In his State of the Union address in February, President Donald Trump improvised a new riff on one of his favorite lines.
“Please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much; we can’t take it anymore,” Trump said, suggesting some citizens were discombobulated by a deluge of unheard-of success.
One war, several profound Supreme Court rulings and innumerable late-night social media outbursts later, Trump is claiming his biggest win yet, saying he’s made American great again for its 250th birthday.
Trump, as always, is spinning a bit of truth with a larger helping of hyperbole as he tracks deeper into a second term that’s creating unfathomable disruption.
But as he busily builds a legacy in cement and marble — soon to include a triumphal arch and a towering White House ballroom — it’s too early to say whether he’ll emulate truly consequential presidents with wins that long outlive his administration.
Trump took yet another victory lap on Tuesday after the Supreme Court finished its run of blockbuster high-summer verdicts.
Broadly, the court’s right-wing majority has expanded Trump’s authority — partly because, like him, it envisages a stronger presidency. It’s also doled out big political wins for Trump on issues like immigration. But it’s also trimmed his zeal for limitless power when confronted with the plain language of the Constitution.
The court has felled two pillars of the MAGA wish list. It squashed Trump’s trade war by ruling in February that the law doesn’t permit the president to unilaterally impose tariffs. On Tuesday, it thwarted one audacious immigration goal, striking down his executive order to end birthright citizenship. Chief Justice John Roberts said the intent of the authors of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was crystal-clear. “We keep that promise today,” he wrote for the majority.
Yet the majority has often delivered wins to Trump on immigration, scoring wins for a policy approach that helped him twice win the White House. Last week, it limited the role of courts in adjudicating the cases of people from nations such as war-torn Syria and Haiti granted temporary protected status to stay in the US. In another victory for the White House this term, the justices ruled Trump can revive a controversial policy that aims to curb asylum claims at a port of entry.
One of Trump’s most tangible win-loss records is in his continuing dominance of the Republican Party. He loves dancing on the political graves of MAGA heretic lawmakers he primaried. But there are signs his stranglehold may be loosening as pandemonium in the GOP House majority Tuesday further threatened his attempts to improve a fallow legislative record. And an anti-Trump faction in the Senate is thwarting his attempts to pass a law that could cull midterm voter rolls.
Trump sees a global winner, while critics perceive the opposite
Trump also claims he’s on an unprecedented win streak overseas.
“We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore,” he said when opening the Great American State Fair last week. “We’re not a joke anymore. (We’re the) most powerful country in the world.”
If making America the world most unpredictable force counts as a victory, he might be right. But by traditional measures of global leadership, Trump has left the US isolated, mistrusted and facing serious questions about its relative power.
He often highlights the stunning special forces raid that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as exemplifying America’s unique power. Such hubris may have helped lead the president into a war with Iran that started with strategic success in military strikes but that degenerated into a stalemate. His memorandum of understanding to end the war hands Tehran huge benefits for little in return. The Islamic Republic will have to fully comply with Trump’s claim that it has forever renounced nuclear weapons for the war to be anything other than a US failure.
Still, at the NATO summit in Turkey next week, Trump will bask in the increased defense spending of alliance members. Secretary General Mark Rutte arrived in the Oval Office last week with a chart showing what he called “The Trump Trillion.” He told the press pool: “This is your president, but also the leader of the free world, taking the leadership role as is necessary.”
But experts fear Trump will still erupt next week at alliance states that have yet to honor their pledges. Other presidents failed to win such commitments, but the price for the 47th’s victory is steep. The transatlantic alliance that won the Cold War is reeling. And Trump is feuding with the few allied leaders he once liked, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Chaos as victory
But fractures are a defining characteristic of Trumpism.
His fans see chaos as itself a marker of a winning presidency. They relish the downfall of global and Washington elites. Critics might see Elon Musk’s bid to eviscerate swaths of the federal government as a fizzle. But DOGE embodied Steve Bannon’s declaration in the first few days of the first term that Trump would oversee the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
So when Washington sages judge Trump, they grade on a scale that MAGA wouldn’t even recognize.
Yet Trump’s version of winning often leaves destruction in its wake in the form of crushed democratic values. The consequences can be lasting — think of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, US citizens who were shot dead in Minnesota during protests against immigration sweeps.
Musk, the world’s richest man, celebrated feeding the US Agency for International Development into the “wood chipper.” The agency might have been bloated, but it saved millions of lives, embodied American values in the developing world and helped build US soft power.
In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump wrote that he has an advantage because he “thinks big” while “most people think small” because they are “afraid of winning.”
This may work in real estate. But is it a suitable yardstick for a presidency?
Trump’s current political struggles suggest not. By traditional indicators — unemployment; GDP growth; and even inflation, which is higher than ideal but far below its heights of the Biden administration — the economy is robust.
And his Cabinet sees its success in dollars. “The Dow is over 50,000 right now” former Attorney General Pam Bondi once roared, as if rising stock prices were answer enough to claims that she was abetting a lawless presidency.
But voters see the economy differently. They care about paying the rent, access to healthcare, buying groceries and finding childcare.
If Trump’s mockery of the concept of affordability sends Republicans to defeat in November’s midterm elections, it will be hard to judge his presidency as a win. His record-low opinion polls might be a better tell.
When presidencies end, they’re often remember for only a few big-ticket wins.
Future historians may struggle to understand how Trump hijacked the nation’s psyche for a decade. And posterity will not judge him by his own scorecard. He’ll stack up against Abraham Lincoln, who saved the union, and Franklin Roosevelt, who beat the Great Depression and won World War II.
History will require something greater of Trump than epochal disruption. It will judge whether his wins — beyond an undeniable expansion of presidential authority — outlast the blistering sealant in his renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
