May 2, 2025
Trump 2.0: An Imperial Presidency, or the People’s President?
By Barry Scott Zellen
Donald Trump once said, “I Run the Country and the World” and his critics quickly pounced on America’s imperial president, and the man who would be king. Like many things POTUS says, this needs to be taken with a grain of salt mixed in with a lot of context. It used to be a truism that the American President ran the world, or at least much of it -- with the phrase “leader of the free world” ubiquitous across party lines. Indeed, the American President did run the world from the end of the Cold War to around when Russia began to reassert itself 15 or so years ago within its former Soviet territories. From the end of WWII through the fall of the Berlin Wall, America ran half the world -- and it was the most economically productive half, so much so by the end of the Cold War the other half of the planet wanted to join our side. From the Soviet collapse in 1991 through to the Twin Towers' collapse on 9/11, America did rule the world, or most of it anyway. But since around 2014 when Russia began its re-expansion, America's supremacy has been gradually eroded -- fueled more by China's meteoric global rise than Russia's more limited resurgence -- with a potential bifurcation of world politics into familiar Cold War era blocs under way.
Indeed, President Trump's "America First" vision as it translates into foreign, defense, and security policy is increasingly hemispheric in its focus (with new potential "hotspots" for armed confrontation being in the Americas, such as our old military stomping ground in Panama or new ones like Greenland and maybe even Canada), with his "Liberation Day" tariffs potentially decoupling America's economy from the global economy. Indeed, before long the President may be back to running just the Americas (and potentially, only North America) as in the days of the Monroe Doctrine.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/trump_2_0_an_imperial_presidency_or_the_people_s_president.html
