Trump's pride cometh before a fall

Donald Trump is a president at the height of his political power — and well aware of it. After a month spent disrupting federal agencies, laying off thousands of veterans and publicly humiliating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Trump clearly feels untouchable.

But as recent MAGA history so often reminds us, Trump’s most overconfident moments tend to precede his most spectacular missteps. After all, it was a reckless and questionable phone call to Zelensky that landed Trump his first of two impeachments. Now, his ego-driven fumbles risk further inflaming an already divided and unstable world order. Some "Golden Age."

Trump’s sense of invincibility is sure to be on full display tonight when he addresses Congress, likely to become one of the most closely analyzed speeches in history. With world capitals still reeling from Friday's Zelensky debacle and the federal government just over a week from a costly shutdown, leaders from Kansas City to Kyiv are looking to Trump for leadership.

Get ready to be disappointed.

While voters may see Trump speaking from the Capitol on Tuesday, it will be deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s words they hear. Miller has been Trump’s ideological voice since the latter’s entry into politics, and Miller’s views formed the backbone of what Trump would eventually adopt as MAGA ideology. Trump has granted Miller a sweeping remit in his White House role, and writing portions of tonight's address amounts to a victory lap for Miller’s extreme policy views.

Trump’s speech will reflect Miller’s policy fixations, especially their shared passion for peddling anti-immigrant hate. Expect Trump to tout the recent extradition of Mexican drug cartel members to the United States as proof of his total victory on the southern border — despite deportations under Trump lagging behind the Biden and Obama administrations. That inconvenient truth is a major sore spot for Trump, who has demanded White House insiders give him a made-for-television stunt to distract from his struggling immigration policy.

In Mexico, government leaders worry Trump’s stunt might look an awful lot like a series of high-profile American military strikes on northern Mexico. Those worries are now bubbling to the surface as a budding international incident, with the word “invasion” creeping into Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent public speeches. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also suggested that Trump was prepared to deploy American troops into Mexico unless Sheinbaum clamped down on cartel crime.

That kind of fist-swinging swagger is already the norm for Trump’s foreign policy, but Trump’s speech will also mark a low point for America’s relations with the European democracies we once considered allies.

The relationship between Trump and the heads of Europe was already strained by his threats to leave NATO and the blanket tariffs he approved last month. His treatment of Zelensky has now thrown relations into a deep freeze, to the point that European Union leaders are actually allowing themselves to envision a national security future without the United States center stage. To say that would reshape global foreign affairs is the understatement of the century. It would be a wrecking ball to American global influence at a time when we desperately need that influence to counter the rapid rise of Chinese power in Africa and Latin America.

Trump’s new vision for America will also be present in the things he doesn’t talk about in his speech, like our new alignment with the gangster regime in Moscow. Earlier this week, Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to stop all offensive cyberoperations against Russia, one of the world’s most prolific cybercriminal states. Meanwhile, global markets are betting on Trump ending Russian economic sanctions, effectively offering the pariah state a critical financial lifeline.

As Trump’s vision for America leads us ever further away from other liberal democracies, our own homegrown democracy will wither as well. As we embrace autocracies like Russia, we will begin to resemble them. That’s a dangerous path for a fragile democracy to walk.

When Trump begins his remarks tonight, he can do so knowing with certainty that he is the most consequential man in the world, a dominant force not only in America but in world politics. We can assume he won’t take the opportunity to reflect on what that immense power means and its awesome power to shape — and destroy — on a vast scale. Instead, Trump will take his mandate to govern as a mandate to rule.

The vision he shares with the American people this week will be bombastic and presented in full spectrum technicolor, but it masks the devil’s bargain Trump is making with America’s future. Trump is about to overstep again. This time, he’s taking the whole world with him.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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