Donald Trump is the president and will be for the next four years. He has since spent his first 78 days in office stripping government programs, bolstering Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and curating economic policy seemingly designed to annihilate the stock market. As Trump knocks down decades worth of progress in a matter of days, he proves that new progress can be rebuilt just as fast.
What we have lost, and certainly may never get back, is our prestige.
For roughly the first 150 years of American history, we were not an exceptionally active international actor. Sure, we did our fair share of military intervention, exerted our fair share of influence and arbitrated our fair share of treaties, but to call the United States a major player in international politics during this period would be dishonest.
Of course, this changed in the latter half of the 20th century. In the wake of World War II, America turned itself into an irreplaceable actor on the world stage. Even well into the 21st century, we have worked to continue and expand our role as the protectors of freedom and democracy. Now, though, we may have lost our claim to that title.
The world is watching America, and what the world sees is an executive attempting to exert unchecked power over the American people. Trump has referred to himself as a king, promised to arrest and deport student protestors and threatened individuals who protest Elon Musk by defacing Tesla vehicles with prison sentences in El Salvador.
With that in mind, the U.S. loses its platform to champion freedom and democracy. The nation cannot criticize a non-democratically-elected leader since it not only pardoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow a democratic election but also elected the man who incited the insurrection in the first place.
Trump has also spent his tenure working hard to alienate our allies: he refers to Canada as the country’s 51st state, is adamant about the U.S. buying Greenland and has placed massive tariffs on nations across the globe. These attacks go far deeper than mere verbal assault or unfriendly behavior. They demonstrate contemporary America’s ambivalence regarding other nations’ sovereignty, which makes us far more infamous on the world’s stage, discouraging other nations from cooperating with us.
Another worrying facet of Trump’s doctrine is that it demonstrates the fickleness of an American alliance. The war in Ukraine is a stellar example of this. The Biden Administration sent Ukraine billions of dollars and pledged American support to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Trump Administration has since withdrawn a significant amount of support from Ukraine and insulted Zelenskyy during a now-infamous meeting in the Oval Office.
The stark contrast between the level of support from the two administrations is worrying, as it highlights how varying American foreign policies can be. How can foreign leaders trust any promise, treaty or support from the U.S. if those policies can be erased in a matter of days upon a change in administration? We can already see a response to these volatile foreign policy decisions in the European Union’s new plans to increase their military capabilities, thus severing the military dependence many of these nations have on the U.S. and severely decreasing our influence.
The Trump Administration is pushing away American allies and destroying decades-long cooperation. The more the administration does this, the harder it will be for future administrations to rebuild that trust. America may be a shining city on a hill, but as we continue to insult, alienate and threaten the world, our light will dim until all that is left is a nation that is a husk of its former self.
