The most consequential president of our lifetime

David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

There are dates when it is possible to pinpoint when the world changed:

July 4, 1776: The signing of the Declaration of Independence, a signal moment in the history of colonialism and democracy. June 28, 1914: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting in motion the First World War. Nov. 7, 1917: the Russian Revolution that created the first Communist state, with reverberations throughout the 20th century. Oct. 24, 1929: “Black Thursday,” the stock-market crash leading to the Great Depression.

Jan. 30, 1933: The formal appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. Sept. 1, 1939: Germany’s invasion of Poland, the start of the Second World War. Aug. 6, 1945: The atomic-bomb attack on Hiroshima, representing the beginning of the nuclear age. Nov. 9, 1989: The fall of the Berlin Wall. Sept. 11, 2001: The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

To this list, we can add one more: Jan. 20, 2025. The day Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of the day the 47th President took the ancient oath of office. What has occurred in the year since has left wreckage on every continent, reshaped economies, shattered strategic trade partnerships, endangered alliances, shifted migration patterns, and smashed long-established conventions and customs of political behaviour.

There’s more. Definitions of “presidential” rhetoric were overhauled. The course of festering rivalries and wars in the Middle East and Europe was altered. Expectations of the truth in public life were upended. The markets for houses, steel, automobiles, summertime Maine seashore rentals, California wine, artillery shells, addictive narcotics, Canadian passports, and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts tickets were disrupted.

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The most stable republic in the history of humankind has been shaken to its roots, its institutions reshaped, its Constitutional counterbalance disrupted. And in the course of all this, perceptions of the United States – the sinews of its founding document visible in the constitutions and institutions of scores of countries, and of democratic values themselves, once in the ascendancy across the globe – have been transformed.

One date. One man. One political earthquake that rumbled across the globe, the aftershocks still being felt a year later.

“We are living in an unprecedented world, totally unrelated to history,” said Mark A. Peterson, a political scientist at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. “So much has been disrupted, and a great share of the population doesn’t know a world that is different from what they are experiencing now. It is hard to imagine what the eventual equilibrium is going to be.”

The American socialist and journalist John Reed is remembered for writing Ten Days That Shook the World, his 1919 account of the Russian Revolution. Mr. Trump almost certainly will be remembered as the author of a year, beginning last January, that also changed the world, though its permanent significance will be determined by whether Mr. Trump’s movement suffers setbacks in November’s midterm elections; whether it survives a more fundamental challenge in the 2028 presidential elections; and whether the disruptive, conservative waves that he has set in motion crash into future decades.

All those elements comprise the mystery of the age – and perhaps the most consequential question of our time.

But there is little question that the United States, and its global influence and its role as the world’s sheriff and economic arbiter, has been altered, perhaps permanently, by a president who resembles nothing more than Winston Churchill’s description of early 20th-century French prime minister Georges Clemenceau: a “ferocious, aged, dauntless beast of prey.”

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No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, almost a century ago, has been so powerful, so adept at using the levers of executive power, so transformative in so many ways, across so many realms and so many national borders. No president since FDR – perhaps no president since Abraham Lincoln or Andrew Jackson, both giants of the 19th century – will have left the office so altered.

“Trump has done things beyond anyone’s experience or expectations,” said Sarah Purcell, a Grinnell College historian. “He has combined all the things previous presidents have tried to do to boost the executive and done them all at once, with very little resistance from the other branches of the government. It’s been one of the most significant years in American government since the beginning of the Republic.”

Almost nothing in American culture has been left untouched or unchanged by the depth and breadth of the Trump Revolution, as it may be described by future historians the way they now speak of the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which in hindsight seems a mere faint course correction in the American story. During the 40th president’s two terms – regarded then as a disruptive period – no institutions were undermined, no Constitutional imperatives were challenged, no international understandings were breached, no one worried about the survival of the country’s political culture or breathed the words “civil war.”

None of that is the case at the end of the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term.

“Important, momentous, fateful – these words absolutely apply,” said Amy Dru Stanley, a University of Chicago historian. “There’s been a subversion of the principles of the American Revolution. It’s almost like the re-installation of a sovereign who claims monarchical power.”

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Mr. Trump crafted this new world order by force of will and by a touch of the elements of a phrase made famous in another context by Bismarck: blood (in some cases in the presidentially ordered roundups and deportations of migrants) and iron (in the determination of the President and his top aides to overhaul the government and change its direction).

This wasn’t accomplished without assistance. It came with aid from a legislative branch that may prompt historical studies years from now that, borrowing the title of John F. Kennedy’s 1940 book Why England Slept, which explored the failure of the British to avert the Second World War, might be titled Why Congress Slept. The legal justification came from a Supreme Court with a conservative majority willing if not eager to break its own precedents and elevate the executive branch to new heights of prerogative and power.

“Trump’s vision of executive power is as expansive as any president’s, certainly since Roosevelt,” said Marc Selverstone, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “His willingness to test the bounds of that power exceeds all other presidents since FDR. He’s supported in this by a legislature less willing to constrain executive power than any I remember. He’s also supported in this by a Supreme Court that’s deferred to executive authority and has been aided by a Democratic Party that’s been unable to check the Republicans.”

Mr. Trump put his personal stamp on American culture, bent the news media, higher education, law firms, major corporations, even changed the shape of the White House. It would require a construction crew to remove his name from what is now the Donald Trump-John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a bureaucratic manoeuvre to remove the description of the new additions to the Navy, which the President says will have “guns and missiles at the highest level,” as Trump-class battleships. (It is fitting that the first ship will be named the USS Defiant.)

It would take a decade to rebuild the federal bureaucracy, and surely as long to replace the expertise that has been lost, should one of Mr. Trump’s successors decide to do so. Management studies suggest that in the public sector at least, pared-down work forces often don’t return to their earlier size. The same can be said of immigration; it’s unlikely that immigration rates will return to Biden-era levels anytime soon.

These conditions may suggest the emergence of a second round of the kind of Republican domination that marked the United States between 1869 and 1933, when the GOP held the White House for 48 of 64 years, though this time with vastly expanded presidential powers. But Mr. Trump wasn’t re-elected in 2020, and sober Gallup Organization poll numbers, which put the President’s support at 36 per cent, the lowest of his second term, suggest the Republicans face a difficult battle to retain power on Capitol Hill and, in three years’ time, the White House.

“Americans know who Trump is, his personal characteristics, his boldness, and they’re not happy with him,” said Karlyn Bowman, a conservative public-opinion analyst who is a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. “His strength was an asset compared to Kamala Harris, and people gravitated to him because they wanted a strong person who’d shake things up. Now they’re dealing with it, people think he has gone too far, and his ratings are in a danger zone.”

That doesn’t mean the changes in the presidency and in the broader architecture of American political institutions will revert to a norm established by past presidents. A newly elected Democratic president isn’t likely to scale back presidential prerogatives and indeed may find political advantage in using the Trump advances to pare away the Trump executive orders and other tools that the President re-discovered, enhanced, or invented.

That’s what Barack Obama did to many of George W. Bush’s initiatives, and what Joe Biden did to much of what Mr. Trump put in place in his first term.

But doing the same to what Mr. Trump has done even in the first year of this term will be difficult because the changes have been so vast and have been promulgated with such regularity and intensity. A New York Times study found that Mr. Trump made an important decision, or at in the very least made news, in each of the first 329 days of the current term.

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Mr. Trump is no modern-day version of the characterization that the colourful Earl Long (governor of Louisiana off and on between 1939 and 1960) made of one of his opponents: “He won’t say nothing, he won’t promise nothing, and if he gets in, he won’t do nothing.” Mr. Trump, a chaos-monger par excellence, also isn’t like the early 20th-century liberals who believed progress was dependent on an orderly society. He is sui generis, prompting a descriptor that leaves no doubt in listeners’ minds when it is employed: “Trump-like.”

Though the effect of his presidency may seem clear even now, the longer-perspective evaluation will take years, maybe generations. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Survey of presidential scholars placed Mr. Trump dead last among all American chief executives on the basis of his first term. Scholars identifying themselves in the separate categories of conservatives and Republicans placed him second to last, above Mr. Biden.

“We didn’t know the effect of Lincoln and FDR until after they were gone,” said Matthew Dallek, a George Washington University historian. “But there’s no question he’s had an bigger impact than anything we’ve seen in the modern era. There’s a good case to make that Trump has dramatically changed the country and changed how the United States is perceived around the world. We don’t know how long that shock to the system will last, but he’s unravelled so many things that we expected would last forever.”

But Mr. Trump has shown that nothing – certainly not customs and conventions, many of them unwritten, nor even legal barriers – lasts forever. The question that haunts the country as the second year of his second term approaches is whether the United States that the world has known for 250 years will last another decade, let alone forever.