Under his administration, governance became performance; truth became negotiable; and power became personal.
From Kua Kia Soong
Have you often wondered how history will remember Donald Trump?
If history were a meritocracy, Trump would be remembered as a footnote – an eccentric real estate showman who mistook television ratings for governance.
Unfortunately, history is not so tidy. It occasionally hands immense power to a man who believes instinct outranks knowledge, volume outranks reason, and spectacle outranks substance – and then watches as the consequences unfold in real time.
His tenure can be understood through four defining breakdowns: the collapse of intellectual seriousness, the corrosion of truth and law, the reckless mismanagement of economic power, and the normalisation of cruelty without borders.
The cult of ignorance in power
Previous US presidents at least paid homage to expertise. Trump treated it as an obstacle.
His handling of Covid-19 stands as the clearest indictment. Faced with a once-in-a-century public health crisis, he downplayed the threat, saying “it will disappear”, contradicted his own scientists, and publicly mused about injecting disinfectants, turning White House briefings into global spectacles of confusion. While other governments mobilised coherent responses, the US lurched between denial and improvisation.
This was not merely poor communication; it was a governing philosophy.
Expertise was sidelined, agencies were undermined, and scientific consensus became politically negotiable. The result: one of the world’s highest death tolls, paired with a president more interested in television optics than epidemiology.
The war on truth, law and democracy
Trump did not merely bend the truth – he attempted to bury it under an avalanche of falsehoods. Fact-checkers stopped counting after tens of thousands of misleading or false claims. But the deeper damage lay not in any single lie, but in the normalisation of unreality as a political environment.
This culminated in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Having lost, Trump refused to concede, promoting baseless claims of fraud and pressuring officials to overturn certified results.
His call to Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes was not satire – it was an unvarnished attempt to bend democratic machinery to personal will. The inevitable climax came with the Jan 6 Capitol attack, when a mob, animated by his rhetoric, stormed the seat of American democracy. It was a moment that would have been unthinkable in a system that still commanded universal allegiance to the rule of law.
Human rights norms, already fragile, were further weakened as they became transactional. The message was unmistakable: principles were negotiable, truth was optional, and power was personal.
Economic nationalism as strategic self-harm
Trump promised to restore American economic greatness through toughness, chiefly in the form of tariffs and trade wars. The results were instructive.
His trade confrontation with China triggered retaliatory tariffs that hit American farmers particularly hard, forcing the government to spend tens of billions in bailouts – an ironic outcome for a policy meant to strengthen domestic industry. Supply chains were disrupted, uncertainty surged, and businesses faced rising costs.
Even allies were not spared. Tariffs were imposed on steel and aluminium imports from partners like Canada and the European Union under the dubious justification of “national security”, straining ties that had underpinned decades of economic stability.
Markets oscillated wildly, not because investors admired bold strategy, but because they struggled to predict the next policy lurch. Economic governance became indistinguishable from brinkmanship.
The broader consequence was a weakening of the global trading system itself. Institutions and norms that had structured international commerce since World War II were treated as constraints to be broken rather than frameworks to be improved.
Trump’s great irony as a self-proclaimed dealmaker is this: he managed to make nearly every party worse off – including his own.
Cruelty without borders: power without sovereignty
If Trump’s domestic record revealed ignorance and impunity, his conduct abroad exposed something even more disturbing: a capacity for cruelty unconstrained by respect for human life or national sovereignty.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his unwavering political and military support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, widely condemned across much of the world as genocidal in scale and intent.
Civilian suffering – children buried under rubble, entire neighbourhoods erased – was not a deterrent but background noise to geopolitical calculation.
This same disregard for international norms was evident in the normalisation of targeted assassinations. The killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad was not merely an act of escalation – it was a declaration that sovereignty itself was conditional, subject to unilateral American force.
Similar patterns emerged in the treatment of leaders linked to groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, where assassination and extrajudicial murder displaced diplomacy entirely.
Even more brazen was the posture toward Nicolas Maduro. Open discussions of capture, removal, or forced regime change signalled a return to an earlier era of imperial intervention – one in which smaller nations exist at the mercy of great power whims.
The principle that states are sovereign equals under international law was not merely weakened; it was openly mocked. Taken together, these actions reflect a presidency that did not simply neglect international law – it treated it as irrelevant.
Violence became a tool of convenience, sovereignty an obstacle to be bypassed, and human life a variable in a larger spectacle of power.
A presidency without precedent
It is tempting to rank Trump alongside past presidential failures. But such comparisons risk understatement. They failed within a system they at least recognised.
Trump’s distinction lies in his apparent indifference to the system itself. He did not merely lower expectations – he dismantled them. Governance became performance; truth became negotiable; power became personal.
In the end, Trump’s presidency may be remembered not just as a failure of governance, but as a failure of humanity, where ignorance enabled recklessness, impunity enabled lawlessness, and cruelty was exercised without restraint, at home and across the globe. - FMT
Kua Kia Soong is a former MP and a former director of Suaram
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
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