: “Make America Great Again.” That was U.S. President Donald Trump’s promise to the American people. Elect him, and the country would recover its mojo and return to a golden age of internal harmony, economic vitality, domestic sovereignty, and global influence. It was a seductive vision, especially for those Americans who had been buffeted by globalization and believed that immigrants and “globalists” were undermining the country from within.
As Trump’s second term nears the midway point, there can be little doubt that he is one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all the consequences of his actions have been harmful, not just for most people in the United States but also for America’s relative power and standing in the world. His cronies and family members may be reaping the benefits, but the cumulative impact of his actions will be not a return to greatness, but a weaker and more divided America.
Let me count the ways.
1. Destroying confidence in U.S. promises. The importance of credibility is sometimes exaggerated, but other states will be less inclined to cooperate with Washington if they do not believe that it will keep its promises. As he did throughout his litigious and bankruptcy-prone business career, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that his threats are mostly empty bluster and his pledges mean nothing. He tore up the successful nuclear deal with Iran (didn’t that work out well?), and he now condemns the same trade agreement that he negotiated with Canada and Mexico during his first term (and that he said was the best deal ever). His on-again, off-again approach to tariffs, repeated threats to withdraw support from key allies, and unexplained reversal of his offer to let Ukraine build Patriot interceptors make it abundantly clear that his word means nothing. Zip. Nada.
This has real consequences: For example, Trump’s well-deserved reputation for double-dealing and unpredictability is one reason why he is having such trouble ending the war with Iran. Its leaders don’t believe a word he says—and why should they?—and they understandably want concrete concessions up front before they let him off the hook. It is also why more countries around the world are hedging their bets and looking for more reliable partners.
2. Reducing U.S. military capability. Despite spending unprecedented sums, boasting of the United States’ “lethality,” and making sure male troops have enough testosterone, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made the country’s military forces weaker and undermined the U.S. ability to deter attacks on its partners.
How? By starting a foolish war with Iran, depleting stockpiles of critical weaponry, and keeping ships, squadrons, and service personnel on station for months on end, reportedly leading to a wave of suicide attempts. These actions have burned through valuable military capacity to no good purpose, showed potential adversaries where the country’s vulnerabilities are, and eroded service members’ morale in potentially tragic ways. While Trump and Hegseth have been squandering U.S. military assets, potential future adversaries have been arming, studying, training, and preparing.
To make matters worse, Trump and Hegseth are trying to politicize the uniformed services and make them a loyal part of the MAGA movement. Hegseth has actively sought to purge officers he regards as “woke,” fired or denied promotion to a disproportionate number of women and people of color—despite their stellar records and recommendations from the senior officers who know them best—and tried to impose ideological conformity on the entire military establishment, including the service academies.
This is a dangerous development. As the late Samuel Huntington famously argued in The Soldier and the State, the professionalism of the armed services, based on a set of norms and institutional culture that kept the military above the political fray, has been a major asset throughout our history. Officers swear an oath to the Constitution but not to a party or a president, and they are expected to embrace a code where “Duty, Honor, Country” come first. They have not been judged by which party they might support, and senior officers willingly serve both parties over time. Although senior military leaders (and the rest of the so-called military-industrial complex) have considerable influence on national security questions, they remain subordinate to civilian control and have never been a tool that one party could use to seize or retain power illegitimately.
I think that is still the case today, but the trends are worrisome. And I do not doubt that if Trump could turn the armed forces into a loyal instrument of his own power, he would. Were he to succeed, they will become an even less effective fighting force.
3. Dismantling diplomatic capacity. Marco Rubio has held a lot of titles—including secretary of state, national security advisor, and acting head of the National Archives—but sometimes he reminds me of those pictures of missing children that used to appear on milk cartons. I want to ask: “Have you seen this man?” He’s been largely sidelined from the Iran war, Ukraine, and the other major issues confronting the nation today, even as he and Trump have been systematically undermining the United States’ diplomatic capacity and international presence in ways that could take decades to rebuild.
Under Rubio’s leadership at the State Department, the United States has unilaterally withdrawn from more than 60 international organizations, even as China keeps expanding its involvement in them. He has closed consulates and offices abroad and left dozens of ambassadorships empty. A comprehensive survey conducted by the American Foreign Service Association found that 98 percent of respondents reported low morale and 86 percent said these actions were impairing their ability to do their jobs. The title of the report says it all: The country’s diplomatic institutions are “at the breaking point.”
That might not be a big problem if the special envoys that Trump prefers to rely upon were highly competent and effective, but the performance of amateur diplomats Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner or Vice President J.D. Vance shows that this not the case.
4. Undermining U.S. scientific preeminence. Leadership in science and technology has long been one of the foundations of the United States’ global power. As China clearly understands, scientific prowess will be even more important in the future. What has Trump done in response to this challenge? He has cut federal support for a wide range of scientific research, attacked universities on spurious grounds, appointed ignorant and unqualified science skeptics (such as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) to key positions, amplified their false claims through his own statements and social media blasts, appointed a nonscientist as his scientific advisor, and actively encouraged the belief that ignorance is preferable to knowledge and expertise.
Are these actions having an effect? You bet they are. According to the American Institute of Physics, Ph.D. graduates in that field are leaving the United States at the highest rate in 30 years, nearly double the rate of just a year ago. The resulting brain drain in this field (and others) will leave the United States less knowledgeable, innovative, productive, and secure than it would have been otherwise. It is an own goal that is likely to cede scientific preeminence to the Washington’s most formidable rival.
5. Missing the green transition. A related blunder stems from Trump’s long-standing climate change denialism, his opposition to renewable energy, and his steadfast commitment to burning more fossil fuels. This is lunacy, as anyone who has read the literature on this subject or paid attention to long-term climate trends knows. Not only will this lead to more serious climate problems, more climate-related deaths, and much human suffering, but Trump’s policies have ensured that China will dominate the green technologies of the future (solar, wind, batteries, etc.) while the U.S. dominates the smokestack technologies of the 19th century. Unless you believe that nuclear fusion will be commercially viable and in wide use in the very near future, Trump’s handling of the climate challenge will leave the U.S. weaker and poorer. And warmer.
6. Eroding the rule of law. Trump’s contempt for laws and rules is well-documented, and he has gone to great lengths to insulate himself from any sort of legal constraint while using the legal system to conduct vendettas against individuals who have had the misfortune to have incurred his ire. The confirmation of his personal attorney, the infinitely accommodative Todd Blanche, as U.S. attorney general is merely the latest step in this campaign. His efforts have been aided by an ideologically aligned and compliant Supreme Court, which has checked his actions on a handful of occasions but mostly blessed and empowered them.
Why does this matter? Because confidence in the integrity of the U.S. justice system is reassuring to Americans and to foreigners who want to trade or invest in the country. Confidence that the laws will be fairly interpreted and enforced in an unbiased and transparent way reduces the risks of arbitrary or politically motivated decisions, thereby reducing the risks of doing business. Foreigners won’t cut all their ties with the country if they come to believe that the U.S. justice system has become politicized and corrupt, because there are plenty of countries where these problems are even worse. But the United States will have squandered one of the features that has made it an especially attractive partner in the past.
7. Threatening electoral integrity. Democracy depends on free and fair elections, and on citizens’ belief that the results accurately reflect the ballots cast. From the very beginning, Trump has sowed doubts about the integrity of the electoral system, most notoriously in his baseless and oft-repeated claim that he actually won the 2020 election. Indeed, the most clear-cut example of electoral misconduct was Trump’s own effort to reverse his defeat in 2020 by encouraging an angry mob to storm Congress, pressuring state election officials to find more votes for him, and trying to get former Vice President Mike Pence to violate his oath and refuse to certify the results. If you want evidence of real electoral fraud, look no further.
The danger here is that eroding public trust in elections will lead losers to reject what a majority of voters have said, refuse to accept decisions by officials that they falsely believe were fraudulently chosen, and make them prey to conspiracy theories that divide the country even more. Nothing could be more corrosive to a sense of patriotism and civic unity than a belief that elections are constantly being rigged, and that’s exactly what Trump and his minions have been doing.
8. Abandoning checks and balances. The growing power of the executive branch didn’t begin with Trump, and some of the forces that have accelerated that process during his second term—such as congressional fecklessness and a Supreme Court stacked in favor of a unitary executive—were present before he was reelected in 2024. And he’s hardly the first president who resented the limits on their authority and wished they could just do what they wanted without having to get congressional approval and judicial backing.
That said, Trump’s willingness to run roughshod over the checks and balances embedded in the Constitution is unparalleled in U.S. history, and the long-term consequences will be severe. Reducing the perceived political independence of the Federal Reserve, for example, will make foreign investors skittish, and removing checks on presidential action will increase other states’ concerns about U.S. reliability and predictability. And when presidents can do anything they want, without having to gain public support or even make the case to Congress, you are more likely to get ill-conceived debacles such as the current Iran war. Unless you are convinced that Trump is an infallible agent of divine Providence—despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary—this assault on the United States’ constitutional order should worry you. A lot.
9. Abandoning civil discourse. More than anyone else, Trump is responsible for the coarsening and vulgarity of U.S. political discourse. It’s partly his willingness and ability to lie shamelessly—a trait that has infected most of the Republican Party—but it is also his reliance on vulgar insults; violent rhetoric; rambling rants portraying opponents as criminals, traitors, or worse; and his all-too-evident contempt for half of the citizens of the country.
His followers, from Vance on down, have embraced the same tactics. Further dividing Americans against each other and turning what should be serious debates about complex issues into a competition of school-yard insults is a recipe for continued polarization, gridlock, and dumb decisions. Our enemies must be delighted watching the United States’ own president and vice president doing their work for them.
10. Torching U.S. soft power. Put all these things together, and the result is a real-time collapse of the United States’ once considerable “soft power.” Although Trump is popular with a few like-minded politicos (mostly in Latin America), overall, the United States has taken a remarkable tumble in the eyes of most of the world. Its flawed democratic system no longer commands admiration, its eroding infrastructure depresses foreign visitors instead of dazzling them, and Trump’s predatory policies have alienated countries that were once among the most pro-American in the world (such as Canada and Denmark).
Worst of all, his erratic decision-making and reliance on unqualified lackeys has eroded the aura of competence on which enduring global influence depends. When the United States is only slightly more well-regarded than North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, or Israel, you know something has gone badly awry.
To be fair, Trump’s second term is not a total failure. He’s helped get some pro-Trump people elected in some small countries, extracted some short-term economic concessions from a few U.S. partners, and got FIFA to rescind a penalty on a U.S. men’s national soccer team member during the recent World Cup (to no avail—the squad lost its next game anyway). He even managed to attend a NATO summit without causing a major diplomatic incident.
But his main accomplishment during his second term has been to enrich himself and his cronies. That is no small achievement, I guess, and it may be the real reason he got into politics in the first place. His family will be a lot richer when his term ends, but the country will be weaker, sicker, and angrier. If it wasn’t obvious before, it certainly is now: “Make America Great Again” was always just a scam.