Remember when the leader of the National Party made sure everyone could see his MAGA hat in the background? Not even Winston Peters would be so foolish now.
September 2026 is a long, long way from peak Trump January 2026.
In Trump’s first two years Trump did everything he could to break and remake core United States institutions. He and his team enjoyed great success. Grant him that. The legacy of his movement continues in successful far right movements from Australia to the United Kingdom.
But here we are. China’s leader Xi Jinping will meet with President Trump this Thursday and Friday. China now holds a far stronger position in global trade than the US, has dominance in specific industries, continues to trade with Iran and Russia, and shows little impact from the oil price and petroleum shortages.
In January he decapitated Venezuela and forced control of its thick sour crude oil. In September Cuba is at its weakest point in a century but Trump is no longer moving to regime change.
This week, the United States, Denmark and Greenland signed a defence pact which, far from ceding the entirety of Greenland to the United States as Trump had repeatedly sought earlier this year, instead largely clarifies the 1941 and 1951 agreements.
Over the last month, rather than controlling Iran by attacking without warning in partnership with Israel, the war has widened beyond the Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea. The US military has on multiple fronts including the destruction of many of its Persian Gulf bases, the denial of tactical support for Saudi Arabia, and inability to win any of its stated goals, been proven far weaker than expected.
Last year President Trump vowed to make the United States the global crypto capital and roll back oversight. Bitcoin’s price has nearly collapsed.
Last year President Trump projected that sweeping tariff policies would immediately stabilise costs and secure the sovereignty of US economic production. Instead of revitalising manufacturing, most firms have created new supply chain work-arounds. Canada and other US trade-reliant countries are now making their own plans. And NZ is doing just fine on all key exports.
In Trump’s big 2025 policies against immigration, he’s certainly had policy success by deporting nearly 600,000 people. But it’s also made things worse for years because his approach has stripped three times that number of Temporary Protected Status and other programmes, which will clog the system for years. It has also put otherwise rock solid Republican mid-western seats in political danger.
In early 2026 and still to this day Trump has supported unregulated Artificial Intelligence development, and hyper data centres across the US. There are now major political movements in the US and elsewhere successfully leading the charge against them both.
While Trump’s Republican Party has control of White House, Senate, House of Representatives, a majority of governorships, and arguably the Supreme Court, absolute legislative dominance in late 2026 is now tempered by internal party friction and self-induced political wounds.
Collectively within the US the impact of his policies are now so unpopular the Republicans are now at high risk of losing majorities in both Senate and Congress in November, overturning a huge Trump-led Republican wave in 2023. Across the world new alliances have formed beyond Trump’s influence.
Trump and the Trumpist movement is by no means dead but its power is diminished and there are many signs that he and his supporters are now successfully resisted.
It’s not over. But Peak Trump is a good start.
Trump, please send JD Vance to help our government with electioneering, as you did with Orbàn.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I wouldn't be so sure about the second- and third-order effects of Trumpism.
Trump himself may have badly damaged his presidency and legacy, but that doesn't mean the political forces he exploited disappear with him. If anything, he demonstrated that there is a substantial constituency for a politics built around immigration, distrust of institutions and elites, cultural grievance, national preference and a sense that established politics has failed to maintain control.
For much of the last decade, Trump and Trumpism were almost inseparable. The recipe was extraordinarily difficult to copy because so much of it depended upon Trump himself.
I'm not convinced that's still true.
The more important legacy may be that other politicians have learned which parts of the formula can be separated from Trump and repackaged more effectively. You don't need another Trump if a more disciplined and intellectually capable politician can retain the politically successful parts while discarding some of the chaos and personal baggage.
Immigration is perhaps the clearest example. Whatever one thinks of the underlying policy question, it has moved from the political margins to become a major issue across much of Europe, including Berlin and London, and increasingly in New Zealand.
So I'd be cautious about declaring "Peak Trump". We may instead be approaching the point where Trump becomes less important than the political realignment he helped expose.
And while it does indeed warm the cockles of my heart to see the orange shitgibbon flailing so badly, the political scientist in me can't help noticing how much of the institutional order on which liberal democracy — and, ultimately, New Zealand's security and prosperity — depends he has taken out while doing so.
Maybe we'll see a retrenchment towards the status quo ante. More likely, whatever post-Trump settlement emerges will have to reckon with the political, institutional and geopolitical after-effects of his presidency.
Trump leaving the stage doesn't mean history politely resets to 2015.
Trump is a figurehead for the project of "retaking of the commons by the wealthy" since the 70's.
It won't stop when Trump is gone.