Last year, I wrote about the start of Donald Trump’s second term and how it would be much worse than his first administration, beginning with an intentional shock campaign that has not let up since Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025. One year into the current regime, what happened as we predicted, what went differently, and what we didn’t predict?
No Masks – a brutal and cruel foreign policy
Throughout the past year, the Trump administration’s foreign policy demonstrated a contempt for the rules-based multilateral order that promoted values such as democracy and human rights. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out in his recent speech to the World Economic Forum, the rules-based order was often little more than a fiction. Previous administrations ignored it when convenient, using U.S. hegemonic and imperial power at will (the Iraq war and U.S. protection of Israel’s policy against Palestinians come to mind). And the U.S. has always used its significant power to pressure countries within multilateral institutions to get its way. But there was always at least an attempt to justify those actions (if hypocritically) within the norms of the multilateral order. The U.S. used its influence in multilateral forums because it thought the outcomes there mattered.
From the beginning, the Trump Administration has been less interested in using U.S. power to influence the order, and more interested in using it to smash the rules of the system. Trump’s outright rejection of multilateralism was obvious in the first round of executive orders he issued, including withdrawals from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Agreement. This has since been expanded significantly to include the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and dozens of other multilateral institutions that cover a wide range of issues. These withdrawals reflect a complete rejection of the purpose of multilateral institutions that enable international cooperation
What was significantly worse than we expected was the administration’s immediate attack on foreign aid. Within days of taking office, the administration initiated a “pause and review” of U.S. foreign assistance that quickly escalated to a near-total freeze that dragged on for months. This ultimately culminated in the dismantling and shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the cancellation of billions of dollars of development assistance. Thousands of deaths can already be traced to those actions; if the cuts are not reversed, this could rise to millions by 2030. The elimination of programs such as food assistance for refugees and HIV treatment, with no advance warning whatsoever, had particularly dire impacts. 2025 was the first year in decades where early childhood deaths increased, with foreign aid cuts (the vast majority from the U.S.) as a key factor.
Trump and his top lieutenants (especially Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth) went on to show little regard for historical alliances or values such as democracy and human rights, alienating Europe, acting chaotically with no apparent strategy on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, proposing to turn the Gaza Strip into a resort, bombing multiple countries with little pretense, and showering authoritarians with praise. The administration’s trade policy was equally chaotic, with massive tariffs announced with little warning, often used explicitly for political retaliation rather than any coherent economic rationale. “America First” started to look a lot like “Trump First,” where approving Trump hotels or other business deals seems to be the best way for countries to ensure good relations with the U.S. government.
The administration’s all-out assault on the existing world order accelerated in the early part of 2026, when Trump ordered a military attack on Venezuela and the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro. The action itself was jaw-dropping, with U.S. service members flying into Caracas in the middle of the night, fighting their way into a government residence, seizing a head of state and his spouse, and taking them back to the U.S. to be put in jail. But the minimal effort used to justify the operation – much of which seemed to boil down to “it’s what Trump wanted to do,” with no effort to defend the action under international law –
Within weeks, the situation in Venezuela was overtaken by concern that Trump was somehow serious about seizing Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. After a series of threats that seemed to genuinely include the possibility of a U.S. military invasion, European nations finally stood firm against Trump’s bullying. While that crisis has been sidestepped for now, the consequences of the near-showdown linger in badly damaged relations with our closest traditional allies.
Rather than promoting isolationism, a core part of the original “America First” philosophy, Trump and his advisors are intentionally destroying the rules-based international order and rejecting any constraints on U.S. power. “Might makes right” is now their explicit foreign policy: the strong take what they want.
More than simply reversing the specifics of the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions, it is this worldview that must ultimately be entirely rejected and undone. The world’s multilateral institutions are not perfect, and at times have been used to prop up a fundamentally unjust global hierarchy. But they can and do bring real benefits to people by tracking diseases, sharing technology, research, and medicine, or agreeing on protocols to make interaction and engagement easier. Children dying of hunger or preventable and treatable diseases is a moral stain on all of us. A rules-based, values-oriented world order – even one that is largely a convenient fiction – is clearly preferable to a “might makes right” world. It is something to build on and improve; we should imagine a world in which the foreign policy of great powers like the U.S. is based on principles of solidarity rather than supremacy. We will all suffer the consequences if Trump and Stephen Miller’s worldview is allowed to dominate.
Trump is not popular, but there is still work to do
While many of our worst fears have been realized in the past year, this is not a moment for despair, but a time to double down. Last year, I argued that Trump’s narrow electoral victory did not signal a broad mandate for his most extreme policy positions. This seems to be holding true. Trump’s approval ratings have dropped throughout his first year in office. In the wake of his brutal, inhumane, and unconstitutional crackdown on my home state of Minnesota, he’s now underwater on immigration, which many thought to be his strongest issue. More Americans say the country is on the wrong track than did a year ago.
This has not translated to clear policy changes yet, for a variety of reasons, including Congressional weakness, the media’s failure to manage the repeated lying from the administration, and the Republican Party’s fear that Trump will retaliate against anyone breaking rank. The administration does not seem to care about its unpopularity; its response has largely been denial and threats to the integrity of the electoral process, likely foreshadowing future attempts to stay in power regardless of the will of the voters.
Yet resistance has mattered. The administration has lost repeatedly in the court (even the Supreme Court may be considering some brakes on Trump’s action around the Federal Reserve), and has, for example, been forced to withdraw the National Guard in several states. And Minneapolis is showing the whole world that people are willing to brave not only incredibly cold weather, but also potentially deadly risks to themselves, to protect their neighborhoods and stand up for what is right.
There will not be a single moment in the immediate future that will snap the U.S. back to a pre-Trump or even a 2024 footing. Far too much damage has been done for that, and fixing much of that damage will be a long and arduous process. But that doesn’t mean that Trump and Miller’s view of the world is locked in. Resistance, building solidarity across impacted groups, and fighting for the world we really want matter more than ever. The destruction of the old world order is an opportunity to build a new, more just and sustainable one – but it will only be won through ongoing struggle.