WHAT CHAOS WILL TRUMP UNLEASH IN 2026?
The evidence of 2025 suggests a president who is alternately reckless and bored
One of my favorite anecdotes occurred sometime after 9/11 when Tony Blair, the prime minister of Great Britain, joined in with America’s declaration of war against terrorism. The brilliant playwright Harold Pinter, who would be a bitter and prolific critic of the ensuing war, was invited to respond before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a tale from British history during a wave of terror in Ireland.
“There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda, the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me, General. Isn’t it the other way around?’ A voice from the crowd called out: ‘Mr. Cromwell knows what he is doing!’”
In Pinter’s telling, the voice of support from the crowd was Blair’s. Today it could and would come from the lips of Vance, Bondi, Hegseth, or Noem. Never has a modern American president been surrounded by such self-important sycophants and a Republican-led Congress with little gumption. Trump’s lack of interest in nonmilitary briefing papers and his obsession with social and political gossip has moved from information known by a few to standard operating procedure.
The Marx Brothers aspect to all of this comes in the crudely staged televised Cabinet meetings that consist of Cabinet members competing with each other for the most extravagant compliments for the president. Disregard for details is one way to describe his lack of interest in facts that could affect the daily life of the vulnerable around the world.
How do you feel about Donald Trump ordering the US forces to conduct bombing raids on seven nations last year—Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia and Venezuela—without significant complaint from the Republican-led Congress?
Do you think that he really knows the issues, all of the pros and cons of such warfare? America’s leading newspapers—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post—have done their part, but the president could not care less. Can it be that in some cases he is acting in an international crisis, dropping American bombs and conducting airstrikes on behalf of a fellow billionaire or a corrupt foreign leader and future investor?
His domestic policies have had nothing to do with making life in America better for all. Trump’s hiring of Elon Musk to slash the federal workforce is now written off as a failure, but it also did real damage. Even more toxic have been the similar, and far more widespread and permanent efforts of Russell Vought, the Senate-approved director of the Office of Management and Budget, to push hundreds of thousands of federal employees out of office. And then there are the racist policies—there is no other word for it—of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and major supporter of the Trump-approved national effort to use the National Guard and local police, along with immigration officers, to subject undocumented migrants and other foreigners who have overstayed their visas or arrived illegally in the United States to deportation without due process.
There have been abuses in border control and the monitoring of illegal immigrants, including the shameful separation of very young children from their detained or deported parents.
Trump has remained unmoved by the domestic chaos stemming from his immigration policies, just as he has remained unmoved by the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza as the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued its policies of collective punishment in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
Was he just obdurate or was in thrall to the possibility of future billion-dollar private investments in Gaza and the Middle East? Was it about good public policy or money?
The same questions have to be raised about his motivations regarding the war in Ukraine. He invested enormous time and energy early last year in dealing with oil and natural gas-rich Vladimir Putin in an attempt to end the war between Russia and Ukraine but has apparently lost interest because the going got hard. In recent months bombing, missile, and drone attacks have been causing increasing damage to both sides. There was a recent wave of optimism that I wrote about last month but that moment seems to have passed. American officials involved in peace talks are increasingly dispirited. The battered Russian troops have made gains on the ground, and the Russian Army aims to recruit a new wave of four hundred thousand troops in 2026.
There has been no significant public word from Trump about this moment, as a chance for a meaningful settlement. Is Trump bored or is it that the opportunity for a financial killing has slipped away?
A recent series of reported drone attacks that may or may not have been perpetrated by Ukraine on one of the official state homes of Russian President Vladimir Putin—there was no word of Putin’s whereabouts at the time—prompted Sergey Lavrov, the longtime foreign minister, to return to harsh talk again about the Nazi influence inside the Ukrainian army and issue a blunt message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Keep up the terrorist attacks and there’ll be no negotiated settlement, but a settlement will be arrived by arms and dictated by Russia.”
If Trump has lost political and economic interest in the war, there are other Americans who have not.
Jack Matlock, a former ambassador to Russia, told me a few months ago that Zelensky is beholden to the Ukrainian neo-Nazis known to still have enormous influence in the Ukrainian army. His point to me then was that Ukrainian land seized by Russian forces since the war began in 2022 would have to be given up to get a settlement. “That,” Matlock said, “is probably going to require a different Ukrainian government because Zelensky will probably be assassinated by the neo-Nazis if he makes such a deal.”
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