The world has a verdict on 100 days of Trump 2.0: Wow, what a loser [View all]

The world has a verdict on 100 days of Trump 2.0: Wow, what a loser
His return to the global stage has been an extended, catastrophic self-own. Yeah, he's dangerous — but not serious

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published April 27, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) There may be no way back to respectability for a supposedly major nation, let alone a global power, after “Vladimir, STOP!” Amid the daily storm of sewage and plague of frogs that is Donald Trump's second administration, it’s difficult to say that anything beggars belief. But that the duly elected president would make such a plea to another world leader in public — if the third-rate social media platform he personally owns counts as public space — and would perceive such an action as manly and strong, as he clearly does, is inconceivably far beyond fiction, pathos or parody.

Many people with my approximate job description have been trying to take the measure of the Trump 2.0 presidency after its first 100 days. That feels like one fallacious premise piled on top of another: First of all, it’s an entirely arbitrary benchmark, one that doesn’t strongly correlate with how a president will be remembered; second, the Trump presidency can only be measured in days or hours, sometimes in minutes. Whatever premise appears valid about Trumpism today will look stupid tomorrow; policies are proposed, enforced, insisted upon in court with gratuitous lies and then partly recanted or fully reversed.

At risk of immediately being proven wrong, I will suggest that this past week was when the penny at least temporarily or conditionally dropped for Donald Trump: While the rest of the world views him as dangerous, it does not take him seriously. Trump has projected his fatuous fantasies about global domination onto the wall of world opinion — whether it’s more like Plato’s cave or the light show announcing the opening of a mall in suburban Indianapolis is a matter of individual judgment — while at the same time backing away from all forms of international engagement and obligation. The contradictions are embarrassing, abundant and obvious to everyone. As we supposedly measure these things, Trump is the most powerful individual in the world. He is also a massive global embarrassment, the glaring flaw that proves the entire Rube Goldberg machine is no longer working.

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Don’t get me wrong: I make no predictions about what this person will or will not do. But with Trump’s Maple Leaf delusion blowing up in his face, his incoherent tariff policies torpedoing the global economy and his purported deal-making brilliance accomplishing less than nothing in Ukraine, he looks nothing like an all-powerful stable-genius conqueror-slash-peacemaker on the world stage. He looks like a hapless loser. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/27/the-world-has-a-verdict-on-100-days-of-20-wow-what-a-loser/