If the only way to stop a bully is to punch them in the nose, who is balling up their fists and putting Donald Trump in their sights?
In the less than two weeks since he returned to the White House, Trump has fired federal prosecutors who targeted him in criminal cases, stripped critical former top officials with threats on their lives of security details, and ordered that the Guantanamo Bay military base—home since 2002 to detained enemy combatants—be turned into a migrant detention camp.
That’s on top of his threats to take Greenland and the Panama Canal by force, make Canada the 51st American state, and slap tariffs on any country that doesn’t submit to his will.
This, at least, is Trump’s plan as he starts his second four-year term as president.
He’s quickly set his country on a collision course with allies and enemies alike, seemingly confident that he can bulldoze his way to victory, leaving in his wake a broken pile of “woke” opponents, migrant masses, economic rivals and legal checks on the world’s most powerful politician.
But even a hard-headed negotiator like Trump would be wise to remember the words of another legendary combatant, Mike Tyson: everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Democrats on the defensive
“When we fight, we win.”
That Kamala Harris campaign slogan was also a reminder this week from a half-dozen Democratic state governors to Sen. Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democratic minority in the U.S. Senate, according to the New York Times.
Outnumbered by Republicans in both congressional chambers, the domestic political opposition is struggling to be heard and seen amid Trump’s daily flurries of presidential proclamations and press statements.
There are court challenges planned or already launched against some of the president’s executive orders, among them one that would end automatic citizenship for those born on American soil, which has its origins in an 1868 constitutional amendment that extended rights to former slaves.
Some cases will inevitably be decided by the Supreme Court, to which Trump appointed three conservative judges during his first term in office.
But Democrats have already claimed one win after the Trump administration was forced to clarify a presidential order that froze federal funding after payments to social assistance and Medicaid beneficiaries, small businesses and farmers were cut off, sparking chaos across the country.
“This is Trump’s first major loss,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared on social media. “When we fight, we win.”
But if the dearth of people gearing up for the fight is any indication, that’s a contested take.
Canada pushes back
Look across the U.S. border to Canada, where the debate on how to take on Trump is raging.
In the race to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, former Liberal finance minister Chrystia Freeland is running a leadership campaign that boasts about her bad relations with the world’s most powerful political leader.
This week, she released a retaliatory plan to protect the Canadian economy from Trump’s tariff threats that proposes an axis of angst made up of Mexico, Panama, Denmark and the European Union to fight back against American aggression.
Her primary leadership opponent, Mark Carney, has also called for tariffs on American imports, but his campaign has focused more broadly on casting him as an experienced and responsible economic steward.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre might be horrified to find himself allied with Freeland but, in his own words, they are agreed on the need for retaliatory tariffs as well as one other key matter: “You have to respond with strength,” he told an interviewer earlier this month. Trump, he said, “respects strength.”
Iron-fist idolatry was a takeaway from Trump’s first term in office, when he cozied up to dictators, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean President Kim Jong Un.
He’s also spoken admiringly of Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying, “He runs 1.4-billion people with an iron fist.”
This time around, those traditional American adversaries have some reason for concern, despite the president’s admiration for autocrats.
Checking Chinese dominance is a key driver of Trump’s foreign and economic policies, as well as the reason he’s given for needing to seize control of the Panama Canal.
But there appears little appetite in Beijing for a full-on fight with Washington, said William Matthews, a senior research fellow with Chatham House.
“I think they would rather avoid that, if possible,” said Matthews. “I get the impression that they are prepared for a fight over trade, for example, if there’s going to be one. I think they’d rather it didn’t happen.”
China could make life difficult for Trump by starving the U.S. of critical minerals needed for things like computer chips used in the automotive, defence and other vital industries.
Matthews warned, however, that China was likely to continue building up its military presence in the South China Sea and around Taiwan, testing whether Trump’s “America First” world view would give it free reign to create its own regional zone of influence.
Putin, meanwhile, is awaiting an icebreaker telephone call and an eventual meeting with Trump as a prelude to talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
That could be a temporary blessing in disguise for Putin, whose economy is suffering after three years of war and economic sanctions.
Cordial as any meeting between Trump and Putin may appear, the Russian president has deep distrust of American power due to the real and perceived slights he says his country has suffered since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
America’s allies reassess
The last time Trump was in power, Peter Mandelson, a former British Labour MP, cabinet minister, European trade commissioner and member of the House of Lords, rather undiplomatically referred to him as “a bully,” “a danger to the world,” and “a little short of a white nationalist and racist.”
Mandelson’s tone has moderated since he was tipped by U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer to be the country’s next ambassador to Washington.
“I think (Trump) has won fresh respect,” Mandelson told Fox News in an apologetic interview this week. “He certainly has from me, and that is going to be the basis of all the work I do as His Majesty’s ambassador in the United States.”
It is by far the most radical recalculation, but not the only one occurring on the European continent, where the 27-state European Union is deeply divided on what feels like an absentee ally.
Trump has questioned the orthodoxy of defending Ukraine as well as the utility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, while demanding that NATO member states commit billions of dollars more to defence spending. And Europe is also threatened with tariffs to tackle trade grievances.
Trump has his cheerleaders on the continent, including Viktor Orban of Hungary, Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Poland’s Andrzej Duda. Giorgia Meloni of Italy has been touted as a European “Trump whisperer.”
Others are more fearful of the risks facing Europe, from procuring energy to managing migration to combating Russian interference, and they are concerned that Trump’s policies will only exacerbate EU divisions.
The likely next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said in a recent campaign stop that Europe must be bold in response to the America First agenda.
“What’s our response? Be small, obey, be fearful?” he asked, adding that those who supplicate themselves before the powerful in America are too often treated like a doormat.
First fight?
Who will bow and who will rise?
The first to be tested could be the Kingdom of Denmark and its autonomous Arctic territory, Greenland. Trump has said he wants to buy the island, but wouldn’t rule out using military pressure to seal the deal.
“This is not a joke,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Megyn Kelly Show in an interview Friday. He said the American military was bound by a defence agreement to protect Greenland against threats from China “because Denmark can’t stop them.”
“If we’re already on the hook for having to do that, then what we might as well have more control over what happens there,” Rubio said.
The simple response to that assertion is that Greenland is not for sale and an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders are opposed to having the American flag fluttering in their frigid winds.
That was the message that Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen took to Paris, Berlin and Brussels this week as she attempts to build a common front against an expansionist America.
But there is a divide-and-conquer logic behind Trump’s attempts to take the island.
Greenlanders are going to the polls this spring. A key ballot issue will be the island’s independence from Denmark, promoted by Prime Minister Múte Egede’s party, Inuit Ataqatigiit.
The 36-year-old leader has a simple message that he would like to deliver in person to the suddenly menacing leader of the free world: Greenland’s 56,000 souls don’t want to be Danes, but they don’t want to be Americans either.
While he awaits that meeting, Frederiksen is scrambling to deal with the rotten situation facing her country.
On Friday, she explained that her government is considering the imposition of a potentially painful ”war tax” in response to Trump’s other order from his White House bully pulpit, that NATO allies increase their defence spending from two per cent of GDP to five per cent.
It’s a two-track attack that indicates there is some method in the global menace that Trump 2.0 is spreading: it’s the prospect that even if he loses in his most outlandish demands, he could still emerge a winner.
