Donald the Great

Save this storySave StorySave this storyThe Great American State Fair, the centerpiece of the official celebration of the United States’ 250th birthday, was made in the image of the president who called it into being. On its face, the fair, slated for June 25 to July 10, was a bombastic mess. President Donald Trump promised “the most unforgettable birthday party any country has ever seen,” and for reasons unintended this may well prove to be true. Half the fair’s announced musical guests promptly dropped out. Power outages crippled the Ferris wheel and melted ice cream. On July 4, a storm drove the fair’s guests into museums for shelter. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which Trump has tried to dismantle, quickly reached capacity. Later, once the rains cleared, an attempt was made to put on “the largest fireworks display in history.” Air pollution levels in Washington, DC, increased more than sixfold.

However ridiculous Trump’s public commemoration appeared, the president had private reasons to celebrate. In the week leading up to the nation’s birthday, it was revealed that in 2025, Trump had raked in some $1.4 billion in income from his cryptocurrency ventures. Among those efforts was the $TRUMP meme coin, which The New York Times characterized as having “no intrinsic value itself” but was instead “a bet on the aura around Mr. Trump.” The bet went swimmingly for the house and poorly for its takers. By July 4, $TRUMP had declined 97 percent from its peak. Meanwhile, Trump appeared to have had the most lucrative period of his long and dubious career as a businessman, all in the first year of his second term. “Presidential historians said they could identify no other president in American history,” wrote New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton, “who entered into new business enterprises just before moving into the White House, and then continued to personally profit from them during his term.”

Trump’s quarter millennial—featuring overt buffoonery and historic grifting as neighbors—was characteristic of his two presidencies. But both emanate from something his opponents have never quite grasped. Trump is not just the most acquisitive politician of his era, he is also the most visionary, gifted with the ability to appreciate his country’s darkest pathologies and profit from them. Perhaps more ­importantly, Trump understood that the inanities and shibboleths of this country’s alleged institutional guardians, its senators, lawyers, elite universities, and free press, were little more than that, and the guardrails of this liberal democracy were illusions easily dispelled by one who would dare. One such as Trump.

Through a mix of moxie, cynicism, and misanthropy, Trump has made himself into the dominant American of our age. Sometimes a man meets his moment, and Trump met his in the wake of a black presidency and a conservative movement doggedly and patiently pursuing a decades-long counterrevolution. The marriage of Trump’s charisma to a fundamentalist right wing has been bountiful: three Supreme Court justices in four years, the subsequent destruction of national abortion rights, the banishment of affirmative action, the hollowing of the Voting Rights Act.

The anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once said he wanted to shrink the government to a size where he could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” No president has more committed himself to this ethos than Trump. His Department of Government Efficiency slashed government payrolls, destroyed USAID, and has made a mockery of public health. That hundreds of thousands are projected to die around the world as a result of the administration’s foreign aid cuts, that the United States is enduring its worst measles outbreak in decades, that Americans are avoiding salad for fear of explosive diarrhea is, for those who believe the government that governs best is the one that governs least, a feature, not a bug.

Whatever Trump’s disdain for regulation, he has proved an aggressive employer of state power against the perceived enemies of the conservative movement. Universities in Texas are seizing and scrubbing syllabi, and some of the country’s most storied institutions of higher learning have been cowed into paying protection money. Journalists, long a thorn in Trump’s side, have watched their bosses bend the knee—killing editorials, deriding their reporters to the president, and settling lawsuits widely criticized as meritless. After Trump forced ABC News into a humiliating settlement, he subsequently threatened to sic the attorney general on the outlet’s star reporter, Jonathan Karl. “Your company paid me $16 million,” Trump told Karl. “So maybe [the attorney general] will have to go after you.” Karl would be wise to take the threat seriously: For Trump counts among his growing cast of supplicants some of the most powerful law firms in the country—firms that once championed progressive causes. He has extracted nearly a billion in pro bono legal services from these firms and even turned them into servants of the regime.

Conditioned by such feckless opposition, Trump has taken his intimidation tactics abroad. The second Bush administration pushed the boundaries of international law. But Trump, summarily killing alleged drug runners on the high seas, abducting a foreign leader to face disputed drug-trafficking charges, brazenly assassinating a foreign head of state, has shattered those limits and burned the order they were designed to preserve. “No stupid rules of engagement,” said Trump’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, as the administration sought to bring Iran’s regime to its knees. “No politically correct wars.” Most interestingly, it is here, in a world of theocracy and despotism, not self-styled democracy and freedom, that Trumpism finds its limits. The Trump administration, facing a foe that actually believes in things, is presently headed to a strategic defeat in Iran.

Back at home, Trump has been fortunate to face an elite opposition that mostly believes in handing over their lunch money. He has not defeated them through diabolical genius. He is not playing three-dimensional chess so much as just punching people, in the great assurance that they will not punch back. That could always change. Perhaps, emboldened by a majority, Democrats who once urged their party to “roll over and play dead” or made cryptic appeals to a higher power will be forced to recover their fight and embrace the drastic means necessary to roll back the worst of the age of Trump.

But some things can’t be unseen. The example that Trump has set, the scope of what is possible should one embrace the dark powers of the White House, will not dissipate. It turns out that you can deploy secret police onto American streets. You can deport immigrants in defiance of the courts. You can have the Justice Department badger your enemies. And you can become very rich while doing it. And some of the most powerful sectors in America, those who most loudly extol their own love of country, will stand around and watch you do it. Asked why he was making deals during his second term, Trump gave a succinct and chillingly accurate summation: “I found out that nobody cared.” And to the extent that there is a genius to Trump, it is in his apprehension of this reality—so very few people who matter care. When you’re president, they let you do it.

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