Is Trump 2.0 powered by action or reaction?

It’s too early to determine if, through the fog of Truth Social self-congratulation, there is a larger plan being executed.

The White House via Flickr

I should like to thank my friends at the noble wealth management house of Evelyn Partners, the renamed merged entities of Smith and Williamson and of Tilney, for their very kind invitation for me to spend a day as their guest at the Chalke History Festival.

They are principal sponsors and what a fine choice they have made. I think of myself as a bit of a history buff and Chalke has long been on my to-do list. Having been there – the weather could not have been more benign – I must ask myself what has taken me so long. Thus it was that I drove south a little over two hours into the history laden county of Wiltshire and the area around the ancient city of Salisbury.

I had a splendid time but above all was very taken by two of the talks I attended, both of particular current relevance, one by lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall (Rtd) titled “The House of War: The Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate” in which he spoke, referencing his newest book, of the long history of conflict between the West and the East dating back to the birth of Islam. The second was by the eminent Cambridge historian Professor Sir Richard Evans titled “Hitler’s People – Faces of the Third Reich”. My academic background is of course in Nazi history – my tutor at Manchester was the towering figure of Professor Sir Ian Kershaw – fifty years ago he was still plain Ian – who, although now in his mid-80s and retired, is acknowledged to be “the geezer” on the subject of Adolf Hitler.

Kershaw was himself mentored by the late Martin Broszat. One of the central themes of study was, and still is I suppose, to what extent the unfolding of the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945 was determined by Hitler’s 1925 political manifesto “Mein Kampf” and to what extent it was circumstantial, meaning that much of what happened happened because of what had gone before and less because of what was intended for after.

Determinists versus circumstantialists. As a mind game, this is intriguing for exactly a century after the publication of Mein Kampf, presumed to have been largely penned by Rudolf Hess rather than by Hitler himself, we have “Project 25” variously claimed as and then denied being Donald Trump’s own political manifesto, although with historical precedence we can already begin to ask ourselves whether Trump 2.0 is being powered by action or by reaction, by determinism or circumstantialism.

I am loath to go with the fashion of comparing Trump to Hitler. The backdrop of their rise to power could not be more different although there are many similarities, not least of all the chaos that appears to rein within the administration when ideologues of the inner circle battle against one another for access to the leader and for his favour as well as the struggle for control of the civil service.

In Hitler’s Germany, this was achieved by the party within its structure replicating the civil service, something that is less complex in the modern United States as the incoming President has the power to fire more or less any civil servant and to appoint a person (whether qualified or not is less relevant) of his choice in their place. The Nazis began immediately after the seizure of power in 1933 with the process of “Gleichschaltung”, the alignment of public life to the Nazi world view.

In the United States, this realignment after a change of Presidency is built into the system and anyone who believes the new Trump broom has swept any more comprehensively than the Biden one had done four years before is dreaming.

Watching and listening to President Trump during the past 12 days from the first Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure – it really was just 12 days – cannot but have been wondering how much was planned and how much was spur of the moment. One moment he’s going to wipe the ayatollahs off the face of the earth, the next he’s declaring peace has broken out.

The hugely entertaining English 1950s and 1960s comedy duo of Flanders and Swan – Michael Flanders was the father of the highly regarded British financial journalist, now at Bloomberg, Stephanie Flanders – once wrote that if architecture can be described as frozen music does that mean that music is therefore also defrosted architecture? In the same vein, the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war is politics by other means. Does that in subsequence also make politics war by other means? Trump has blithely declared that the war between Iran and Israel is over and that peace begins now. Given that for 49 years America and Israel have been pronounced by the Tehran theocrats as the Great and the Little Satan, I’m not quite sure how Trump can between last Saturday and this Wednesday have come to that conclusion.

When historians look back at the first six months of 2025, will they conclude that Trump came into the White House with a master plan that he executed as best he could under the circumstances or will they see an administration that was day by day changing direction in desperate search of anything, no matter how shaky, that could be declared to be a win?

Donald Trump certainly has more than a passing resemblance to a narcissist who thrives on sycophancy but who also needs to think of himself as the winner which necessitates someone else, anyone else, having to be the loser.

What we cannot know now and might not for some time to come, is whether, through the fog of Truth Social self-congratulation, there is a larger plan being executed. It might be 80 years since VE Day and in a couple of months we will be marking the 80^th anniversary of VJ day but it is 92 years since the National Socialists, never with a majority in the Reichstag, seized power. Some 92 years on, we are still debating the whichness of the why whilst at the same time we hope to be able to immediately find the historical context of the Trump, the Putin and the Xi presidencies.