This year marks 10 years since Donald Trump was first elected president of the United States. What a remarkable political journey that popular choice has subsequently visited on the US and the world.
First, let’s consider a recent, real-world report card.
In September, the BBC observed how the US military deliberately killed shipwreck survivors in the Caribbean. The victims were struggling for life after an initial US military attack. The “second tap” attack was explicitly authorized, contrary to the US Department of Defense (Department of War) Law of War Manual. Never mind, the US was, at the time, intensifying its unofficial hot war with Venezuela.
The White House explained that these murder-victims were “narco-terrorists” setting off from Venezuela. They told the world this without providing any evidence beyond mere assertion and without regard for due process.
Consider how issues are handled in East Asia, where China and the Philippines have been at odds for many years over certain maritime claims in the South China Sea. On Christmas Day 2025, a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy vessel helped rescue a Filipino fisherman stranded in the South China Sea for several days after engine failure. Several weeks later, the China Coast Guard and PLA aircraft combined to help rescue 15 Filipinos sailors after a cargo ship capsized in the South China Sea, claiming several lives. The rescued sailors were transferred to the Philippine Coast Guard.
Here is a current, striking measure that confirms how comparatively depraved Washington’s understanding of international and domestic law has become. The roots of this corruption of the persona America presents to the world date back many years, but the last decade has witnessed a conspicuous acceleration of this willful debasement from within.
Substantial foundations were laid for this sharp adulteration of the American brand by then-US president Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017. An article in the Harvard Political Review in 2021 said that Obama was a war criminal. As president, he ordered 563 drone strikes which killed 3,797 people, including the murder of some 40 people attending a funeral in Pakistan. In 2009, as he was beginning this project, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was, however, the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 that visibly marked the inauguration of today’s still-unfolding, exceptionally dismal American decade.
In January 2021, Cordelia Lynch, a Sky News US correspondent, said that “Mr Trump was ending his (first) presidency as I saw him start it — in an exhausting blaze of chaos.” Another commentator, Alex Funhoff, cataloged the grim components that confirmed what he described as a disastrous presidency, including:
A ballooning of federal debt from $20 trillion to $28 trillion, while the national GDP only increased from $19 trillion to $21 trillion.
Continuous bombastic threats and insults directed at both allies and foes.
Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement, and the multinational Iran nuclear deal.
Torpedoing the operation of the World Trade Organization.
The catastrophic handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the US, including Trump’s speculation about employing disinfectant injections as a medical response.
And then came that insurrectional finale. Lynch put it this way:
“The riot at the Capitol was a culmination of years spent amplifying the voice of the alienated, demonizing the ‘swamp’, questioning America’s democratic institutions, and the electoral process itself. Once Trump started to see a second term slip away on election night, he began to unravel and dragged America with him. It plunged him into denial, despair, and a reckless revenge.”
Joe Biden won the 2020 election, a result that sparked the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington after Trump vehemently refused to accept the election outcome. Many thought that a circuit-breaker effect would apply. It did not.
Instead, the Biden administration significantly accelerated the unflinching downhill trajectory set in motion four years earlier.
As one reflects on the last decade in the US, three things become clear. First, America has steadily and openly transformed itself into a paramount hoodlum democracy. Second, the Biden presidency certainly did not interrupt this process. Third, the worst may well be yet to come
There were attempts to rebuild international trust in America. But all meaningful initiatives arising from this project were conspicuously focused on traditional Global West allies. Meanwhile, token meetings — which relied on handpicked attendance rosters — were directed toward the Global South.
Biden energetically escalated the trade war with China, imposing 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in May 2024, for example. And the White House did nothing to stop the then-House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, from visiting Taipei in 2022, knowing full well how geopolitically inflammatory this trip would be.
According to a leading Washington think tank, Biden also increased the net federal debt by an additional $4.7 trillion during his presidency.
Katie Stallard, writing in The New Statesman, stressed that Biden’s primary failures related to his stubborn, ego-driven refusal “to acknowledge his decline even as the ravages of his advancing age were clear.” She and other writers noted, too, how Biden oversaw America’s deadly, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after spending around $2 trillion over 20 years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
Arguments stressing that the Russian military operation against Ukraine in 2022 was inexcusable are strong, but equally robust are those arguments underlining how America incubated this calamity through extended, prior willful provocation of Russia.
John Mearsheimer, a respected American political scientist, has highlighted how then-vice president Biden played a significant role in fostering this catastrophe many years before the Russian military operation. Subsequently, Biden compounded that earlier reckless intervention as the conflict commenced, not least by pressuring Ukraine to walk away from a potential peace agreement shortly after the conflict began.
However, the most egregious failure of his presidency was the way Biden threw maximum military and financial support behind the unspeakably wicked Israeli decision to launch a massive, scorched-earth, genocidal attack on Gaza (which continues to this day) using the fearful Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 as a brazen pretext.
As this fanatical Israeli atrocity began, Biden flew to Israel to hug Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in public, mortally debasing America’s global political credibility. Subsequently, the Biden administration and Congress hosted Netanyahu in Washington with sickening warmth. (In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued a war crimes arrest warrant naming Netanyahu.)
The second year of the latest Trump presidency has commenced as we enter the 10th year since he was first elected. The first eight years of this inauspicious decade have been, on balance, distinctly bad for the world at large — and strikingly bad for America. The last year, however, has surely made those previous years look somewhat benign.
Following the recent slaying of two disobedient American citizens in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement operatives, The Economist seriously questioned if “America’s president is building his own paramilitary militia.” The best-known militia examples are, as it happens, the SA (Sturmabteilung) and the SS (Schutzstaffel), which emerged during the Nazi era in Germany.
In the meantime, the tremendously overarmed American military has increasingly been swaggering from one side of the globe to the other, spitting massively destructive, homicidal firepower at White House labeled targets (or threatening to do so) like some grotesquely demented dragon. Those most recently caught in the military crosshairs include Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and even Greenland. Author, commentator and pastor Chris Hedges calls this “brute colonialism”. Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian essayist, said, “The US is pushing so many regime-change agendas it is hard to keep up.”
Those so far caught in the closely related US economic-intimidation crosshairs include Canada, most of the EU, and Mexico. Almost all other “allies” are watching nervously.
What The Economist calls “tariff madness” has provided the continuing, relentless backdrop to all this elemental bullying.
When you first encounter Trump’s open use of weirdly fabricated images (including the president planting a giant American flag on Greenland), you could be forgiven for thinking this was surely the work of some malevolent foe bent on lampooning the president. But it is not.
Indeed, Trump has populated his administration with a cast of real-life leading (frequently billionaire) characters so incredible that they rival any fictional team typically found in penetrating political satire.
The leading US commentator Ian Bremmer recently argued that Trump’s latest “political revolution” poses the top global risk in 2026. In fact, it is prudent to expect that the pattern of deeply disturbed political behavior, as confirmed in the US over the last decade, will extend well beyond 2026. There is no sign that profound shaping factors, including intense (partly militarized) polarization, entrenched plutocrat-hugging inequality, potently divisive media competition, longstanding racial and cultural divisions, and institutional capture, are set to ease anytime soon.
As one reflects on the last decade in the US, three things become clear. First, America has steadily and openly transformed itself into a paramount hoodlum democracy. Second, the Biden presidency certainly did not interrupt this process. Third, the worst may well be yet to come.
Still, it remains possible that America could discover within itself the means to shed this immensely menacing persona over the next decade. This is the outcome that the world must hope for and be ready to support.
The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
