Donald Trump spent the closing hours of his first year of the 47th presidency by taking in the college football national championship game in Miami before returning to the White House late on a frigid Monday evening. To all intents, he looked like a man without a care in the world as he enjoyed the sport.
In offices across Europe, lamps burned late as prime ministers and senior cabinet officials fretted over how to deal with the Trump administration’s apparent determination to ‘buy’ Greenland while privately mulling over the collective policy of flattery and appeasement of an American president who conducts himself unlike any other.
On Tuesday, Trump will prepare for his flight across the Atlantic to the World Economic Forum in Davos. He will arrive exerting much the same influence on this, the anniversary of his first year in office, as he did on that bitterly cold day last January. The international mood is one of addled guesswork. China has responded nimbly to the worst of the Trump tariff threats while Vladimir Putin has remained free to prosecute his invasion of Ukraine despite Trump’s election vow that he could end that war with a phone call.
Europe, meanwhile, is absorbing the surreal turn in which the United States, its steadfast, postwar ally, has flipped into belligerence, in turns lecturing and taunting about what its political leaders see as the European Union’s myriad flaws, its freeloading and its self-destructive policies.
When Trump returned to office a year ago, Jimmy Carter was just two weeks buried after a simple ceremony in Plains, Georgia. The entire month was perishing in Washington, so much so that Trump’s inauguration ceremony was moved indoors on the eve of the event. It was quickly reimagined as stagecraft, with Trump delivering his inauguration speech in the Capitol Rotunda before past presidents, Republican lawmakers and an extraordinary court of tech and business overlords who held a prominent role in the gallery.
After thanking the most distinguished guests – and president Joe Biden got a polite mention that day – he set out his agenda for the coming term. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation and not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”
As he flies to Switzerland, there is little doubt that Trump and his cabinet will believe they have delivered on that opening promise. He has repeatedly claimed to have settled “eight wars”, including the fragile and uneasy Gaza peace plan. The spectacular and daring US stealth bombing mission in Iran, and the equally audacious raid and arrest of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas has clearly thrilled Trump.
If, as his chief of staff Susie Wiles said in a Vanity Fair profile, Trump, a teetotaller, has “an alcoholic’s personality” in that he “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do”, then he seemed intoxicated by the success of the Venezuela mission when he met a team of New York Times White House correspondents for a marathon two-hour interview a few days later.
“Yeah, there is one thing,” Trump replied when asked: “Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage?”
He answered: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me – and that’s very good.”
To Trump loyalists, from his senior cabinet officials to the Maga Republican loyalists, Trump’s single-minded capacity to destabilise and surprise and intimidate and shock remains the core element of his unique appeal. “If you don’t know, now you know. This is the way it’s going to play out,” said secretary of state Marco Rubio hours after the Maduro arrest.
“People need to understand that this is not a president who just talks and does letters and press conferences. If he says something he means it. Don’t play games when this president’s in office because it’s not going to turn out well.”
The Maga faith has not been shaken through what has been a disorienting year. Trump has, at 79, transformed the White House into a volatile and unknowable force of change and whimsy. From the pardoning of all 1,600 January 6th rioters to unleashing Elon Musk with a literal chainsaw to gut and rip through federal departments as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, the Liberation Day tariffs on April 2nd, the ongoing war on DEI, the sinister spectacle of masked Ice agents prowling through residential streets of US cities, the calling up of the National Guard to Washington, the concerted reversal of all of the Biden administration policies, the frequent mocking of his predecessor and the flood of late night and early morning messages and announcements on Truth Social.
And woven into those landmark moments were the jaw-dropping subplots, such as the infamous dressing-down delivered to Volodymyr Zelenskiy in February, the ‘gift’ from Qatar of a super-luxury jet to be converted into Air Force One, the campaigns against prestige liberal colleges, the longest government shutdown in US history and lawsuits against media organisations deemed hostile to a president who has governed through relentless force of personality.
But it is a force with a notoriously short attention span. There is a counter argument that within the United States, not a lot has changed in the past year when it comes to kitchen-table economics. The cost of living remains painfully high. The national jobs scenario is sluggish – a monthly average of 55,000 jobs created throughout 2025; the Biden economy, which Trump constantly maligns, created 192,000 jobs on average over the final two years.
Farmers have been hurt by the tariffs and recent studies confirm that American consumers are picking up the tab for the tariff-related costs of imports. The Supreme Court may well rule on the legality of the Trump tariffs as soon as today. The impact of the loss of healthcare coverage has only begun to fully register in many homes. The Jeffrey Epstein saga has not gone away.
The latest CNN poll found that 61 per cent disapprove of how ‘Donald Trump is handling his job as president’, a fall to 39 per cent from his high of a 48 per cent approval rating in February. Sixty-seven per cent of respondents reported that economic conditions are ‘somewhat/very poor’, a descriptor 42 per cent of Republicans polled agreed with. The scenes in Minneapolis, where protesters clash with Ice agents in the wake of the fatal shooting of Renee Good, reflect a dark and stressed national mood.
But vanity aside, the polls are no longer Donald Trump’s concern. He is now into the second year of a second-term presidency and even Susie Wiles has stated he will not run again. And although it seems as though the United States electorate is still recovering from the last election, the midterms are on the horizon and the jostling to succeed Trump has already begun. This may be Donald Trump’s last year as the only relevant player on the stage.
On Monday, the historian Jon Meacham appeared on a morning television show. His writings contend that US presidencies have through the centuries reliably reflected the elemental struggle between the best and worst of the national impulses. But he sounded vexed as he considered president Trump’s unreasonable claim to Greenland and as he spoke, his mind turned towards a broader question that hangs over the United States in its 250th year.
“We don’t need this confrontation. But I think that need is the critical word here. I think that president Trump self-evidently has a need for these dramas. He has personalised our politics and our foreign policy in a way that … I think this is unprecedented. This is a pre-Glorious Revolution kind of autocracy where a king’s feelings are hurt because of the prize obsession and so therefore the panoply of power is going to be deployed in the service of his own emotional and, I suppose, political [needs] – although I don’t think anyone woke up thinking: ‘oh my God Greenland is the key to prosperity and the future of the middle class.’
“So, I think we are living in a world where his own needs are dominating our policy. There could be a great case for doing this. Make the case! 49.9 per cent of the people who voted in November 2024 decided: yeah, let’s try that again. But were they voting for all of this? And at what point, and to me this is the critical question of the next three years: at what point do those voters somehow signal that they don’t want a king? They don’t want a monarch. That the constitution still matters to them. How does that happen?”
He offered no answer.