In Back to the Future II, the neighborhood bully, Biff – a character modelled on Donald Trump – wins untold riches and power until he ends up face down in a pile of manure. As the saying goes, I’m getting déjà vu all over again.
The US President has frequently boasted about his thumping electoral victory. “The beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive,” he crowed in Time magazine. He claims his success is “unprecedented” when it is nothing of the kind. Trump won 49.8 per cent of the vote, against 48.3 per cent for Kamala Harris.
His job approval ratings stand at about 49 per cent, close to an all time high for him – but noticeably short of most US presidents in their honeymoon phase.
On this slender basis, Trump feels entitled to do as he pleases, treating people, institutions and nations like pieces in his own cosmic jigsaw.
To him, Gaza is a demolition dump ripe for beachfront redevelopment as the “Riviera of the Middle East”. Palestinians should be “cleaned out” of their homeland and other “peoples of the world” should move in, Trump declared at a bombshell press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’ll own it,” Trump offered, as his chief of staff Susie Wiles looked on, her eyes popping with astonishment.
Wiles, a veteran Republican, may have been remembering the Pottery Barn rule, as explained to President George W Bush by General Colin Powell before the invasion of Iraq: “You break it, you own it.”
After the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s favorability rating soared to 86 per cent. Trump could only dream of commanding a figure like that. By the time Bush left office in 2008, only 24 per cent of Americans approved of his performance, according to the Pew Research Center – fewer than the 37 per cent who still think doddery Joe Biden did a good job.
Trump is at the height of his powers now, but his downfall has begun. He is going to own everything he is breaking at home and abroad. His rampage through US government agencies and his ripping up of the law and constitution is thrilling his supporters and confounding his enemies. He is bullying nations in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Arctic. High on his own supply, he feels like Superman.
As happened with that other American bully, Senator Joe McCarthy, the architect of the 1950s Red Scare – when fear-mongering over the supposed rise of communism peaked – eventually somebody will say: “Have you no decency, Sir?” and the message will cut through. Or, to quote Trump, “We are gonna win so much you’re gonna get tired of winning.”
Trump's 'colonialism' is the opposite of America First
Read MoreWe are not there yet. On the contrary, the unelected “first buddy”, Elon Musk, and his band of juvenile geeks at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) are America’s masters now. Their revolutionary zeal is upending the lives of tens of thousands of real people with families and jobs, while Maga voters egg them on. USAID, which subsidises a few frivolous groups but supports the poorest people on Earth, is being gleefully fed into the “wood chipper” by the richest man on the planet.
The Department of Education is being abolished, Treasury records seized, the names of CIA agents leaked and FBI officers threatened, ostensibly to drain the Washington swamp. Meanwhile, Pam Bondi, the US Attorney General, has disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, leaving the US vulnerable to corruption and political interference by China and Russia, who are enjoying the spectacle.
One of Musk’s “baby-faced assassins”, Edward Coristine, 19, once went by the name of “Big Balls” online and is heir to his father’s popcorn fortune. The eldest of the group, Marko Elez, 25, has been forced to resign after The Wall Street Journal exposed his white supremacist rantings.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez posted on X last summer. But what really did for him was claiming he wouldn’t mind “if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth”.
Almost no Republican thinks Trump’s plans for Gaza make sense, but they are too cowed to say so. GOP members of Congress are terrified that Musk will use his vast billions to mount primary campaigns against them and drum them out of office. However, we know what Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, really thinks about Gaza, because he told Trump at a 2016 presidential debate, “The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald.”
Trump’s own advisers have walked back the idea of the US taking over the strip, letting it be known it was more of a bluff or negotiating tactic to persuade Middle Eastern nations to pay for Gaza’s reconstruction and that Palestinians would only need to be relocated “temporarily”. That hasn’t stopped Trump posting about his brainwave on Truth Social.
I’m reminded of what happened during the pandemic, when Trump would spout nonsense about bleach and whatever entered his head until the public got fed up with his antics. This mania will end. We just don’t know when.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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