Much as I hate to admit it, Donald Trump is the greatest president in the 250-year-long history of the United States.
Let’s first understand that “greatness” does not mean “goodness.” In history, greatness lies in a leader’s ability to save or change a nation, to create or destroy institutions. Achieving greatness usually requires hurting a lot of people.
Alexander of Macedon was great because he was the best military thinker of his time and built an empire by fighting wars from Macedonia to India. An 18th-century czar became Peter the Great when he transformed a backward nation into an empire that eventually reached all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Alaska, complete with a modern army and navy.
Such rulers’ greatness stemmed from the destruction of other nations, conquered and folded into the rulers’ empires.
Trump’s greatness stems from the destruction of his own country, with the rest of the world suffering collateral damage.
In the US, a legacy of ‘greatness’
Previous “great” American presidents had set the terms for the United States, like George Washington, or fought against slavery, like Abraham Lincoln, or punished corporate abuses, like Theodore Roosevelt. His cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt rescued the country from economic depression, led it to victory in the Second World War and laid the foundations of the postwar rules-based order.
Such great achievements required presidents with high intelligence, firm integrity and brilliant leadership skills. Each great president moved the country a little closer to its founding idea, that all of us are created equal.
Trump has none of those skills. He has cunning, and a talent for lying so often that each new lie smothers whatever outrage the last lie caused.
We love to disparage Trump’s intelligence. But he was astute enough, before he first ran for president, to see that many Americans were deeply unhappy living in the United States.
After all, men and women were considered equal. Racialized people and white people were also supposed to be equals. People could say anything they liked, and education determined not only one’s wealth and status, but even one’s health and life expectancy.
Millions of Americans, going back before the revolution, had detested such freedoms.
Many of the American power elite knew about such citizens. But they didn’t understand them except to dismiss them as “deplorables.”
Projecting his own vices on others
In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump went after the “deplorable” vote by flouting the rules of American political discourse.
He called Mexican immigrants “rapists.” He attacked his political adversaries not for their policies but for their fictitious personal failings. He loudly expressed his love for the “poorly educated.”
He criticized his opponents for his own bad behaviour; in psychology, that’s called projection.
Trump was also astute enough to see that American institutions had rotted, and they offered him little or no resistance. He could even stage the Jan. 6 insurrection and walk away free.
Then he spent four years planning his return to power, gaming the judicial system that should have put him in prison.
It was stark evidence of American rot that he once again became president despite having been found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the course of concealing his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
After the first year of his second term, Trump repeatedly showed himself immune to the law, immunized by the Supreme Court itself. The obvious corruption of the court made no difference.
So in less than a year and a half, and despite countless lawsuits, Trump has effectively dismantled the government.
The Supreme Court allows him to do almost anything.
Congress, with Republican majorities in both House and Senate, has given up control of the country’s finances.
The Department of Justice, founded by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870 to protect newly freed Black Americans from white domestic terrorism, is now a tool of Trump’s vindictiveness against his enemies.
Having offered little but quack remedies for COVID-19 in 2020, Trump returned in 2025 determined to demolish health science in general and public health in particular.
With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the demolition has gone very well.
Meanwhile, Trump created the concept of fake news and then projected it onto American news media, which are now largely in the hands of hedge funds or of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and the Ellison family.
After two and a half centuries, American media have caved to Trump with scarcely a whimper.
Transforming America beyond recognition
It is no small achievement to bring down a world superpower. In doing so, Trump undid most of the work of the previous great presidents; as Prime Minister Mark Carney said to Trump, “You are a transformative president.”
Trump has transformed the United States out of all recognition, thereby earning the title of greatest American president.
One way or another, though, Trump will leave office. But scores of millions of his followers will remain, as well as the oligarchs who backed him and the sycophants who worked for him in government.
Some Trumpist like JD Vance or Marco Rubio may succeed him, but even if the Democrats win the 2028 election, they will face formidable opposition.
The U.S. Supreme Court will still be in place with a reactionary and corrupt majority. The Senate will be largely dominated by low-population red states, and Republicans in the House of Representatives will be talented schemers, gaming the system as they always have.
The media, and especially social media, will still be owned by oligarchs. So will the oil and gas industries. The Department of Justice will remain staffed by Trumpists, so prosecution of Trump and his associates will be difficult.
A Democratic president might want to roll back everything Trump has done since 2017, but that would be impossible — and even if the old system were restored, the Republicans would know just how to exploit and subvert it again.
One possibility would be for a non-Trumpist government to declare a new constitutional convention, where an entirely new constitution would be framed as the foundation of a new republic. But even if such a constitution were created, Trumpist states would surely refuse to ratify it.
Another possibility would be to disunite the states, allowing some to become white Christian nationalist enclaves. This would involve population transfers of millions, like the division of Pakistan from India, and the removal of nuclear weapons from the enclaves. The economic consequences would likely be a global depression.
And a third possibility would be another civil war. Again, the economic damage would be enormous. Whichever side won, the result would not be a renewed democratic republic. The winners would have to repress the losers for generations.
Given these prospects, the Americans are unlikely to restore a government of the people, by the people and for the people unless they can find a new leader even greater than Trump. Either that, or become responsible citizens who don’t need a great leader at all.
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