Trump Decoded

Has there ever been more confusion about what a U.S. president is up to? In the days since Donald Trump launched his February 28th assault on Iran, it’s been virtually impossible to get a straight answer out of him or his team about what the U.S.’s ultimate goal is. Given the flurry of contradictory statements from government representatives and even the commander-in-chief himself it’s fair for all to ask if the President even has one.

In fact, evidence exists that Trump does. And we’re missing the point when we focus separately on his various aggressive actions toward Iran, Venezuela, or Greenland, or on Trump’s previous pledge to his MAGA base that he wouldn’t start foreign wars.

What many of his critics fail to see is that Trump is very likely pursuing a broader strategic vision in his own mind, though it will likely be up to historians to pronounce whether or not it is visionary or delusional – this has been a presidency of extremes and there’s nothing to suggest that any future verdict will be anything but .

For those who have written biographies about him and perhaps know him )or profess to know him) best, the Trump vision is about discarding what he sees as a weak, failing world order and turning himself into the author of a new one that will have his name stamped on it the same way we have Trump Towers, the Trump Arch and the Trump-Kennedy Center. For him, it’s always been about branding, and while he is not making any claims to the affirmative (as least for now), one gets the sense that if he could rename planet Earth to planet Trump, he would.

Indeed, looking back over Trump’s entire career, one sees a consistent throughline: he appears intent on remaking the global landscape in his image, including when he sought to remake the New York skyline in a “bid for immortality,” as the New York Times wrote in 1985; or reconceiving the Republican Party’s agenda from top to bottom after 2016 and putting his “America First” stamp on it; or the way as mentioned previously, he is reconfiguring Washington, D.C., itself into a kind of Trumpolis.

Now Trump is intent on creating a kind of Trump World—a global legacy that will far surpass that of his predecessors and fulfill his self-image as “one of the greatest” presidents in U.S. history and author of a new “golden age,” as he’s put it.

His is a career built on grandiose ambition and an egoism for the ages—as well as a canny, cunning killer instinct for spotting and exploiting the indecisiveness and weakness of opponents who, to Trump’s mind, remained stuck in the practices of the past.

Look to his record as president of discarding and condemning any previously negotiated deals—among them NAFTA, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate agreement—in part because he wasn’t the one to negotiate them, along with newer efforts like trying to replace the United Nations with a “Board of Peace” and making himself the head of it seemingly for life.

It can hardly be an accident that Trump complains obsessively and incessantly that he’s been deprived of the ultimate global brand for a statesman, the Nobel Peace Prize, something awarded without any effort to his much-reviled rival Barack Obama. On March 3rd, Israeli Consul General Ofir Akunis proposed—in surely one of the most surreal moments of 2026—that Trump and his partner-in-war, the even more belligerent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, be jointly awarded the honor.

In Trump’s mind there’s probably also no real contradiction between his campaign pledge to be a peacemaker and the military operations he has launched against Iran and Venezuela, for a world that he – or the United States - dominates might well be his definition of peace. He himself has suggested as much, declaring that the Iran operation is an example of his policy of “peace through strength.” “We’re doing this for the future,” Trump said in announcing the Iran operation on Feb. 28th.

That future may also possibly include a dynastic vision for his family, including the accumulation of enormous wealth, position, and power for his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It may not be entirely a coincidence that the Trump family is doing billions of dollars of deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two nations opposed to the Iranian regime and with dynastic power structures.

Yet there are signs of trouble ahead for the Trump global brand—especially as Iran continues to retaliate ferociously and oil prices have spiked since the start of the U.S.-Israeli attacks and the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian leaders. It’s noteworthy that Trump’s personal history going back to his real-estate empire has also been one of occasional (albeit serious) overreach, especially after admittedly early success. That’s what drove him to six bankruptcies, and some very narrow escapes out of them. And that’s what we may ultimately find out about the president’s latest venture in the Middle East.

But Donald Trump is the type of person who believes that one wills his own luck into being and his own version of Steve Jobs’ much-remarked ‘reality distortion field’ has proven more than successful.

Though Trump and his principals seem to jump back and forth haphazardly between “nuclear weapons” and “ballistic missiles” and “regime change” when they’re asked why they attacked Iran, it’s clear the president is hoping for the latter. “When we are finished, take over your government,” he urged the Iranian people on Feb. 28th. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

While the president had appeared to be leaving regime change to the hapless Iranians to figure out on their own, he’s now insisting that he will be the one who decides who the next leader of Iran will be, just as he’s done in Venezuela, as Delcy Rodriguez has proven to be as pliant as a pet. “I have to be involved…” he has said in the Iranian succession, though conjuring up a suitable candidate from that viperous den has been much more challenging – after all, who can one work with when everyone looks like a bad guy? The least bad bad guy, one would wager, but how can one even tell when everyone has blood on their hands?

That ambition was always unlikely to be fulfilled in a theocratic state still controlled by zealously anti-U.S. forces. And when the Iranian government named Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei as his successor, in open defiance of Trump, who had earlier said the younger Khamenei was “unacceptable.”

It’s not at all clear what the future of Trump World will look like beyond the naked unleashing of U.S. military power—and Trump’s repeated threats to keep unleashing it.

What we are likely seeing is more the destruction of the old, post-war order rather than the creation of a new one/ Trump’s policies over the past year, as well as the world’s tepid and disorganized response to them, have served as a bracing reminder of just how powerful the United States is and how much coercive capacity it actually has. After all, witness the sidelining of Russia and China in Venezuela and Iran (at least until recently when Trump reached out to Xi Jinping to build a bridge to the Tehran regime in an effort to reach a truce). But these muscular exertions of American power do inevitably come at a cost.

Still, one should not be too quick to dismiss Trump’s record of what one might call creative destruction. After all, for all his overreaching in his previous life, Trump’s buildings are still standing in major cities.

With his never-failing killer instinct for weakness, Trump is determined to shatter what he sees as frail old obstacles to U.S. influence—to take out recalcitrant regimes that long frustrated previous presidents, whether in Venezuela, or Iran, and soon perhaps Cuba—and overturn long-held shibboleths, like the idea that a hegemon can’t exercise power as it pleases. With his ongoing tariff war, Trump is also intent on reordering the entire post-World War II global trading system so as to undo, as he sees it, unfair advantages enjoyed by U.S. rivals and allies alike.

His military aggression against Venezuela and Iran is also his attempt to dispense with the Washington establishment’s pretense—at least in Trump’s mind—that this is still the rules-based era. It’s true that even before Trump’s second term, few strategists in either party believed that the U.S. could resume its old place as a benign hegemon, a kind of global policeman whose authority is recognized by all sides.

And some Western European diplomats, while unhappy about the new Iran war, concede that Trump sometimes evinces a more realistic view than some of his predecessors by acknowledging that the old norms against aggression no longer work as a deterrent. They note that for all the lingering questions about whether Trump has been bought by Russia or is too weak on China, he’s actually put both countries in their place and perhaps heightened their wariness of U.S. power.

Trump’s actions, not his words, have been effective at stripping Russian President Vladimir Putin of two of his allies, in Iran and Venezuela, and actually added some sanctions on Russia. In addition, while being consistently accused by the mainstream and leftwing press of ‘favoring’ Russia, the Ukraine War has entered a strange new phase where Putin seems spooked, and Ukraine has won back momentum, aided perhaps by American satellite intelligence and other more covert forms of military aid.

In terms of pure military prowess, Trump’s moves against Venezuela and Iran probably do give the Russians and Chinese some pause. The U.S. and Israel established air dominance over Iran in two days. The Russians are in year five and they still don’t have dominance over the skies in Ukraine. There’s a subtle lesson here that has perhaps eluded surface observation: Russian raw manpower has resulted in horrendous churn (i.e. soldiers’ lives lost) when confronting western (US) technology, which is why Trump constantly repeats casualty figures whenever asked about this war. Russian and Chinese air defense systems worked about as well as slingshots with rocks: the U.S. military is leaps and bounds ahead of them.

To be fair, Putin, however, has also benefited from the spike in oil prices and the diversion of U.S. attention away from Ukraine whereas China has to be concerned about its Persian Gulf oil supply (China imports an estimated 11% to 13% of its total global crude oil from Iran while China is by far its largest customer, purchasing roughly 80% to 90% of all of Iran's exported crude oil) though it has pursued an effective diversification of oil partners.

Trump is aggressively enlisting prominent skeptics of his global rebranding mission, as well. Meeting with Trump at the White House, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz defended the strikes carried out by U.S. and Israeli forces, saying the two countries had “good reasons” to act considering how close Iran had been to building a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom and France both announced they would deploy naval and air power to respond to Iran’s retaliatory strikes though that proved to be largely illusory.

In understanding Trump and what he may be up to on the world stage there is something of a “Rosebud” moment to point to—one that goes back to the beginnings of his career in the public eye. An 18-year-old Donald in 1964 accompanied his developer father, Fred Trump, to the grand opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York. During the ceremony, Robert Moses—the famed “power broker” of New York construction—neglected to name the aging engineer who designed the bridge and who was standing off to the side. As Trump would later describe it in an interview in the New York Times in 1980, that was a life-changing epiphany for him. He a reporter that “just standing there in the rain, is this man, this 85-year-old engineer who came from Sweden and designed this bridge, who poured his heart into it, and nobody even mentioned his name.” (The engineer, Othmar Ammaann, was actually Swiss.)

“I realized then and there,” Trump said, “that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool. I realized then and there something I would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”

Trump read that moment as a seminal lesson: he would do great things AND seize the credit for it. And so, Trump spent the rest of his career, whether in real estate or politics, do just that. “I get no credit for it” and “they never give me credit” are still two of the president’s favorite locutions.

As a brash young developer of big buildings, Trump sought to remake New York’s skyline in his image at a time when no one thought he could do it. He was successful, starting with his ambitious debut: a career-making plan to convert the derelict Commodore Hotel into the glitzy Grand Hyatt. The city was bankrupt, corporations were moving out, and neither New York officials nor many old-school developers thought Trump could get it done. He did.

A slew of eponymous edifices followed: the Trump International Hotel & Tower on Central Park West, Trump Park Avenue, and the Trump Parc and Trump Parc East. And of course, the famous Trump Tower, inside the atrium of which are various restaurants and shops called Trump Grill, Trump Pizza, and Trump Sweets.

While he is not by admission a voracious reader (or even a reader at all), in his quest to put his stamp on New York’s (or more accurately Manhattan’s) famous skyline, ( especially evident in his plans for a huge West Side project of six 76-story towers called Television City, and one additional record-high skyscraper) Trump recalls the hero of Ayn Rand’s novel ‘The Fountainhead,’ for architecture is unmissable and the ultimate form of branding. He even tried to rebuild on the World Trade Center site after 9/11.

It was no surprise that the New York development world came to despise Trump (whom they saw as arriviste) and his buildings (for their supposed vulgarity and ostentation) and Television City was never built. He never forgot nor forgave them.

Later, even as his real estate empire repeatedly went into bankruptcy, Trump turned himself into a global trademarking factory living on royalties and rents from buildings, golf courses, steaks, wine, ties, and more. According to Trump’s 2016 Federal Election Commission disclosure, among the more than 500 corporations, trusts, limited liability companies, and other associations he holds positions in are a vast array of “DT Marks” entities from Baku to Qatar.

As a neophyte politician, Trump also sought to rebrand a Republican Party tottering after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama in his image. Ultimately, he accomplished this to such an extent that his America First agenda was almost the opposite of what the GOP stood for only one presidential cycle earlier and what their autopsy report suggested as the recommended direction (i.e. outreach to other races, sifter positions on immigration etc.)

While campaigning in 2015 and 2016, Trump treated his Republican rivals—most of them major figures in national politics—with as much contempt and disregard as he once did his rivals in Manhattan real estate. Trump saw, as no other candidate did, the hollow credibility of the Republican establishment in the bitter aftermath of the George W. Bush presidency as the political class churned out blow-dried clones opining the same focus group-driven positions and supported by wordy policy papers no one read. Thus, Trump found himself essentially kicking down a rotted door, and seizing possession of the house in much the same way his younger version collected long overdue rents for his father’s company.

It is hardly an accident that at his first presidential rollout a decade ago, as Trump famously descended the escalator in glittery Trump Tower, he pledged to “take the brand of the United States and make it great again.”

More recently, as a newly inaugurated president for the second time, Trump also sought to reshape Washington, D.C., in his image—or at least rebrand it—starting with the White House, which he’s partially demolished and turned into a Gilded Age, New York-style mansion replete with generous amounts of gold leaves. Aside from the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts; the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace; Dulles International Airport, which he reportedly also wants named for him; as well as the aforementioned proposed Arc de Trumpian Triumph next to the Potomac. Then there is the drug discount program he’s calling TrumpRx and his plans for the most advanced battleship in the world—called “Trump-class,” of course, with the more than appropriately named first ship being called the ‘Defiant.’

Now, it seems, Trump is also intent on leaving behind a lasting global legacy, and his confidence in this grandiose ambition has only grown in proportion to the seeming ease with which he’s able to achieve his transformation—at least thus far.

Previous presidents have been forced to discard or scale down big global ambitions in the face of often bloody military failure—whether Lyndon Johnson’s humiliation in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter’s failure to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, or George W. Bush’s fraught occupation of Iraq. Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton suffered the Black Hawk Down debacle in Mogadishu. And so on. Only his self-styled nemesis, Barack Obama as well as George H.W. Bush seem to have escaped such opprobrium.

As of this writing, Donald Trump has not yet met such a situation, and there’s no certainty he will. But some of his critics, including Trump biographers, say he seems dangerously fixated on the use of military power—a predilection he may have picked up while a cadet at the New York Military Academy. In early January, Trump proposed a $1.5 trillion defense budget, a 66% increase to an already vast sum.

“We’ve got the greatest military in the world, and we’re using it,” the president has said. Yet previous U.S. leaders have been much more wary of too much deployment, preferring to focus on deterrence. In the early 1990s, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, herself a hawkish advocate of using U.S. military force in Bosnia, upbraided Colin Powell, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” as Powell wrote later in his memoir, My American Journey.

Powell recorded his feelings: “I thought I would have an aneurysm.” More emphatically , he observed, “American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board.”

During this time, he developed the eponymous Powell Doctrine, the idea that the U.S. military should only be mobilized in overwhelming numbers, in situations where victory is near-certain, and where the exit strategy is clear.

Trump, as yet, has found no exit—either from Venezuela or Iran. Nor has he given any indication he’s thought of one. But the president can be sure of one thing: For good or ill, both places will long be associated with the Trump brand.