donald-trump
  • Brazil Shows Accountability Works: A Lesson for the US
    Andre Diniz Pagliarini 30 September 2025
    Earlier this month, Brazil did something the United States couldn’t: it punished a president who tried to overturn an election. Jair Bolsonaro lost in 2022, claimed fraud, encouraged his supporters to storm Brasília, and is now serving a 27-year sentence for subverting democracy. Donald Trump lost in 2020, made nearly identical false claims, watched as his most fervent supporters sacked the U.S. Capitol—and he’s back in the White House. That contrast is telling. It goes to the heart of whether democracies can enforce the rules that make them democracies in the first place. Brazil’s message is clear: accountability is possible, even in a deeply polarized society. The United States’ is equally stark: polarization can become an alibi for impunity.
  • Can China’s Global Governance Initiative Adapt the World Order to Multipolarity?
    Seán Golden 12 September 2025
    China marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II (WWII) with an orchestrated set of events designed to visualize how much the current world order has changed. It convened a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that included Xi Jinping’s announcement of a Global Governance Initiative (全球治理倡议 Quanqiu zhili changyi), and staged a massive military parade that highlighted the advanced technology of China’s armed forces. Donald Trump’s typically hostile and narcissistic reaction showed how successful it had been.
  • The Price of Partnership: Can South Africa Trust Washington Again?
    Rabia Turnbull 9 September 2025
    On a crisp morning in Citrusdal, trucks brimming with oranges idled under the blazing South African sun, farmers watched helplessly as port authorities halted shipments to the United States. A new 30 percent tariff, one of the highest imposed by the Trump administration, had shut off access to one of South Africa’s largest export markets. For families whose livelihoods depend on agriculture, the shock was immediate, putting an estimated 30,000 jobs at risk.
  • Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a Boon to Democrats,
    but Don’t Expect them to Seize the Moment
    Hussein Ibish 7 July 2025
    The U.S. has never been short of hideous or harebrained legislation from both liberals and conservatives. But President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Budget Bill,” passed on Thursday by Congress, outdoes anything in living memory. In one gigantic sweep, it enacts at least four major national initiatives, each of which would alone qualify as among the most appalling legislative acts in modern American history.
  • The LA Protests Are What Donald Trump Has Been Waiting For
    Hussein Ibish 16 June 2025
    It’s a real-life film noir in the City of Angels. U.S. President Donald Trump is once again hurling Americans through the looking glass, this time – fittingly – in Los Angeles. It feels lifted from 1930s hard-boiled pulp fiction in which nothing is as it appears and everything is the inverse of what powerful men assert. It’s genuinely shocking, while also seemingly inevitable, that U.S. military forces are being deployed to major cities with the express purpose of trying to intimidate, quash, and, ultimately, violently confront Americans who dare raise their voices against Mr. Trump’s policies and practices. It is one of the most significant inflection points since the last election took America on the road away from constitutional democracy and towards the kind of repressive lawlessness this President admires in other leaders and is seeking to emulate in the U.S.
  • Trump’s Full Gulf Agenda: From the Houthis to Gaza.
    And the Trump Golf Club
    Hussein Ibish 12 May 2025
    From May 13-16, President Donald J. Trump will repeat the opening gesture of his first administration by making the initial major diplomatic travel of his second term to Saudi Arabia (excluding his unanticipated visit to Rome for the funeral of the late Pope Francis) but this time also including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. This trip comes at a highly significant moment in U.S.-Gulf Arab relations, and all parties will have specific agendas and deliverables at stake. Overall, Trump’s trip reinforces the centrality of these partnerships for all sides and signals that he continues to view Gulf Arab countries as important partners, not just for the United States but for his personal and political goals.
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    The “Regime Change” of Trump’s Second Presidency: Political Messianism vs. Rule of Law
    Massimo Faggioli 7 May 2025
    In the history of the United States, this is the era of Donald Trump. The transition from Joe Biden to Trump does not represent a normal transition of power, but rather a regime change. It marks the rise of charismatic leadership and, in the eyes of many, even a form of political messianism, often at odds with the constitutional rule of law. Trump’s second presidency steers America onto a path few – especially in Europe – had anticipated or even imagined, opening up unpredictable scenarios both domestically and internationally.
  • Obama: Core Principles of Democracy Are Eroding
    Under Trump’s Agenda
    Editorial Board 10 April 2025
    “It is up to all of us to fix this.” In his first public speech since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, Barack Obama urged Americans to defend democratic values and called on institutions—particularly universities and law firms—to resist the administration’s attacks. “I have deep differences of opinion with my most immediate successor—who’s now president once again,” Obama told students of Hamilton College, without naming Trump directly, “but at least for most of my time, I’d say the post-World War II era, there was a broad consensus between Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals around a certain set of rules where we settle our differences—[…] bonds that transcend party, region, or ideology.”
  • Slobodian: Beyond Neoliberalism, Techno-Feudal Dystopias Riding the Far Right’s Wave
    Fulvia Giachetti 9 April 2025
    Are we witnessing the rise of a new world order—one ruled not by governments, but by private armies, tech tycoons, and corporate fiefdoms? What sounds like dystopian fiction may, in fact, reflect the dream of a fringe of anarcho-capitalists, now alarmingly close to real power, especially within the ascendant far right. But is it really a “Techno-Feudal” turn or something more fragmented and chaotic? To make sense of the forces at play—their ambitions, strategies, and contradictions—Reset DOC spoke with historian Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy.
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