Is Donald Trump a great president? That’s the question posed by John F. Harris in Politico, less in the spirit of endorsing Trump than suggesting that he is nothing less than “the greatest figure of his age.” Trump has now dominated American politics for over a decade. The Biden administration increasingly looks like a mere interregnum now that Trump has been elected, or, if you prefer, restored, to power. Joe Biden and company may have winced at Trump’s farrago of boasts and promises during his inaugural speech at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, but it was clear that Trump is determined to sweep out the ancien regime and replace it with his new ruling establishment.

Unlike the Democrats, who retreated to technocratic policies during the Biden administration, Trump has a sweeping vision for a “golden age.”  A new Monroe doctrine. Raising tariffs. Energy independence. Sealing the border. Ending DEI. “Nothing,” he declared, “will stop us.”

Trump, as CNN’s Scott Jennings noted, is at the “apex of his power.” One symbol of that power was not merely that he surrounded himself with billionaire tech bros at the Capitol, but that he relegated the Republican governors and other conservative worthies to Emancipation Hall. Only after he delivered his inaugural address did Trump condescend to address these GOP stalwarts. They had to stand patiently as he embarked upon a prolonged and tedious denunciation of his numerous enemies, ranging from Liz Cheney to Adam Kinzinger to Mark Milley (whose portrait, unveiled only last week, was promptly removed at White House orders from a Pentagon hallway and banished to parts unknown).

At the President’s Room at the Capitol, before a Capitol One Arena crowd and later in the evening in the Oval Office, Trump issued a torrent of executive orders that are supposed to instill shock and awe in his adversaries, ranging from withdrawing from the World Health Organization the Paris climate accords to abolishing birthright citizenship. But how efficacious they will be is an open question. Even though Republicans control both houses of Congress, Trump felt constrained to issue executive orders to create a sense of momentum and many of his orders are likely to be entangled in legal battles for several years. Three lawsuits have already been filed by public interest groups that are targeting the nongovernmental “Department of Government Efficiency” which is supposed to be led by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk who has commandeered an office in the Old Executive Office building.

The issues that Trump will confront in the coming months are far more treacherous than targeting federal employees. Prime among them are extending the original iniquitous 2017 federal tax cuts and raising the debt ceiling. With a slender majority in the House, Trump may be forced to compromise with Democrats to achieve passage of a tax bill in return for hiking the debt limit. Or he may go for a grand bargain that includes annulling the debt limit. The worst-case scenario: he digs in his heels and America crosses the threshold of defaulting on the whopping $36 trillion in federal debt. The Treasury Department already warned Congress that it would need to begin taking what it called “extraordinary measures” on January 21 to avoid a default.

Then there is the Ukraine war. Judging from his remarks on Monday night, Trump is hoping that Russian president Vladimir Putin comes to the bargaining table: “he should make a deal … I think Russia’s going to be in big trouble.” But there is no indication that Putin shares Trump’s view of the matter. As he makes slow but steady progress in eastern Ukraine, Putin seems unruffled by the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded that Russia has incurred during his invasion.

Perhaps Trump envisions invading Panama to regain control of the canal as a nifty diversion from these larger problems. “We’re taking it back,” he declared.  Or perhaps Trump is indulging in dreams of a new American empire, as Yale professor Greg Grandin warns, that would include Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Grandin reminds us that William Kristol has already called for making Cuba a state—he apparently in 2021 that “60 years at 50 states is enough.” Sometime-neocon Secretary of State Marco Rubio might be on board with that notion as well.

No doubt Trump has consistently inveighed against the neocons and called himself a “peacemaker” in his inaugural. But he is nothing if not opportunistic. The costs could be high. As Grandin aptly notes, “One lesson the past teaches, especially the imperialist past Mr. Trump is invoking, is that opening the kind of belligerent, multifront balance of power that is in operation today—with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, with all countries, everywhere, angling for advantage—will lead to more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war.” Trump would not be the first president whose dreams of greatness were foiled by quixotic quests abroad.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

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