Trump Purged America’s Leftist Toxins. Now Hubris Will be His Downfall

Americans, like much of the world, are getting tired of Donald Trump. Like an old actor who still insists on playing romantic leads, he has managed to become a caricature of himself, a blustering, overweight, sometimes barely coherent one-man wrecking crew. A usually sympathetic conservative journalist, writing in the Wall Street Journal, recently described his behaviour as “incontinent”.

Yet as insane as many of Trump’s failings may be, he has served as something of an enema, purging the excesses of his predecessors. Gone are a host of moronic Biden policies, from net zero and DEI to transgender and racial madness. If judged by what he has eliminated, Trump deserves no small amount of thanks.

The trouble is that, increasingly, Trump seems to be devolving into something of a mix between two Roman emperors, Caligula and the elderly, paranoid Tiberius. His antics over Greenland, his outrageous approach to Canada as a potential “51^st state”, the seemingly endless attempts to get back at opponents – even the doggy-loyal Republicans in Congress have shown increased unease with some of his more deranged ramblings.

With Europe, Trump’s instincts to get the lazy bastards off the dime make sense and may even be working. But his now-withdrawn threats to use force to seize Greenland, when the US already has a sizeable military presence on the island, will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of America’s performative allies. He may have backed down, perhaps due to Wall Street’s objections, but in the process he has empowered the old European elites while discomforting his own political allies on the continent’s resurgent Right.

As with Britain’s Tories in the last election, who threw away their majority by failing their new coalition, Trumpian excess is undermining the political alliance he built in 2024. Getting control of the border may be popular, but the widely perceived brutality of deportations is clearly hurting Republicans with the all-important Latino constituency. The always overblown notion of a growing Right-wing resurgence is losing its reality as even the pro-Trump New York Post suggests his bombast can’t “solve his very real economic problems”.

Never popular among a majority of Americans, he has worsened his standing by being slow to address the key issue of the cost of living, which he first characterised as “a scam”. This is brain dead politics and not a good look for someone with the most billionaire-dominated cabinet in history. His endless campaign to seek retribution against foes – whose nefarious activities helped get him back in the White House, thanks to the backlash among voters – and the mammoth self-dealing among his inner circle will not help Republicans in 2026 or 2028.

Read the rest of this piece at Yahoo News. Originally published in the Telegraph.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: President Donald Trump exits the stage after delivering remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, January 21, 2026, at the Davos Congress Center. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)