On January 20, 2025 President Donald Trump re-entered the White House a second time.
After he won the November 2024 presidential election, the world spent Christmas welcoming his Second Coming with mixed feelings.
Most (somehow) expected him to not pursue his loud campaign claims and promises to down-size government, change US foreign Policy — and Make America Great Again by going against ‘undocumented immigrants’.
But from his first day in office last year, President Trump has done exactly as outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, seen as his manifesto, even though he publicly denied knowing about it.
In his second first 100 days, President Trump:
• Pardoned almost 1,600 persons convicted for the Capitol Hill insurrection on January 6, 2021
• Approved Elon Musk’s DOGE formula sending thousands of federal workers home in the name of improving efficiency,
• Iced USAID (the world’s biggest aid donor) and put it under the State Department
• Assigned the role of National Security Adviser to Secretary of State Marco Rubio
• Renamed the Defence Department ‘Department of War
• Turned US foreign policy on its head to ensure ‘America First’ in everything global
• Threatened tariff wars against ll nations trading with the USA
• Unleashed the worst attack on immigrants ever in a land built by immigrants
By mid-year, Trump had let the world know he was back, punishing all he claimed had punished him during his four-year absence and making it clear he meant to upend the state.
Sounding like King Donald II, the US president:
• Talked about making Canada the 51st US State
• Changed the Gulf of Mexico’s name to ‘Gulf of America’
• Threatened to ‘take back’ the Panama Canal
• Unleashed global tariffs (even against countries that didn’t exist)
• Gave notice he wanted to annex Greenland for US ‘national security
• Removed a US bounty on the head of Syria’s new President and doubled that on the head of Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro
By December, it was clear to Americans they’d voted for a president with his own agenda, having:
• Sent Federal troops into states that didn’t vote for him
• Isolated Europe over Ukraine, Russia, Venezuela and Greenland
• Armed Israel for its continuing genocidal war in Gaza
• Invoked the age-old Insurrection Act to enable his designation of ‘terrorist’ labels on foreign entities (real or imagined)
• Bombed Iran, Nigeria — and over-100 fishing boats and over-100 people in Caribbean and Pacific waters
• Declared war on Venezuela without Congressional Approval
• Located 8,000 combat troops, 8 missile-loaded attach warships, a nuclear-powered submarine and the world’s biggest aircraft carrier, with over 100 attack aircraft aboard, in the Caribbean Sea
On January 3, before the world awoke, President Trump unleashed a lightning invasion of Venezuela by US troops to kidnap and extract President Maduro and his wife, leaving over-100 Venezuelans and 32 Cubans dead.
Since then, world leaders are seeing President Trump differently, starting to take his threats seriously and no longer regarding him as a predictably unpredictable madman, now seeing him more like the New American Badman on the world stage.
As Uncle Sam’s new Sheriff, he’s started shaping the homeland like his hometown: the highway from the airport to his Mar-a-Lago resort is renamed ‘Donald Trump Drive’, an arc is underway to bear his name, he plans to remodel Mount Rushmore (expectedly with an additional statue of himself), renamed the Monroe Doctrine ‘The Donroe Doctrine’, is converting a US $400 million aircraft gifted to him into the next Air Force One (Presidential Aircraft) — and his name has been added in front of The John F. Kennedy Library.
And now he wants ‘Four More Years’.
The speed with which the President hit the road implementing his declared and undeclared election campaign promises suggests (o some) he may want to achieve as-much as possible in his first year, igniting speculation (among many) that he may be racing against a medical problem.
He’s made it very-clear he has no plans to leave the White House soon, commissioning a new entertainment wing that will change its landscape.
Bad-Boy Trump has shown his middle finger to European Union (EU) allies from Day One:
• Etracting rare earth payments from Ukraine for US security
• Insisting NATO member-states pay more for their security
• Refusing to continue to back an unelected Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky
• Refusing o stop engaging with Russian President Vladimir Putin
• Promising to put US boots on the ground in Ukraine
• Insisting he’ll take Greenland by force if he so determines, no matter what NATO and the EU say or do; and now
• Threatening to impose tariffs against any and all EU nations that oppose US annexation of Greenland.
By the end of the first half of the first month of the first year of his second term, President Trump has made himself the obvious 2025 Man of the Year for all the different reasons that stand him out as the one man who’s said and done the most last year to affect the entire world in the most ways – including pulling the US out of the UN Climate Change body and scores of other international organizations responsible or preserving Humanity and protecting Planet Earth.
But 2026 has also begun with prophetic predictions that, like the Roman and British empires before it (and others), this will be the year that will definitely signal whether it’s really the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, of the US as the world’s most-powerful global empire.
The answer, like any song, may be blowing in the wind — but until heard, the blowback effect is also already being felt across the US: from President Trump’s Maga base revolts, to his party’s loss of the first major elections it faced, to the election of a declared ‘Democratic Socialist’ as New York’s Mayor, to a growing rebellion by Republicans in the US Congress who insist the USA should have ‘No Kings!’
And now for the next three years…