Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• The heavy price America has paid for Jeff Bezos’s ambition• The US is becoming impossible to live in• I told Trump over dinner he didn’t have my loyalty – it sealed my fate• This is how the world will look after Trump• I’ve seen what ICE has done to Minnesota. Farage wants to import that to the UK• The men who want to stop women voting• Trump isn’t damaging America. He’s reinventing it’
“Straight out of central casting” – that’s how the ex-showbiz President Donald Trump described some of his foreign-policy aides in his first term, though it was a trait he’d regret; the part they looked was that of elite establishmentarian, which he realised he didn’t want. For his second term, he fashioned his own movie, hiring like-minded ideologues, whose chief talents lay in nodding at his remarks and executing his orders, however absurd.
When he returned to the White House in 2025, after four years of humiliating absence and an electoral defeat that he still denies, Trump knew what he wanted to do – and how to get most of it done. The first-term advisers not only held fairly conventional views about the nature of American power and the US-led Western world order, but also served as the gatekeepers of the Executive Branch structures – chiefly the Department of Defence, Department of State and National Security Council – that provided continuity from one administration to the next, for better or worse.
