Hubris Is Undoing Trump’s Second Term

By Dan McLaughlin

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

Last January, on the eve of the Trump re-inauguration, I argued that everything Donald Trump’s enemies had attempted against him had failed or backfired, offering him three possible paths: a victorious second term, a more conventionally disappointing third act — or a more spectacular downfall by his own hand:

 

There’s also the third, Nixonian ending: Trump, having laid all his enemies at his feet and surmounted all of his defeats, is laid low instead by his triumphs. That is the tale of hubris told by so many tragic-hero lives in Greek myth, the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Plutarch. It seems the most fitting way for Trump to end, even if we can’t yet envision how. It feels like the reason why he had to win, elevating him before the Fall.

 

Certainly, some version of hubristic overreading of a reelection victory is a common bane of second-term presidencies. True, most of them don’t include a four-year wilderness interlude, but there’s no particular sign that Trump will be returning a humbled man. What remains to be seen is whether events conspire to impose some humility on him by more forcible means.

 

A year later, that seems to be where we are headed. Democrats have done precious little on their own to damage Trump. Their approval ratings are still in the tank with voters. Other than retreating to the ideological muscle memory of massive resistance to ICE and DOGE — stances that reflect both their core constituencies and their inability to maneuver toward the center ideologically — and pouncing on pre-existing MAGA conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein, about the only idea of their own that Democrats have had is to push for extending Obamacare subsidies — in other words, re-running their playbook from a decade and a half ago.

 

Instead, they have had to rely upon Trump to overreach. He’s been all too willing to comply.

 

Of course, it was right and prudent for Trump to have an active, and even ambitious, agenda. A newly elected or newly reelected president has political capital to spend, and there are good reasons to spend it rather than hoarding it like a miser. You don’t fight to win elections in order to do nothing with your victory. Even in cold political terms, you don’t hold coalitions together by running out the clock when you’re in power. Events will sooner or later cost you support, so you may as well get something out of the interval before you lose it.

 

But on one front after another, Trump has acted and governed as if there was no risk of alienating any of his new coalition. That’s particularly politically imprudent because of how much of his 2024 victory was owed not to Trump or his platform but to the Democrats’ catastrophic misgovernance. People wanted the economy and border policies of the first Trump term back, yes, but the vast majority were not lining up for a revolution.

 

A wise reading of Trump’s mandate, then, would have counseled the sort of approach often taken by first-term presidents: choose a few priority areas in which to swing for the fences in pursuit of lasting change, advance with more caution across other fronts, and above all else, focus on fixing the things that got the previous administration thrown out of office.

 

That’s not what we’ve received. The most obvious example is on the tariff front. Trump’s fondness for tariffs is well-known, and it’s true that he talked a good deal about expanding them during his 2024 campaign. That said, the successful economic policies of his first term were built around the strategic and selective deployment of tariffs. Instead, we got a market-rattling global war on trade that tried to fight on every front at once. Trump has avoided economic catastrophe by backing off on the most extreme versions of the tariffs and hammering out some deals. But he has nonetheless managed to take political ownership of the cost of living, thwart his foremost mandate (to get prices under control), alienate allies, risk a major legal defeat in the Supreme Court, and now drive Canada into the arms of China.

 

All of this was the result of a hubristic view that tariffs could remake the entire world economy and revive American manufacturing — and quickly — while cutting Congress out of the discussion entirely, thus requiring Trump to get the results he wanted before the end of his presidential term because anything he does can be undone by a Democratic successor.

 

Then there’s immigration. Again, the Biden administration’s policies were such a large, visible, consequential failure that Trump came to office with an unprecedentedly strong mandate to secure the border. Most people understood and expected that this time, Trump would go beyond policing the border and restoring policies such as Remain in Mexico to force asylum-seekers to wait outside the country. This time, Trump would actually deport a significant number of people, starting with criminal aliens and migrants who flooded in during Biden’s tenure. And the Trump team understood that this would be hard and sometimes controversial work that would burn political capital.

 

Even for all of that, the administration’s approach to immigration has been imprudently heavy-handed, often legally sloppy (or worse), unnecessarily confrontational, dishonest, and dismissive in its public communications. Even where the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the Border Patrol have acted within their legal powers, many of the top Trump officials have acted as if public opinion either is permanently in their corner or doesn’t matter. (See Ramesh Ponnuru and Jeff Blehar on this.) At the same time, they have bypassed enforcing immigration laws against employers, pushing enforcement further into more confrontational settings. Justifiable resistance to handing over ICE agents to avowedly anti-ICE state and local officials has been coupled with a stonewalling refusal to conduct transparent federal investigations. All of this is foolhardy. If, as Michael Brendan Dougherty argues, you wish not only to deport a bunch of people but also to create a more durable shift in immigration policy and the illegal-worker economy, you want to do more than clap a bunch of people in cuffs and beat your chest; you want to act strategically to seize the middle ground from your hysterical and extreme opponents. Hubris is seeing your enemies go crazy and deciding that this gives you a license to go further rather than an opportunity to marginalize them.

 

DOGE was a good idea, if one that had little support in Trump’s electoral mandate. But it was massively oversold, pushed too far too fast without adequate patience or legal grounding, and generated far more controversy than its attainments justified. Across multiple areas, such as civil rights and workplace enforcement, Trump has similarly taken useful and important steps, but done so with a heavy-handedness that activated dormant opponents, generated bad publicity, and is likely to be not only unsustainable but a manual for retribution in kind when Trump is gone.

 

Trump’s nomination and election represented a huge repudiation of Democratic lawfare that aimed to jail him, throw him off the ballot, or strip him of his family business, often on the most dubious legal pretexts; to run down with prosecutors and bar complaints all manner of his political allies and supporters; and at the same time to lavish pardons and lenient treatment on Joe Biden’s family and political allies. The savvy move would have been to bring a decisive end to this and to pursue structural reforms aimed at preventing their recurrence. Instead, Trump mass-pardoned or commuted the sentences of even the worst January 6 offenders while gearing up his own bogus legal assaults. These included lobbing ginned-up charges at Federal Reserve governors, bringing flimsy and sloppily constructed cases against Jim Comey and Letitia James that have since collapsed (and that caused Trump to part ways with the United States attorney who warned of this), prosecuting John Bolton, going beyond reasonable retribution (such as stripping individual security clearances from malefactors) to sanctioning entire law firms just for having previously employed those people; and ramping up the political-prosecution threats in Minnesota to the point of triggering the resignation of the lawyer who led the Somali fraud investigation.

 

Foreign policy has been, surprisingly, the strongest suit of this administration thus far. Yet, hubris has been a problem there, too. Trump’s belligerent rhetoric regarding Greenland and Canada has made cooperation all but impossible, killed any near-future chance for acquiring Greenland, reawakened slumbering Danish and Canadian nationalism, and in both countries, resuscitated the fortunes of the political left. At the root of this is the notion that we can simply dispense with the Atlantic alliance. Trump overrated his dealmaking ability in Ukraine and in the TikTok negotiations, and got out of his depth in threatening force against Iran for shooting protesters when he wasn’t prepared to back it up at that time.

 

All the while, Republicans have been faring poorly, and with Trump’s approval ratings sagging and his advantages on the economy and immigration eroding, the midterms could go from bad to worse — and the prospects for 2028 get dimmer.

 

In a democracy, there’s always another election. That requires urgency in getting things done before then, but also some sense of what realistically can be accomplished without alienating the electorate or choosing unilateral tools that can easily be reversed. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair. What beside will remain?