Does Trump really matter?

He thought the world was simple and that he had the formula for changing everything. But the world is more complicated than he ever imagined. His impact will vanish with him.

The trouble with relying on journalists to tell us what’s happening in the world is that it locks us in to their narrow view of what’s important. The news business is irresistibly captivated by colour, movement and outrage, to the detriment of deeper, more significant trends that may change the world but which lack glitz. Donald Trump is the leading exponent of colour, movement and outrage, so he dominates the news of the world and, in turn, our understanding.

And so we miss the central fact of the Trump presidency: it is changing relatively little, except in the very short term; and it will produce almost no lasting, significant change to global systems and to the way people live, even in his own country. Fairly soon, Donald Trump and his insubstantial pageant will vanish like a disturbing dream.

The assault on democracy

During the 2024 presidential election campaign, the Democrats warned that a re-elected Trump would seek to trash the democracy, destroying the checks-and-balances and political norms on which a free nation depends. In a way, they were right. Trump – and the Republican nabobs who empower him – have been assiduous in their manipulation of an already-politicised Supreme Court. The Justice Department has become a weapon of personal revenge for the president. After losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, he attempted to regain power through insurrection. He has used the pardon prerogative to benefit people who have broken the law on his behalf. He has flouted the constitution’s emoluments clause, using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. And so on.

These are all egregious, blatant acts that strike against basic notions of fairness and the rule of law. But how significant are they outside of the United States itself? Will they have any lasting effect on the US or the rest of the world?

The answer to both of those questions is no. The rest of the democratic world may look unhappily at these events but it’s more likely to reinforce other nations’ appreciation of the rule of law than it is to tempt them to follow the Trumpist path. Within the US, none of these actions are permanent. Their sole purpose is to benefit Trump in the short term: he is not interested in risking the much more difficult option of systemic reform. His way of doing business may last until a new president takes to oath of office on 20 January 2029, but then it will end.

Dead cats and foreign affairs

Under Trump, the United States has retreated from international engagement, massively decreasing its influence in global affairs. One of the first acts of his second term as president was to withdraw from 66 organisations, 31 of them attached to the United Nations. The other 35 are a wide variety of bodies covering an array of issues from cotton growing and mining to counterterrorism and piracy against shipping. Trump said in his executive order that it “is contrary to the interests of the United States” to remain In these organisations.

Among them are the Paris agreement on climate change (a senate-ratified treaty), the International Panel on Climate Change, the International Trade Centre, the International Law Commission and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

He has repeatedly threatened to leave NATO and has already withdrawn from the World Health Organisation and the Human Rights Council. He is forcing changes on the World Trade Organisation which would render it unable to enforce fair trade.

And so on.

All of these measures were made by executive order; none have been ratified by the congress or made into law. As such, a single countervailing order signed by a new president could reverse all of them. It is entirely possible – and perhaps probable – that they will not last more than a few hours after midday on 20 January 2029, when the presidency changes hands.

However much he would like to do so, Trump cannot withdraw from NATO. Under the National Defense Authorization Act, passed in 2024, a two-thirds majority of the senate would be required to allow withdrawal.

The other measures, damaging as they are for now, are unlikely to have much, or even any, long-term effect on the world or even on America itself.

Trump and his advisers are well aware that, despite the trillions of dollars spent on its military, the United States has not won a significant war since 1945. Korea was a draw; Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were humiliating, bloody and costly losses. The risk of war greatly outweighs any possible advantage.

This puts the escapades in Venezuela and Greenland into perspective. There is no real prospect of America going to war, or wanting its military to occupy either country, given the threat of conflict, escalation and insurgency. They have seen this movie before.

So what’s the point?

Crosby ... look over there!

The dead cat strategy was defined by the Australian conservative political operative Lynton Crosby. Boris Johnson, a client, described the strategy like this: “There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

Jeffrey Epstein was causing Donald Trump a great deal of grief. It is very widely assumed, including by his crucial MAGA base, that the Epstein files will show the president up in a poor, possibly criminal, light. The apparently unstoppable furore produced the greatest threat since his return to the White House.

Then came a pair of ripely putrid dead cats: Venezuela and Greenland. Who’s talking about Epstein now? Problem solved.

But despite the constantly changing threats and bluster, countries around the world are not giving up on the United States. The strong international response to the Greenland threats show how completely the nations of the more-civilised West have given up on Trump. They are finally learning the lesson of the schoolground: stand up to bullies. They have not given up on NATO or on the United States, as the continuation of the AUKUS project shows. AUKUS –  weighed down by its irrelevance to modern warfare and its impossible complications and cost – may never actually happen. But that, for the moment, is not the point. The point is that these governments understand that Trump is a passing squall and will soon be gone.

International finance lives!

When Trump’s tariff onslaught began, it was assumed that world trade would be upended and pandemonium would result. But pandemonium stubbornly refused to emerge. What had looked to the president and his advisers like a cunning but straightforward plan turned out to be anything but.

They did not seem to understand that global supply chains are so closely integrated that stopping trade with another country – China, say, or Canada – would not help American businesses but would threaten their survival, so the president had to back down. The car industry was a good example, as the Detroit News wrote recently:

“An April estimate from Michigan's Center for Automotive Research suggested that Trump's Section 232 tariffs would combine to cost manufacturers, distributors and customers about $108 billion across the U.S. auto industry and $42 billion for the Detroit Three automakers. That $42 billion amount is nearly triple the combined 2024 profits of Ford, General Motors Co. and Stellantis NV.

“The magnitude of those potential costs diminished later in the year as Trump and his administration announced policies to mitigate the tariffs: partial exemptions for Mexican and Canadian goods; bilateral trade deals with the likes of Japan, the European Union and Korea; and a 3.75% tariff rebate on U.S.-assembled vehicles.”

Trump also forgot about bond vigilantes. They’re the traders who can sell off massive amounts of government debt, causing bond prices to tank and interest rates – which move in the opposite direction to prices – to soar. They make a lot of money in the process by buying the same bonds back after prices have slumped, but they also enforce harsh and effective fiscal discipline on governments. If Trump hadn’t surrendered, those higher interest rates would have dramatically increased the government’s borrowing costs for its enormous debt. At the end of 2025 the federal government owed $US38 trillion, an amount growing by $US6.2 billion a day. Interest payments in 2025 alone amounted to $US335 billion, or 19% of total government expenditure.

That “bond market tantrum” was a key reason for the administration’s backdown: there was no real choice.

The failure of the tariff strategy can also be seen in the data from Canada, the target of some of Trump’s most severe rhetorical and financial assaults. Early in 2025, the Canadian economy was hard hit, with employment falling significantly in three of the first six months after the US inauguration. But the downturn was short-lived.

By the end of 2025, it was clear that Canada had not only survived the assault but had prospered. Overall, employment grew by 1.1%. Manufacturing had suffered in the first months but bounced back strongly, finishing the year ahead. The only sector to suffer significant job losses was business support services – mainly consultants – a relatively minor employer.

Sixty years ago Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then the French finance minister, described the role of the US dollar as the world’s de facto reserve currency as an “exorbitant privilege”. It is regarded as a safe-haven currency; most world trade is denominated in US dollars; and US Treasury bonds are regarded as one of the safest investments on earth, purchased in huge quantities by other governments (including China).

As a result, money floods into government bonds, keeping interest rates well below what they otherwise would be. If the dollar no longer had that reserve-currency status, the US government would be in much more fiscal trouble than it already is. As this chart for 2024 shows, the dollar still has no real rival.

Nevertheless, the dollar’s domination is under long-term threat that began well before Trump. The proportion of international transactions denominated in the US currency has fallen from 70% at the turn of the century to under 60% today. Dennis Snower, International Research fellow at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, explains:

“For decades, America’s “exorbitant privilege” has allowed it to borrow cheaply, finance deficits without fear, and print money without stoking inflation. Foreign governments willingly held US Treasuries, trusting that they were the world’s safest asset. That trust underpinned the entire global financial order.

“But a reserve currency must rest on six pillars: macroeconomic stability, liquid financial markets, central bank independence, capital mobility, rule of law, and geopolitical trust.

“The current US administration has weakened every one of them.”

Central banks around the world have been running down their US Treasury holdings and buying thousands of tonnes of gold instead. The gold price has shot up, rising by 160% in two years. American investors bought so much gold from Australia, a major producer, that Australia’s trade balance with the US shifted temporarily from deficit to surplus.

But the US dollar, though under serious pressure, remains unchallenged for its reserve status by any other currency. Much of the long-term decline in dollar-denominated trade has been a trend to diversify from all major currencies (the dollar, the Euro and the pound) into alternatives, including the Australian and Nordic currencies.

Trump has badly shaken the financial world’s faith. But, once again, that disenchantment is with the current president and his administration, rather than with the US in general. The future will depend not on Trump himself, but on who follows him. If it’s a Trumpian acolyte, all bets will be off.

After Trump, what?

Four years is a long time in politics. At the time of writing, Trump has been president for just a year, with another three to go before he leaves, finally and forever. Despite the fevered dreams of Steve Bannon, there will be no third term: if Trump refuses to leave the White House, he will be removed by the Secret Service. He will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief and the armed services will obey the new president. Whoever that is.

But if each of those remaining three years are as mad as the first, will the US be changed forever? Will the rest of the world, disheartened and alienated by a capricious America uninterested in the rule of law, still see the US as a central defender of liberal democracy and the rules-based order?

At the heart of these questions is whether Trump can wreak permanent change on the key components of his own nation’s governance and of the world’s affairs. Or are those fundamentals strong enough to endure?

America’s decline as the “indispensable country” began well before Trump and will continue afterwards. He has hastened and dramatized that decline but its causes are systemic and far deeper than the current president is capable of affecting or even understanding.

And that is the core reason why the international system, and even the United States itself, will emerge intact from the craziness of the Trump era. Real and substantial change, even in matters of government policy, is extraordinarily difficult. Over 11,000 proposals for constructional change have been put forward; 27 of them succeeded, having made it through approval of both houses of congress and then being ratified by two-thirds of the states within a strict time-frame, usually seven years.

In any democratic system, checks and balances exist which are carefully constructed to make their removal almost impossible. At the core is the principle of the separation of powers: that the executive, the legislature and the judiciary should be independent of each other. Trump has been able, so far, to get his way because the current congress is supine. By controlling the Republican Party, the president controls the legislature and the separation of powers has been effectively suspended. He and previous Republican leaders have also made serious inroads into the independence of the courts.

But Trump does not have the political or administrative skills to achieve lasting, fundamental  reform. The institutional checks on power have not been abolished, merely deferred. Elections still happen; and it will be the mid-terms in November 2026 and the presidential election in November 2028 that will decide the country’s future, not Donald Trump.

There are unlikely to be further opportunities for Trump to manipulate the balance of the Supreme Court any further. The two oldest members, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – 77 and 75 respectively – are also the most conservative, but unlikely to want to retire just yet. The three progressive members, appointed by Obama and Biden, are between 55 and 71: they’re not going anywhere either. When eventual replacements are made, it will be by a future president.

The chances of that person being a Republican are low and getting lower by the moment. Polls and elections have consistently revealed the hunger for a new kind of government: one which redresses the massive economic and social inequalities, makes healthcare affordable, protects wages, improves working conditions and job security: in short, one which halts and reverses the accelerating trend away from a decent, and inclusive society that once, perhaps, existed but does not any longer.

Senior Republican politicians and strategists are warning about a “bloodbath” at the mid-terms. Texas senator Ted Cruz used just that word. Karl Rove wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headed: “Alarm Bells Ring, Are You Listening?”

Trump’s “grotesqueries have to stop”, he wrote.

“The administration is making mistakes that could result in a nasty 2026 midterm defeat for President Trump’s party … A furious party in revolt against its executive, who is plagued by Democratic investigations and opposition. Time’s a-wasting.”

If the mid-terms are bad for Trump and the party he now owns, the presidential election is likely to be even worse for them.

The Democratic Party is shucking off its old guard: the Clinton/Obama/Biden business-as-usual cabal is no longer in control. Establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden will not achieve the party’s nomination.

The primary process has a habit of identifying new and appealing candidates who appear as if from nowhere: Clinton and Obama, in their time, were among them.

The future of America, and its place in the world, will depend on whether the next president and future congresses can deliver the change that Clinton and Obama were elected to achieve, and which they failed so signally to achieve.