PALM BEACH, Fla. — From his lair at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump sees the sun rising. His sunshine retreat doesn’t allow him to see the sun setting.
But it is another of the human senses that may be the most important in this fraught epoch. This may be one of the few times in a century when it is possible to hear history galloping.
Ordinarily, it moves in a leisurely walk, other times in a canter, but only rarely does it move more swiftly, more decisively, more dramatically.
It galloped during the period of the American Revolutionary War, when the French foreign ministry said the emergence of the United States and the democratic principles it espoused comprised “one of the major events of modern history.” For all its significance, the American Civil War arguably doesn’t count because it followed the times rather than led it; the British Empire had banned slavery two decades earlier.
But history’s hoofbeats were audible in 1917, when V.I. Lenin and his Bolsheviks captured Russia, and again beginning in 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler took office within five weeks of each other.
Since then, there have been many significant moments, such as, among many others, the dawn of the nuclear age, the creation of the Marshall Plan, the establishment of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the Communist revolution in China, wars in Korea and Vietnam, decolonization in Africa, the triumph of Project Apollo and the emergence of muscular Islam. But for all their consequence, they were incremental events, affecting the world but not substantially or permanently changing it.
What is happening today — the galloping team of horses whose hoofbeats bang in the far distance — may be changing the United States, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world; upending global alliances, arrangements and assumptions in place for more than three-quarters of a century; altering power relationships and practices across the world; rearranging trade patterns established over decades; and transforming the way business, politics, diplomacy and war are conducted.
That is because all this is happening during a period of cultural disruption, spurred by alterations in how information is collected, distributed and received, and occurring as centuries-old convictions about gender and identity are upended, redefined and rendered matters of emotional and legal contention.
In a sentence more appropriate to today than when Charles de Gaulle made it in a 1935 letter to a friend, “The world is trembling on the bases we have known up to now.”
Though this has been building for more than a decade, it has come into sharp relief in recent days, when Trump transformed the Monroe Doctrine into a blueprint for extracting Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro for trial in the United States; when the president cast his eyes on Greenland and, in the course of doing so, threatened the survival of NATO; when Trump spoke to America’s allies at the World Economic Forum in a tone and language heretofore reserved only for America’s adversaries; and when the administration withdrew from more than five dozen international agencies and groups, some so benign as the Office of the Special Representative on Violence Against Children, the International Lead and Zinc Study Group and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a posting on the social media platform X, said such groups were “anti-America, useless or wasteful.”
This comes after Trump took executive power into realms seldom if ever contemplated by his predecessors, reshaped federal agencies created by Congress, defied multiple constitutional restrictions, unilaterally applied tariffs in defiance of congressional prerogatives, and threatened the sovereignty of Canada, our country’s neighbor and a historically robust trade partner.
The result was to catapult Mark Carney, Canada’s erudite prime minister, into the role of the preeminent moral spokesman of the West, a position Woodrow Wilson and every president from FDR to Barack Obama held, even Richard Nixon. At Davos, Trump told the leaders of America’s closest friends, “You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember.” At Davos, Carney cited the Greek historian Thucydides and, speaking bitter truth about unrestrained power, said, “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”
Trump, who now looms as the most consequential president since FDR, stands at the commanding heights of this global transformation, though he may have relinquished the global high ground. That happens when a leader doesn’t walk on the high road. Nixon forgot that on domestic affairs, but Gerald Ford remembered.
Trump, and the MAGA theorists, have applied a sledgehammer to all the foundation stones of the alliances and international institutions that were largely the creation of the United States, which through enlightened self-interest and no small amount of selflessness created a rules-based world order.
In the New York Times interview that shook the world, he said the only restrictions on his actions were “my own morality” and “my own mind,” adding, “It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
For decades, American presidents of both parties accepted and strengthened the foundation stones of that world order, believing that doing so benefited the United States by providing global stability even as it provided food for the hungry, medicine for the sick and aid for the victims of earthquakes, floods, epidemics, hurricanes and typhoons. These efforts may have fought communism, but they also fought Ebola, AIDS, entrenched poverty and economic stagnation.
Now, many of these efforts, which provided more than 40% of both humanitarian aid and health assistance worldwide, are discredited; Rubio said the programs amounted to “subsidizing globalist bureaucrats who act against our interests.”
For years, historians will debate whether Trump was cause or consequence of these upheavals — or, put another way, whether Trump understood, and exploited, vast transformations of attitudes and power relationships that existed before he became a presidential candidate in 2015.
In that regard, it may be said that the 47th president was much like his hero, the eighth president, of whom John William Ward said in his classic 1955 book, “Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age,” “The age was not his. He was the age’s.”
Amid the clamor of change are heard the hoofbeats of history. This winter, they seem more audible than ever, perhaps even here on Florida’s east coast, where the sun only rises.
North Shore native David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.