President Donald Trump has been musing about whether he’s the most powerful man in world history, and judging by the results lately, the answer is definitely “no.”
It’s certainly true that Trump has technical tools at his disposal that would have astounded famous pre-20th century contenders for the title of most powerful man, whether Caesar, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne or Napoleon.
Trump’s power, though, isn’t defined by, say, the precision and explosive punch of the Tomahawk missile. As the leader of a constitutional republic that disperses power and depends ultimately on democratic consent, Trump is operating under constraints that routinely blunt his ambitions.
If the theme of the first year of his second term was aggression on all fronts, his second year has so far been defined by significant retreats.
Late last year, Trump surged DHS forces into Minneapolis, seeking to make an example of the Twin Cities after Somali immigrants were implicated in welfare fraud schemes. When the operation was met by fierce opposition from city and state leaders and resistance in the streets, the Trump administration steeled itself for a gargantuan test of wills — before Trump, realizing he was losing the battle of political optics, sent Tom Homan to Minneapolis to unwind the operation.
Last month, the Department of Justice settled Donald Trump’s $10 billion suit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. The department agreed to create a $1.8 billion fund for the compensation of victims of Democratic lawfare, a slush fund for his allies. Faced with adverse legal rulings and opposition in the Senate, the administration abandoned the scheme.
Then, of course, Trump signed a ceasefire with Iran that wasn’t close to the “unconditional surrender” that he had once demanded. The 14-point agreement included more U.S. than Iranian concessions, and Trump admitted that the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz had forced his hand.
None of these were incidental initiatives. They all involved core commitments of this president — to mass deportation, to turning on its head the lawfare campaign against him and to denying the Iranian regime a nuclear weapon.
They were also overreaches that displayed a heedlessness borne of hubris.
Trump isn’t one for incremental progress toward an objective. He prefers the grand gesture and big gamble. He’s drawn to the bridge too far when a drive a couple of blocks down the street would do just fine.
There was nothing that formally compelled him to remove DHS forces from Minneapolis or to relieve the military pressure on Iran, both of which were within his legitimate powers. It was the poor polling and the potential damage to Republican prospects in the midterms that obliged Trump to declare victory and go home.
The president may enjoy thinking of how he can do things that a Roman emperor never would have imagined, yet Marcus Aurelius wasn’t hypersensitive to how stories were playing in the mass media, or to the latest public-opinion surveys.
As the creature of a democratic republic, Trump inherently is mindful of those considerations, which is one reason that it’s been a year of retreats. Trump, surely, doesn’t think of it that way. As Gen. Oliver Smith put it during the Korean War, he’s merely attacking in a different direction — although not the one he’d intended.
Rich Lowry is on X
@RichLowry.
