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Donald Trump The Middle East South America Immigration See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Link Copied!
Follow So much for that lame duck in the White House.
President Donald Trump is doubling down on retribution, global domination and relentless domestic power.
The first full week of 2026 was a potentially defining one for Trumpâs second presidency after the old year ended with predictions of his authority ebbing under the curse of term-limited commanders in chief.
But Trump was never going to sit by and watch his strongmanâs aura erode.
Trump ousted Venezuelaâs dictator Nicolás Maduro and plans to personally manage the countryâs oil reserves as he seeks to dominate the Western Hemisphere.
He has demanded ownership of Greenland in a potential new imperialist land grab.
And the administration on Sunday vowed no retreat on its purge against undocumented migrants despite the killing of Minneapolis woman Renee Good by an ICE agent.
The second week of the year started with another political thunderclap Sunday when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed that federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into the renovation of the Federal Reserve headquarters.
Powell accused the administration of targeting him because he wonât bow to Trumpâs pressure for large cuts in interest rates.
President Donald Trump and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell tour the Federal Reserveâs $2.5 billion headquarters renovation project on July 24, 2025, in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Officials declined to give details of the case, but Powellâs claim to be a victim of the weaponization of the Justice Department follows Trumpâs use of federal power to charge perceived enemies, including former FBI chief James Comey, in cases that have not always stood up in court.
The Powell investigation will send an unmistakable message to his replacement, whom Trump is expected to nominate this year: Donât ignore the presidentâs demands even if they shatter the central bankâs independence, which has been a pillar of the mighty US economy.
Trump is also wrestling with another extraordinary potential adventure abroad.
Aides have offered him options to enforce his red line with military action against Iran after he warned the US will âstart shootingâ if the regime cracks downs on rising protests.
Despite his threats, hundreds of demonstrators have been killed.
The president also spent the weekend threatening Cuba on social media.
His administration hopes that controlling Venezuela will squeeze the communist regime that has defied the US for 65 years into making a deal with Washington or into political collapse.
So far this year, Trump is indicating that his second year back in the White House will accelerate a trend of the first: Show him a constitutional curb, an international law, or a status quo, and his instinct is to smash it.
The result is that millions of people around the world now find their lives intricately bound up in the whims of the most untamed and unpredictable president in generations.
Iranians gather while blocking a street during a protest in Tehran, Iran on January 9.
MAHSA/Middle East Images/Getty Images Trumpâs next big choice is over Iran Trump is deliberating whether to throw himself into an even more consequential crisis after the clerical regime of Iranâs Ayatollah Ali Khamenei turned its guns on protesters despite the presidentâs warnings that doing so could trigger US action.
The possibilities may appear tantalizing to the White House.
⺠Could US action hasten the demise of the Iranian Islamic Revolution that has crushed freedoms for more than 45 years, seeded terrorism and thwarted the emergence of the new, prosperous Middle East Trump believes to be within reach?
⺠Or will Trump and his team conclude that direct US support for protesters could end up intensifying a regime crackdown that has reportedly already caused huge loss of life?
This has been a concern in several previous administrations.
Iran has also warned of reprisals against US bases and Israel if the US attacks.
⺠The uncertainty of what may come next in Iran could also deter the administration.
A democratic transition is only one possible outcome if the regime falls.
Some experts fear the emergence of a classic Middle East secular strongman or the eruption of a civil war that could trigger regional chaos and refugee flows.
⺠Thereâs also the question of how much more the US military can handle.
The Navy is already stretched by maintaining a huge armada off Venezuela, which Trump plans to use to rule Caracas at a distance.
Long-range bombing raids like those that targeted Iranâs nuclear program last year might do considerable damage.
But could the US really make a meaningful difference to street battles and local clashes breaking out all over Iranâs cities?
⺠Then thereâs the issue of Trumpâs political standing, as the supposedly âAmerica Firstâ president gives midterm voters reason to ask whether heâs forgotten their economic concerns.
The White House suffered several rebukes from Congress last week over war powers flexed in Venezuela and the expiration of enhanced Obamacare subsidies.
The discipline of the GOP in the House is splintering as antsy members face tough reelection fights.
Still, as Berita reported last week, Trumpâs power to order up primary opponents is keeping a lid on more expansive Republican defections.
Unfinished business Events of a turbulent early January are consistent with Trumpâs aim to create maximum disruption after he left office in 2021 believing that establishment forces had thwarted his better instincts.
The president is seeking to reverse decades of progressive advances â for instance, at universities, law firms and businesses through his dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
And he is seeking to redefine Americaâs relationship with immigrants, not just by seeking to deport undocumented migrants, but with a string of steps to curtail legal immigration and even travel to the US from citizens of non-White nations.
There is no backing down.
Federal law enforcement agents detain a person in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Sunday.
Victor J.
Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday signaled that the tragedy in Minnesota would do nothing to quell the administrationâs hardline immigrant purge.
She doubled down on her narrative that Good committed an act of domestic terrorism, despite multiple videos from the scene casting doubt on that scenario.
âThe facts of the situation are that the vehicle was weaponized, and it attacked the law enforcement officer.
He defended himself, and he defended those individuals around him,â Noem told Beritaâs Jake Tapper on âState of the Union.â But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said on the same show that the officer who shot Good was âa federal agent recklessly using power that ended up in somebody dying.â âAm I biased in this?
Of course.
Iâm biased, because I got two eyes.
Anybody can see these videos, anybody can see that this victim is not a domestic terrorist,â Frey said.
Trump, the agitator, is stirring similar discord abroad.
The presidentâs new national security strategy shows how he plans to remake the Western Hemisphere in his own MAGA image and for the US to dominate it.
Trumpâs vow to personally control Venezuelaâs oil exports represents a remarkable return to imperialism, even if he insists he will use the profits to benefit the countryâs people.
His failure to embrace the democratic opposition after Maduroâs removal raises the possibility that he plans to preside over a petro-dictatorship for years before Venezuela undergoes a political transition.
Trumpâs Greenland grab, meanwhile, threatens to shatter NATO if Europeans donât capitulate to his colonial ambitions, since no one ever contemplated an attack on a member by another member â least of all by its most important country.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller created shockwaves in an interview with Tapper on âThe Leadâ last week when he described the new organizing principle of American foreign policy as based in strength, force and power.
But another, lesser-noticed statement from Miller pointed to implications of Trumpâs fast-expanding international ambitions: He wants to end the post-World War II order led by the United States just as comprehensively as his tariffs have sought to fracture the global free trading system.
âThe future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,â Miller said, calling for an end to âthis whole period that happened after World War II, where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging and engaging these mass reparations schemes.â Trumpâs presidency is in some ways succeeding, but courts huge risks In many ways, Trumpâs second presidency has been a success so far, judged on its own terms.
The presidentâs approval ratings might be below 40% with many Americans despairing of his failure thus far to make food, housing and medical care more affordable.
But Trump has secured the border and made good on his vows to go after undocumented migrants and to pile pressure on Democratic jurisdictions that thwart the White House.
Heâs making strides in imposing his cultural ideology on institutions like the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Smithsonian, and has used his platform to attack fact-based journalism â all goals that are supported by his most loyal supporters.
President Donald Trump takes questions from the members of the press aboard Air Force One on Sunday en route back to the White House from Palm Beach, Florida.
Samuel Corum/Getty Images Trumpâs increasingly ravenous bids for global power are seen by some supporters as a break with âAmerica Firstâ principles.
But Trump has pioneered the use of sharp, overwhelming military power in operations in Iran and Venezuela without getting drawn into long, bloody land wars that his base abhors.
Yet his aggression raises an increasingly urgent question: Is he pushing the country and the global system to a breaking point?
The administrationâs instinct to intensify ICE raids and deployments to Minnesota after the killing of Good seems certain to fuel more political antagonism and raise the possibility of more deaths or injuries that could turn Americans against Americans.
Trumpâs hubris could become an issue, especially if his growing tolerance for risk in military operations results in a tragedy for US personnel.
And Trumpâs 21st-century colonialism and rush to dominate regions and natural resources risks creating a world that rewards strongmen and empires while crushing the autonomy of smaller nations.
Throughout history, such conditions have set off terrible wars, the likes of which were prevented by the US-led order after 1945.
Trumpâs brute force start to 2026 might have dispelled impressions of his ebbing power for now.
But it comes with massive risks.
And America and the world may look very different when heâs done behind the Resolute Desk.
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