Donald Trump has bent reality to his will for 200 days

Donald Trump remains the master of political reality 200 days into his second term. His administration drives the headlines, not the other way around. Take the fracas that erupted over last week’s downward adjustment to the previous month’s employment numbers. Any other president would have been put immediately on the defensive, desperate to justify his performance to the whole country. Trump simply fired the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics – and all the headlines since then have been about the firing, not the numbers.

Not only is President Trump not a prisoner of the press, he’s not a prisoner to his own legacy. In his first term, Trump involved America in no new wars. Less than six months into his second term, he took America to war with Iran. This was what the non-interventionist wing of MAGA had feared most and had hoped against hope would never happen. And it was what those elements of the neocon-adjacent right that hadn’t abandoned the GOP with the rise of Trump had most ardently desired. Yet Trump defied the expectations of both sides: he started and promptly ended the war. 

​War with Iran isn’t supposed to be the kind of thing you can finish in two days. Once the conflict begins, its own logic takes over. Look at what happened when George W. Bush took America to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Look how long it took for America to get out of Afghanistan and what little agency America had as Biden sounded the retreat. Even the mightiest nation doesn’t really run a war – the war runs you. Unless you’re Donald Trump: somehow, he did what couldn’t be done. There were headlines aplenty questioning whether Trump’s June 22 air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities really accomplished their objective. But the headlines didn’t last long; Trump had moved on to other things, and the press could only follow.

If the ten years since he came down that escalator have been one long fight between Donald Trump and reality as we know it, reality is losing.

​The story has been the same with Trump’s acrimonious breakup with the doge of DoGE, Elon Musk. It’s been the same with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which is the closest any story has come to capturing Trump in its gravitational pull. Just as the President turned the tables on vocal elements in his own base by bombing Iran, he defied his supporters by refusing to release the Epstein Files, alternately downplaying them entirely or claiming they’re a Democratic hoax concocted to besmirch him. The story hasn’t gone away, but its oxygen is dwindling, not least because influential voices in the elite media have deemed the story too appealing to right-wing populists. It must therefore be a “conspiracy theory,” like “Pizzagate” and QAnon. 

​The next big story that will test whether Trump is still the biggest story of all will be the economic consequences of his tariffs, which have now gone into effect on much of the world. The Great Recession was a story that dwarfed George W. Bush in his final year in office. Will an economic crash do the same to Trump at the start of his second term? Or will the doom conventional economists confidently predict from the trade war turn out to be as hallucinatory as the long war foreign-policy experts foresaw in Iran? Tariff panic broke out several times during the first 200 days – and every time, Trump prevailed, striking new trade deals advantageous to Americans while the stock market kept bouncing back.

Surely at some point gravity must triumph over the tightrope-walker. How long can reality be kept at bay? The global economy is bigger than any nation, let alone any man, president or not. The world is at war – the carnage in Gaza and Ukraine hasn’t yet stopped for Trump. Five years ago, a pandemic and race riots did dictate headlines Trump couldn’t overcome. This president can be cut down to size, however feeble his opposition presently appears to be. Then again, Trump’s setback five years ago only proved to be the prelude to his victory last year. If the ten years since he came down that escalator have been one long fight between Donald Trump and reality as we know it, reality is losing.

​That says something remarkable about Trump, but it also says something about the rules of politics, economics, and foreign affairs as most educated persons understand them. Those rules simply do not exist, at least not in the form that has been taken for granted in respectable circles for the last 35 years. The world is a stranger, richer place than the politicians of the pre-Trump era dared to imagine – or most other Trump-era politicians dare to imagine even now. This doesn’t mean Trump’s next 200 days, or the 1,061 days his administration will have left after that, will be as easily dominated by the President as these first 200 have been. But if the last decade is any indication, the odds are in his favor.