Lost in the din and disruption of the first months of US President Donald Trump’s second term are the reasons why Trump returned to power in 2024 with a larger mandate than he got the first time around in 2016. Among those reasons lie clues to the Trump 2.0 approach to foreign policy, which has been a rude — and for realists, overdue — wake-up call to much of the international community, including those who have for decades taken alliances and understandings with the United States for granted.
These factors are important to understand as there have been several comparisons made recently of the United States today with Germany in the 1930s — underscoring the magnitude of the transformation within the United States and its ramifications across the world.
They are also important lessons for other societies and political systems: if ruling elites become complacent, they will pay at the ballot box. If the political system doesn’t include ballot boxes and a credible electoral process and a social contract on peaceful transition of power, change will come in the form of revolution.
Donald Trump’s comeback in 2025 only affirmed that his rise to power in 2016–17 was not an aberration but a product of long-running, festering issues in the United States that complacent, largely coastal liberal elites had for decades — while triumphing in victories for progressive values at home and wedded to liberal hegemony abroad — ignored or failed to address. Trump was only the agent who poured gasoline on long-smoldering discontent waiting for just such a maverick outsider.
Discontent is a feature of the United States, long a battleground over religion and morality; immigration and nativism; and isolationism and globalisation. The ghosts of its own history are also very much alive. Fear — of shadowy cabals and conspirators, of foreigners and Communists, of the immoral and the ungodly, all seeking to destroy the country from without and within — has a long history in the United States and is easily stoked by populist demagogues and amplified by both corporate and social media.
The economic conditions that paved the way for Trump’s rise go back to the 1990s and have been well documented — albeit largely ignored. In November 1999 for instance, tens of thousands filled the streets of Seattle, Washington to protest against a meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). They included environmentalists, labour unions, indigenous groups, non-government organisations and students.
Initially,