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The age of capitulation that defined Donald Trump’s return to office may be starting to fade.
This is a movie that’s been seen before: US President Donald Trump makes demands. When the other side does not give him what he wants, he escalates with bombastic threats of crippling punishment. The
other side surrenders.
Except that Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, evidently has not read the script. His refusal to buckle in the face of Trump’s trade ultimatum even at the cost of retaliatory tariffs has flipped the narrative of the president’s second term. Instead of giving in, Carney is testing whether defiance is a viable strategy against Trump.
The age of capitulation that defined Trump’s return to office may be starting to fade. World leaders and domestic institutions are, in some cases at least, showing less willingness to submit to Trump’s will. European leaders have refused to join his war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel flatly rejected his Gaza Strip plan. Gulf Arab states forced him to abandon plans to charge a shipping toll in the Strait of Hormuz.
Universities and law firms are rebuffing his directives rather than signing on the bottom line. Bond markets are rebelling against his fiscal policies. Even the ABC network, whose $16 million payment to settle a Trump lawsuit was seen as an early example of yielding to the president, has discovered that it did not buy peace and is now suing his administration for threatening its broadcast licences.
None of which means that Trump should be underestimated. Although his poll numbers are at or near historic lows, he remains the most dominant figure on the planet, able to reset the terms of the global conversation on a whim with a social media post and unafraid of wielding power in ways that his predecessors did not.
He may yet bring Canada and Israel to heel through force of personality, tariffs or other means. The Supreme Court has given him one free pass after another to use his executive authority as he sees fit, whether it be taking control of independent agencies, building his cherished ballroom or trying to crack down on mail-in voting.
And every time someone predicts that Republicans in Congress will finally begin exhibiting some independence, they prove the prognosticators wrong. While they have resisted his pressure in some instances lately, Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general made clear that he still dominates his party’s congressional wing.
But even among Republicans, there are some worrisome signs for the president. Although he has successfully punished several prominent Republican lawmakers he deemed disloyal by rallying his Maga base to defeat them in party primaries this year, GOP voters have rejected Trump’s endorsed candidates in 10 nominating contests, including six in August alone. Polls show his support among Republicans slipping.
“I think that recent weeks have been somewhat of an inflection point,” said Norm Eisen, a former Obama White House lawyer and founder of a group called the Democracy Defenders Fund, who has been waging multiple court fights against Trump. “At home and abroad, pro-democracy forces and everybody else are standing up to him with much more widespread vigour.”
Among others, Eisen has been involved in legal battles over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, birthright citizenship, the Federal Reserve and the aborted prosecution of a former Olympian charged with vandalising the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. To the extent that there has been a shift, Eisen said, it owes in part to overreaching by Trump. “Trump has been his own worst enemy,” he said.
Trump and his advisers reject that assessment, of course, and point to his continuing ability to shape events. In a series of social media posts in recent days, the president has taken credit for falling crime rates and insisted that he is winning the war with Iran. He has disputed polls showing his unpopularity and rejected stories about recent primary losses.
“The actual Polls are tremendous, and the Spirit in our Country has never been higher,” he wrote. “We’re winning against EVERYONE, including Iran, whose Country is in Economic and Military Death Spiral.”
He said that his “endorsements are stronger than ever” and asserted that the Republican candidates who were defeated despite his support were never going to prevail. “The few that lost were done out of loyalty,” he wrote. “It was almost impossible for them to win but, I felt obligated to go with them because they were, in my opinion, good people!”
