Washington (United States) (AFP) – On a sunny January morning in Florida, Donald Trump went shopping for marble and onyx for his new White House ballroom. A few hours later, he was bombing Venezuela. It was just one day in an extraordinary year since his return to office, but it summed up how Trump has reshaped the US presidency through the sheer force of his own personality.
And as he enters his second year back in the White House, Trump is increasingly acting as if there are no checks on his power — either at home or abroad. “He has really personalized the presidency,” Noah Rosenblum, professor of law at New York University, told AFP. If the former reality TV star’s first term dominated news cycles because of its chaos, Trump’s second has done so because of a single-minded determination to stamp his mark on the world’s most powerful job.
He began with a freewheeling Oval Office appearance on January 20, 2025, during which he pardoned hundreds of pro-Trump rioters who attacked the US Capitol four years earlier. The Republican leader has kept up the pace ever since. An unprecedented blitz of executive orders, outrageous pronouncements, and directives for the persecution of his political opponents came in the following days and months. Trump has shaken the foundations of American democracy as the country prepares to mark its 250th anniversary, caused global turmoil with his tariffs, and upended the global order.
“There is one thing. My own morality,” Trump, who is the first convicted felon to be elected president, told The New York Times when asked if there were limits on his power. At times Trump has also cultivated what looks like a cult of personality, revamping the White House and building a $400 million ballroom, and adding his name to the famed Kennedy Center for the performing arts. And 2026 dawned with an unapologetic Trump Unbound: ordering the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, threatening Greenland, and sending immigration agents on a deadly operation into Minnesota.
Rosenblum said the past year had “revealed that the old system had less legitimacy and was more fragile than I had understood, than was widely understood.”
– ‘Expect trouble’ –
Trump has begun 2026 with a bang. Yet it could also finally show the limits of a presidency that revolves around the whims of one man who will turn 80 years old in June. The biggest inflection point could come in November’s midterm elections. While these votes for the control of Congress are always effectively a referendum on sitting presidents, this year’s will more than ever be a verdict on Trump himself. His approval numbers remain low, with the White House battling to show that his economic plans are working despite voter anger over affordability.
If Republicans take a hammering, there are questions about whether Trump could seek to overturn the results, like he tried when Democrat Joe Biden beat him to the presidency in 2020. “I expect trouble,” William Galston of the Brookings Institution told AFP. “He is more actively involved in the management of the midterms than any president I’ve seen.”
Galston said, however, that Trump was unlikely to be able to mount any meaningful challenge if Republicans lose control of the House, which would leave him a lame duck president for the remaining two years of his term. Trump faces challenges on other fronts too. The Supreme Court could clip Trump’s wings on tariffs, while his bypassing of Congress by the use of executive orders could also backfire, said Galston. “The problem with governing by fiat is that what you weave by day, your successor can unravel by night, which leads to far fewer permanent achievements,” Galston said.
With Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Ukraine, and Gaza on Trump’s agenda in 2026, the self-professed “America First” president also appears preoccupied by foreign policy. “That’s a problem politically because a lot of the people who voted for him didn’t vote for that, they voted for them to focus on the economy. He’s paid a significant price for that,” added Galston.
© 2024 AFP
