The first 10 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have seen such an onslaught of executive orders and implementing actions that Steve Bannon’s strategy to “flood the zone with shit” seems apt. But that characterization is incomplete, and it obscures a more frightening truth: The Trump administration’s actions have been not just voluminous but efficient and effective. Though Trump himself may not appreciate the depth of detail that has gone into these early days, his allies do appear to understand what they are doing, and they seem to have his unquestioning consent to do whatever they like.  

And what they want is very clear: to take full control of the federal government. Not in the way that typifies every change of administration but in a more extreme way designed to eradicate opposition, disempower federal authority, and cause federal bureaucrats to cower. It is an assault on basic governance.

A great deal of thought has gone into this effort already. The executive orders and sundry administrative directives and guidance that have been issued reflect a profound understanding of the federal government and exactly where the weak spots within the bureaucracy might lie.

Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz

Consider, as a first example, the order that reassigned 20 senior career lawyers within the U.S. Department of Justice. Because of their career status, they could not be unilaterally fired, but Trump’s team did the next best thing by reassigning them to a newly created “Sanctuary Cities” task force. With one administrative act, the senior leaders of public-integrity investigations, counter-intelligence investigations, and crypto-currency investigations—individuals with immense experience in criminal law—were taken off the board and assigned to a body that is, apparently, tasked with taking legal actions against cities that do not assist in Trump’s immigration crackdown. Their former offices were effectively neutered.

As my friend, the former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason, put it: “These are career people. They are not political. They are people who have been in these positions often many, many years or even decades. They have developed a real expertise, and that’s a great resource for the government.” A resource that is now lost.

But this is not merely an attack on expertise. This maneuver has a further effect: to disable opposition. Career employees with this degree of expertise and experience are exactly the type who would embody institutional norms and, thus, exactly the sort who could be expected, in their own way, to form a bulwark of institutional resistance to Trumpian excess. Moreover, three of the prosecuting sections of the DOJ that have been disrupted—public integrity (an anti-corruption unit), counterintelligence (combatting foreign influence), and crypto crime—are precisely the three units whose oversight might interfere with Trump’s activities, or those of his allies.

The same playbook was also used last week to hamstring environmental enforcement, by reassigning four senior environmental lawyers at the DOJ to immigration matters. The leaders of these four litigating sections are four of the most experienced environmental lawyers in the nation. Additionally, the Trump administration has frozen action on all cases handled by the Justice Department’s Environmental Enforcement Section, with substantial practical disruption. Once again, expertise has been lost and the functionality of government institutions has been significantly impaired, with the inevitable result that companies subject to environmental regulation (including Trump’s big corporate supporters) will be less policed.

One could continue with a number of other examples, whether the wholesale reassignment of 160 staffers at the National Security Council (responsible for coordinating crucial national-security matters at the White House), the reassignment of DOJ civil-rights leadership (enforcing DEI mandates), or the appointment Ed Martin (a January 6 denier) as the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. But the themes are always the same: Long-standing expertise is discarded and institutional effectiveness diminished.  

[Read: Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity]

More to the point, however, these actions are a “deep cut” reflecting significant planning and intent. The chiefs at DOJ’s public-integrity or environmental-enforcement sections are by no means household names. Nobody outside their immediate ambit of authority would know who they are. And yet the extent of knowledge demonstrated by Trump’s team in reassigning them is extensive. Trump’s team knows which high-value targets might offer internal resistance, and it has removed them.

A second pillar of Trump’s effort to take over the government can be seen in his steps to eliminate any independent oversight of his actions.

Here, the headline is his attempted purge of at least a dozen inspectors general.  Inspectors general, as an institution, are perhaps not so little-known as the DOJ section chiefs who were dismissed, but as individuals, they are mostly anonymous. IGs serve as an internal check on waste, fraud, and abuse at federal agencies. They were created by Congress in the 1970s as a semi-independent authority intended to be insulated from presidential control. They routinely report to Congress and the public about misconduct that they identify for corrective action.

Indeed, Congress so highly values the independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship of IGs that, following Trump’s first presidency, it passed a law strengthening that independence and limiting a president’s removal authority. No doubt recognizing the threat that independent oversight might pose to his planned actions, Trump’s (possibly illegal) removal order is a frontal assault on the careful monitoring Congress has sought to build into the government

To similar effect, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. That relatively obscure office (with a budget of only $7 million and 30 staff), little noticed outside the Army, is intended to study ways of reducing civilian harm during combat. But Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, thinks that “restrictive rules of engagement” make defeating the enemy harder, but the protection of civilians is all about careful rules of engagement. Again, the Trump administration’s action reflects both a substantive desire to diminish oversight and a depth of bureaucratic knowledge that is extensive.

That depth can also be seen in Trump’s announced intention to fire three Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The PCLOB is an independent bipartisan oversight board reviewing executive-branch law-enforcement and intelligence surveillance activities. Yet, despite its crucial internal importance, the PCLOB is hardly a well-known institution. Save for those, like me, who work in that field, few, if any, outside observers could likely define the board’s role or name its members.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s second term might have already peaked]

And still, Trump’s team knew enough to identify an ingenious way of neutering the board. As an independent, statutorily created agency, it could not be eliminated. But the board does require a quorum to operate, and by firing three of its five members this past Monday, Trump effectively eliminated its oversight. As Senator Ron Wyden put it: “By purging the Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Trump is kneecapping one of the only independent watchdogs over government surveillance who could alert Congress and the public about surveillance abuses by his administration.” And he is doing so in a highly sophisticated manner.

Along with large-scale actions to reform government, Trump’s orders included a plethora of small-bore, petty-minded actions designed to implement his personal prejudices and desire for revenge. For example, he has stripped Anthony Fauci of his federal security detail. He has also dismissed Admiral Linda Fagan of the Coast Guard, the only woman who has ever led a military branch, on a transparently inaccurate claim of ineffectiveness. Likewise, he has stripped security protection from Mike Pompeo and John Bolton (both of whom are under affirmative threat from Iran). His administration’s ban on “activist” flags at U.S. embassies would be almost comical if it did not exemplify the coldhearted efficiency at the core of Trump’s new presidency. These actions are petty, but they also reflect the comprehensive nature of his purpose and the extent of his team’s planning.

Were it not so dangerous to democratic norms, the efficiency of these early days would almost be admirable, in the same way that one might admire a well-run play by an opposing football team. But politics is not a game, and this nation’s basic security and functioning are at risk. Those who oppose Trump’s actions do not have an incompetent opponent; Trump’s team is savvy and has been planning for this for years. They came ready.

A second Trump administration was sure to come down hard on whichever Latin American country first defied it—few in the region expected otherwise. But Colombia was perhaps the United States’ most steadfast friend in South America, and the speed with which a 100-year relationship seemed to crumble last night was frightening.

Or perhaps exhilarating, if you were a Chinese diplomat in Latin America observing the presidential spat.

First, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, refused to allow U.S.-military deportation flights that were already airborne to land in his country. Petro balked at reports of migrants arriving handcuffed and said that Colombia would allow such flights only if deportees were treated with “dignity and respect.” President Donald Trump’s response—grossly disproportionate—was to threaten tariffs, visa restrictions, and even banking sanctions against a strategic U.S. ally. The two countries worked out a late-night deal that seems to have averted a crisis, but the speed of escalation left much of Latin American unnerved.

[From the September 2024 issue: Seventy miles in hell]

If Americans are under the impression that Trump’s penchant for reckless, heat-of-the-moment policy making is unique, they don’t have the measure of Gustavo Petro. Colombia’s radical left-wing president has appalled friends and foes alike with X tiffs and stunts such as repeatedly tagging a parody account for his defense minister and amplifying false rumors that Colombian kids lost in the Amazon jungle had been found. Some of his posts come across as just plain bonkers—such as the one he wrote to Trump in the middle of yesterday’s crisis.

At 4:15 p.m. on Sunday, diplomats were working furiously behind the scenes to smooth over the rift between the two presidents when Petro hit back with a long, incoherent rant. Starting with a curt dismissal of tourism in the U.S. as “boring,” the missive went everywhere: Petro slammed American racism, asserted his refusal to “shake hands with white slavers,” and celebrated Walt Whitman. He also recalled the U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup against Chile’s leftist president Salvador Allende, celebrated Colombia’s putative roots in the caliphate of Córdoba, and protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, a Coolidge-era U.S. scandal involving the supposed racial profiling of two Italian American anarchists. In other words, at a moment of peril for his country, Colombia’s president posted a word salad—and then pinned it to the top of his X account.

The moment called for careful diplomacy, not a fit of pique. In Brazil, where the mistreatment of deportees on U.S. military flights had already caused controversy, Colombia’s spat narrowed the Brazilian government’s room for maneuver still further. And throughout the region, governments struggling to figure out what to do with large numbers of deportees found themselves staring into the abyss: Most Latin American governments do not like how the U.S. government is behaving but cannot afford a trade war with Uncle Sam.

Or can they? Zoom out a bit and one might wonder. The era of uncontested U.S. leadership in the region is fading fast in the rearview mirror. These days, China provides an obvious alternative to the United States in the realms of trade, finance, and technology. In fact, most of South America—including big countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru—now trades more with China than with the United States. If you exclude Mexico, Chinese trade now dwarfs American trade in the region.

[Juliette Kayyem: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

After Trump was reelected, discussion in the region centered on how to balance growing Chinese influence with existing ties with the United States. Most countries were of a mind to try to stay neutral between the two powers and maintain good relations with both Washington and Beijing. Countless university seminars agonized over what a war in the Taiwan Strait would mean for Latin America: No country in the region would want to take sides, though many recognized that they might not have a choice. All along, the assumption tended to be that a crisis that started outside Latin America would have repercussions within it. What few at the time foresaw was that the region could be delivered to China through Trump’s sheer impetuosity, or his inability to think before posting.

For now, Trumpian aggression has won the day: U.S. and Colombian diplomats—who know each other well and are used to collaborating closely—had little trouble finding a compromise to de-escalate the crisis. That de-escalation can be expected to last about as long as the two countries’ intemperate presidents manage to stay off X.

But for excellent historical reasons, Latin Americans hate being dictated to by gringos and won’t support leaders who meekly allow it. Trump’s hyper-aggressive approach to Latin America risks tying up the region with a bow and leaving it on Beijing’s doorstep. Most Latin American leaders will resist a decisive break with Washington—the U.S. is still too important a trade and diplomatic partner to antagonize just for kicks. But Latin American leaders will not wish to be seen submitting passively to the United States in full imperialist mode. Not when the Chinese embassy is just one phone call away.

Sometimes politics resembles one of the weirder branches of modern physics or a fantasy version of biology. Time may seem to run backwards; solid things turn out to be insubstantial; black holes swallow up the light; the dead may walk the Earth, ghouls crawl out of cleft rocks, velociraptors not only reappear but learn to speak and, alarmingly, open doors.

That is how American politics feels at the moment. By and large, however, Newtonian physics and traditional biology still apply, and that is worth remembering as we watch the Trump administration’s circus of transgression, vindictiveness, and sometimes mere folly.

Like most administrations, including those of considerably more sedate chief executives, that of the 47th president has decided to way overinterpret its mandate. The brute facts remain: Donald Trump received a plurality of votes (albeit a decisive majority in the Electoral College); the Republican Party is holding on to the House of Representatives by a hair and has a slim majority in the Senate. The administration may hate civil servants and seek to undermine their job security, but it will discover that it needs them to keep airplanes flying safely, the financial system functioning, drugs safe for use, and food fit for consumption.

Gravity still works—if somewhat unreliably. Politicians who overinterpret narrow wins in a divided country get pulled back to Earth, usually by the midterms. But not just that—the federal system of government gives a lot of power to the states, and although Congress has become anemic and irresponsible, most state governments have not. And so the governor of Florida has declined to appoint the president’s daughter-in-law to a vacant Senate seat, and the governor of Ohio has passed on one of the president’s more socially awkward tech billionaires for another. These are small but interesting indications of gravity reasserting itself.

Lawyers, by the thousand, in and out of state governments, create their own gravitational field. The poorly paid lawyers of the Justice Department can sue only so much, and the Supreme Court will turn out to be—as it did during the previous Trump administration—less reliably Trumpist than the president would wish. (The most pro-Trump justices are Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two of the conservatives he did not appoint.) Even the appalling sweeping pardons of the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists have their limits. If any of those people attempt violence in Maryland or Virginia or anywhere else outside of D.C., they will discover that assault and other crimes there are tried in state, not federal, courts. And the presidential-pardon power does not reach state prisons, which means that some ghouls will go back to their cleft rocks if they go out looking for revenge.

Newtonian physics also has it that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Precisely so. Pardon every criminal who clubbed a police officer, and police unions will be unamused. Impose high tariffs, and working-class voters will encounter higher prices and possibly unemployment. Blow up the national debt to cut taxes, and sooner or later the markets will react. Give way to vaccine skepticism, and epidemics will break out. Turn the intelligence community and military upside down by purging women and other undesirables, and you will produce not only big, embarrassing, consequential failures but also pushback from those large populations, their families, and those politicians who still care about national defense.

And then there is retribution. Political physics runs along the lines of the lyrics composed by Johnny Cash: “That old wheel / Is gonna roll around once more / When it does / It will even up the score.” Or, as Shakespeare has Shylock put it rather more pointedly: “The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

The reckless, violence-feeding mass pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists were evidence of Trumpian lawlessness. The orders to end the security clearances of scores of former senior intelligence officials who criticized Trump, and the stunning decision to remove security protection from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Brian Hook—three former senior officials of the first Trump administration—were pure personal meanness. Suspending clearances was intended as a humiliation and a blow at pocketbooks (many of those targeted serve on corporate boards where clearances are a prerequisite), and cutting security protection against Iranian death threats was even worse.

But Trump’s appointees, who will carry out this and other acts of payback, should consider that before very long they, too, will be out of government. They, too, will want to keep their clearances. And they, too, may incur the wrath of state and non-state enemies who want to kill them. They will wish to consider just how exposed they will inevitably be, once their triumph, like all others, passes into memory. If decency and respect for norms do not motivate them in the right direction, fear may have to serve its place.

Biology also will have its say. Inebriation—with power and success, in this case—invariably leads to hangovers, no matter what family remedies or magical cures one imbibes. That usually hits at the midterms, as the Obama and George W. Bush administrations found out the hard way. More to the point, certain biological realities, including age and its accompanying physical and mental decline, will operate during Trump’s 80s. The flunkies and toadies who surround the president will seek to deny this elemental reality—the Biden team was egregious in this regard—but sooner or later it will take hold too.

Primatology, in this case, offers a useful guide. In most troops of baboons, an alpha male dominates all the others, who exhibit submissive behavior if they know what is good for them. The dominance may be so pronounced that all the alpha male has to do is bare his fangs and snarl to get the behavior he wants. But baboons age, and although he may not notice, the alpha male’s muscles will atrophy, his fangs will fall out. He may continue to snarl, but the younger male baboons will notice and begin to sense the possibility of a succession crisis. And then they pounce.

So, too, here. Donald Trump is already a lame duck. He is, by any measure, old, which is one of many reasons that comparisons with Hitler or younger contemporary European authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán are misplaced. He will be an even lamer duck in two years, at which point the troop of Republican politicians will begin to struggle for the succession. Former friends—Donald Trump Jr. and J. D. Vance, for example—may fall out, and the coalition of differing subclans may fight more openly. Republican unity in several years is highly unlikely.

It’s a bad time in American politics, to be sure. But we need to remember that natural laws still apply, and things could get better if even just one piece of fantasy biology were to hold true: a large class of political invertebrates were to grow spines.

Donald Trump has had a remarkably vocal pre-presidency, particularly on foreign policy. Against the background of a no less astonishing silence from President Joe Biden, Trump has threatened to unleash hell on Hamas unless it cuts a deal with Israel before he is sworn in, mused about seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, and advocated the annexation of Canada—not to mention that he has promised to end the war in Ukraine and inflict tariffs on friend and foe alike.

That Trump observes none of the foreign-policy decorum that presidents, let alone presidents-elect, are supposed to maintain should come as no surprise. We have long known that he has no filters; that he makes outlandish, boorish, menacing, ridiculous promises and threats.

It does not help, however, when the foreign-policy commentariat responds by shrieking in justifiable but futile outrage. It only gratifies Trump and that portion of his followers, who—like J. K. Rowling’s Crabbe and Goyle, the followers of the malicious Draco Malfoy—derive an oafish satisfaction when their bullying leader upsets the good kids. Why give them the pleasure of getting visibly riled?

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

But it does make sense to figure out where these statements come from, and, more important, what consequences they may have. They are, on their face, absurd. There is nothing more that the United States can do to Hamas that the Israelis are not already doing—American troops would not help, and plenty of American bombs have been supplied to people who know the targets much better than the U.S. Air Force. Does Trump really plan to expose American soldiers to Latin American guerrillas, and the Panama Canal to almost certain sabotage, in an occupation? Would he really give Europe an opening to align against the United States in defense of what is, after all, a part of Denmark? As for Canada, we have been there before. In 1775, the rebellious colonies launched an invasion, declaring that the inhabitants would be “conquered into liberty,” an infelicitous phrase if ever there was one, and during the War of 1812, we had another go. We got thoroughly whipped twice. Canadians are not as wimpy as we think, nor as peace-loving as they believe.

As Trump’s former national security adviser H. R. McMaster has pointed out, during his first term, he hesitated to use force. So why does he say these belligerent things? For the pleasure of trolling the eminently trollable elites that he despises, no doubt, but there is more to it than that.

Part of Trump’s modus operandi is throwing those around him off balance. He plays his own people off each other, he keeps friends and allies guessing to the end whether he will support them or not, and he wants possible opponents not to know what he will do next. The tactic is not uncommon, nor is it ineffective. It is also a way (in his mind) of setting up negotiations. In his business life as in his political life, Trump has never negotiated in good faith, does not believe in sticking to a deal (as his creditors know), and has always believed that the only defense is an unremitting offense.

That is a bad way to transact the nation’s affairs internationally, because diplomacy relies more than many people realize on good faith and predictability—but then again, Trump does not understand that. He also does not care about the details of the deals he cuts, so long as they look big and beautiful.

Each of Trump’s foreign-policy eruptions also contains a very small kernel of something real, which his whisperers may have shared with him. The United States has not, until now, loudly insisted that Hamas release the hostages, take safe passage for some of their leaders, and surrender. The rest of the world most certainly has not. Although the Biden administration periodically mentions the fact that some of those hostages are Americans, it has not made a big deal of it: Trump intends to.

It is a commonplace that our view of the world tends to form in our 20s. That, for Trump, would have been in the late 1960s, a time closer to the construction of the Panama Canal than to the present. Even during the ’70s, the decision to hand the canal over to Panama met fierce opposition. And although Trump may be interested in getting deals for American shippers, it is reasonable to be anxious about the nature of Chinese infrastructure investments in the Canal Zone, given that the line between Chinese business and the Chinese government is blurry.

As for Greenland, a vast and important territory because of its strategic position and potential mineral wealth, its inhabitants have periodically made noises about independence from Denmark. There are only 57,000 Greenlanders, and the Chinese have been clever and aggressive in penetrating and corrupting the governments of islands with much larger populations than that. The United States tried to buy Greenland in 1867 and again in 1946 and considered it on other occasions as well. It is not a completely insane idea.

And Americans have periodically indulged in dreams of absorbing Canada. In addition to the two botched invasions, the United States and Great Britain came close to blows over American support for Canadian armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838, and the Fenian raids by Americans (including veterans of the Union army) in 1866 and 1870. William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, wanted Canada, and so have many others. The charming fortifications that tourists can enjoy on the Canadian side of the border in Ontario and Quebec were, let us remember, built to defend them from us, and they were still being built five years after the Civil War.

In short, these are all ridiculous proposals, but not 100 percent unhinged from reality. (Although, if today’s Republican Party loathes wokery in all of its forms, why does it believe the United States would benefit from making adherents of the more toxic Canadian variant of wokeness into citizens?)

[Robinson Meyer: Trump is thinking of buying a giant socialist island]

There are, however, two real dangers in Trump’s foreign-policy blither. The first is that sooner or later, he will need to be taken seriously, particularly because the world is a far more unstable and dangerous place than it was in his first term. It is already clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not take anything he says seriously—and indeed, Putin has had his television channels stick in the knife by showing nude pictures of the once and future first lady. Trump’s lack of credibility could be dangerous.

The other may follow from what a German civil servant in 1934 referred to as “working towards the Führer”—doing not what the leader has ordered, so much as what you believe he would like done. It has become a cliché that Trump’s opponents take him literally but not seriously, and his supporters take him seriously but not literally. There will be those among the compromised individuals he will recruit into government, or MAGA-inspired officials and soldiers already there, who do both. And they may be inclined to do dangerous things.

The way to deal with the foreign-policy bombast is not so much through outrage as by turning it against a leader who is inconstant and leads a movement that is actually deeply divided. The Republican Party now has a more or less isolationist wing now, and it would not hurt to call this promiscuous lack of restraint to its attention. Which is why, one hopes, Senator Rand Paul, among many others, will have to field persistent questions about just how much he supports the program of violent Trumpian foreign-policy twaddle.

Vice-president Elect J. D. Vance once said that he doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. We will soon find out whether the American people share his indifference, because if there is not soon a large new infusion of aid from the United States, Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months. Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.  

This poses an immediate problem for Donald Trump. He promised to settle the war quickly upon taking office, but now faces the hard reality that Vladimir Putin has no interest in a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukraine intact as a sovereign nation. Putin also sees an opportunity to strike a damaging blow at American global power. Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine while there’s still time. The choice he makes in the next few weeks will determine not only the fate of Ukraine but also the success of his presidency.

The end of an independent Ukraine is and always has been Putin’s goal. While foreign-policy commentators spin theories about what kind of deal Putin might accept, how much territory he might demand, and what kind of security guarantees, demilitarized zones, and foreign assistance he might permit, Putin himself has never shown interest in anything short of Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Before Russia’s invasion, many people couldn’t believe that Putin really wanted all of Ukraine. His original aim was to decapitate the government in Kyiv, replace it with a government subservient to Moscow, and through that government control the entire country. Shortly after the invasion was launched, as Russian forces were still driving on Ukraine, Putin could have agreed to a Ukrainian offer to cede territory to Russia, but even then he rejected any guarantees for Ukrainian security. Today, after almost three years of fighting, Putin’s goals have not changed: He wants it all.

[Read: The abandonment of Ukraine]

Putin’s stated terms for a settlement have been consistent throughout the war: a change of government in Kyiv in favor of a pro-Russian regime; “de-Nazification,” his favored euphemism for extinguishing Ukrainian nationalism; demilitarization, or leaving Ukraine without combat power sufficient to defend against another Russian attack; and “neutrality,” meaning no ties with Western organizations such as NATO or the EU, and no Western aid programs aimed at shoring up Ukrainian independence. Western experts filling the op-ed pages and journals with ideas for securing a post-settlement Ukraine have been negotiating with themselves. Putin has never agreed to the establishment of a demilitarized zone, foreign troops on Ukrainian soil, a continuing Ukrainian military relationship with the West of any kind, or the survival of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government or any pro-Western government in Kyiv.

Some hopeful souls argue that Putin will be more flexible once talks begin. But this is based on the mistaken assumption that Putin believes he needs a respite from the fighting. He doesn’t. Yes, the Russian economy is suffering. Yes, Russian losses at the front remain staggeringly high. Yes, Putin lacks the manpower both to fight and to produce vital weaponry and is reluctant to risk political upheaval by instituting a full-scale draft. If the war were going to drag on for another two years or more, these problems might eventually force Putin to seek some kind of truce, perhaps even the kind of agreement Americans muse about. But Putin thinks he’s going to win sooner than that, and he believes that Russians can sustain their present hardships long enough to achieve victory.

The frontline city Bakhmut faces shelling day and night.(Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

Are we so sure he’s wrong? Have American predictions about Russia’s inability to withstand “crippling” sanctions proved correct so far? Western sanctions have forced Russians to adapt and adjust, to find work-arounds on trade, oil, and financing, but although those adjustments have been painful, they have been largely successful. Russia’s GDP grew by more than 3 percent in 2023 and is expected to have grown by more than 3 percent again in 2024, driven by heavy military spending. The IMF’s projections for 2025 are lower, but still anticipate positive growth. Putin has been re-Sovietizing the economy: imposing market and price controls, expropriating private assets, and turning the focus toward military production and away from consumers’ needs. This may not be a successful long-term economic strategy, but in the long term, we are all dead. Putin believes Russia can hold on long enough to win this war.

It is not at all clear that Putin even seeks the return to normalcy that peace in Ukraine would bring. In December, he increased defense spending to a record $126 billion, 32.5 percent of all government spending, to meet the needs of the Ukraine war. Next year, defense spending is projected to reach 40 percent of the Russian budget. (By comparison, the world’s strongest military power, the U.S., spends 16 percent of its total budget on defense.) Putin has revamped the Russian education system to instill military values from grade school to university. He has appointed military veterans to high-profile positions in government as part of an effort to forge a new Russian elite, made up, as Putin says, exclusively of “those who serve Russia, hard workers and [the] military.” He has resurrected Stalin as a hero. Today, Russia looks outwardly like the Russia of the Great Patriotic War, with exuberant nationalism stimulated and the smallest dissent brutally repressed.

[Read: What makes Russia’s economy so sanctions-resistant?]

Is all of this just a temporary response to the war, or is it also the direction Putin wants to steer Russian society? He talks about preparing Russia for the global struggles ahead. Continuing conflict justifies continuing sacrifice and continuing repression. Turning such transformations of society on and off and on again like a light switch—as would be necessary if Putin agreed to a truce and then, a couple of years later, resumed his attack—is not so easy. Could he demand the same level of sacrifice during the long, peaceful interlude? For Putin, making Russians press ahead through the pain to seek victory on the battlefield may be the easier path. The Russian people have historically shown remarkable capacity for sacrifice under the twin stimuli of patriotism and terror. To assume that Russia can’t sustain this war economy long enough to outlast the Ukrainians would be foolish. One more year may be all it takes. Russia faces problems, even serious problems, but Putin believes that without substantial new aid Ukraine’s problems are going to bring it down sooner than Russia.

That is the key point: Putin sees the timelines working in his favor. Russian forces may begin to run low on military equipment in the fall of 2025, but by that time Ukraine may already be close to collapse. Ukraine can’t sustain the war another year without a new aid package from the United States. Ukrainian forces are already suffering from shortages of soldiers, national exhaustion, and collapsing morale. Russia’s casualty rate is higher than Ukraine’s, but there are more Russians than Ukrainians, and Putin has found a way to keep filling the ranks, including with foreign fighters. As one of Ukraine’s top generals recently observed, “the number of Russian troops is constantly increasing.” This year, he estimates, has brought 100,000 additional Russian troops to Ukrainian soil. Meanwhile, lack of equipment prevents Ukraine from outfitting reserve units.

Ukrainian morale is already sagging under Russian missile and drone attacks and the prolonged uncertainty about whether the United States’ vital and irreplaceable support will continue. What happens if that uncertainty becomes certainty, if the next couple of months make clear that the United States is not going to provide a new aid package? That alone could be enough to cause a complete collapse of Ukrainian morale on the military and the home front. But Ukraine has another problem, too. Its defensive lines are now so shallow that if Russian troops break through, they may be able to race west toward Kyiv.

Putin believes he is winning. “The situation is changing dramatically,” he observed in a recent press conference. “We’re moving along the entire front line every day.” His foreign-intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, recently declared, “We are close to achieving our goals, while the armed forces of Ukraine are on the verge of collapse.” That may be an exaggeration for now, but what matters is that Putin believes it. As Naryshkin’s comments affirm, Putin today sees victory within his grasp, more than at any other time since the invasion began.

[Read: The only way the Ukraine war can end]

Things may be tough for Putin now, but Russia has come a long way since the war’s first year. The disastrous failure of his initial invasion left his troops trapped and immobilized, their supply lines exposed and vulnerable, as the West acted in unison to oppose him and provide aid to a stunningly effective Ukrainian counterattack. That first year of the war marked a peak moment of American leadership and alliance solidarity and a low point for Putin. For many months, he effectively fought the entire world with little help from anyone else. There must have been moments when he thought he was going to lose, although even then he would not give up on his maximalist goals.

But he clawed his way back, and circumstances today are far more favorable for Russia, both in Ukraine and internationally. His forces on the ground are making steady progress—at horrific cost, but Putin is willing to pay it so long as Russians tolerate it and he believes that victory is in sight.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s lifeline to the U.S. and the West has never been more imperiled. After three years of dealing with an American administration trying to help Ukraine defend itself, Putin will soon have an American president and a foreign-policy team who have consistently opposed further aid to Ukraine. The transatlantic alliance, once so unified, is in disarray, with America’s European allies in a panic that Trump will pull out of NATO or weaken their economies with tariffs, or both. Europe itself is at a low point; political turmoil in Germany and France has left a leadership vacuum that will not be filled for months, at best. If Trump cuts off or reduces aid to Ukraine, as he has recently suggested he would, then not only will Ukraine collapse but the divisions between the U.S. and its allies, and among the Europeans themselves, will deepen and multiply. Putin is closer to his aim of splintering the West than at any other time in the quarter century since he took power.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

Is this a moment at which to expect Putin to negotiate a peace deal? A truce would give Ukrainians time to breathe and restore their damaged infrastructure as well as their damaged psyches. It would allow them to re-arm without expending the weapons they already have. It would reduce the divisions between the Trump administration and its European allies. It would spare Trump the need to decide whether to seek an aid package for Ukraine and allow him to focus on parts of the world where Russia is more vulnerable, such as the post-Assad Middle East. Today Putin has momentum on his side in what he regards, correctly, as the decisive main theater. If he wins in Ukraine, his loss in Syria will look trivial by comparison. If he hasn’t blinked after almost three years of misery, hardship, and near defeat, why would he blink now when he believes, with reason, that he is on the precipice of such a massive victory?

Avdiivka, Donetsk. 2023. Avdiivka was the site of an extended battle, falling to Russian forces in February, 2024. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

A Russian victory means the end of Ukraine. Putin’s aim is not an independent albeit smaller Ukraine, a neutral Ukraine, or even an autonomous Ukraine within a Russian sphere of influence. His goal is no Ukraine. “Modern Ukraine,” he has said, “is entirely the product of the Soviet era.” Putin does not just want to sever Ukraine’s relationships with the West. He aims to stamp out the very idea of Ukraine, to erase it as a political and cultural entity.

This is not a new Russian goal. Like his pre-Soviet predecessors, Putin regards Ukrainian nationalism itself as a historic threat that predates the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s and NATO enlargement in the 1990s—that even predates the American Revolution. In Putin’s mind, the threat posed by Ukrainian nationalism goes back to the exploitation of Ukrainians by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the machinations of the Austrian empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to the leveraging of Ukrainian nationalist hatred of Russia during World War II by the Germans. So Putin’s call for “de-Nazification” is not just about removing the Zelensky government, but an effort to stamp out all traces of an independent Ukrainian political and cultural identity.

[Read: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine]

The vigorous Russification that Putin’s forces have been imposing in Crimea and the Donbas and other conquered Ukrainian territories is evidence of the deadly seriousness of his intent. International human-rights organizations and journalists, writing in The New York Times, have documented the creation in occupied Ukraine of “a highly institutionalized, bureaucratic and frequently brutal system of repression run by Moscow” comprising “a gulag of more than 100 prisons, detention facilities, informal camps and basements” across an area roughly the size of Ohio. According to a June 2023 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, nearly all Ukrainians released from this gulag reported being subjected to systematic torture and abuse by Russian authorities. Tortures ranged from “punching and cutting detainees, putting sharp objects under fingernails, hitting with batons and rifle butts, strangling, waterboarding, electrocution, stress positions for long periods, exposure to cold temperatures or to a hot box, deprivation of water and food, and mock executions or threats.” Much of the abuse has been sexual, with women and men raped or threatened with rape. Hundreds of summary executions have been documented, and more are likely—many of the civilians detained by Russia have yet to be seen again. Escapees from Russian-occupied Ukraine speak of a “prison society” in which anyone with pro-Ukrainian views risks being sent “to the basement,” where torture and possible death await.

This oppression has gone well beyond the military rationale of identifying potential threats to Russian occupying forces. “The majority of victims,” according to the State Department, have been “active or former local public officials, human rights defenders, civil society activists, journalists, and media workers.” According to the OHCHR, “Russia’s military and their proxies often detained civilians over suspicions regarding their political views, particularly related to pro-Ukrainian sentiments.”

Putin has decreed that all people in the occupied territories must renounce their Ukrainian citizenship and become Russian citizens or face deportation. Russian citizenship is required to send children to school, to register a vehicle, to get medical treatment, and to receive pensions. People without Russian passports cannot own farmland, vote, run for office, or register a religious congregation. In schools throughout the Russian-occupied territories, students learn a Russian curriculum and complete a Russian “patriotic education program” and early military training, all taught by teachers sent from the Russian Federation. Parents who object to this Russification risk having their children taken away and sent to boarding schools in Russia or occupied Crimea, where, Putin has decreed, they can be adopted by Russian citizens. By the end of 2023, Ukrainian officials had verified the names of 19,000 children relocated to schools and camps in Russia or to Russian-occupied territory. As former British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly put it in 2023, “Russia’s forcible deportation of innocent Ukrainian children is a systematic attempt to erase Ukraine’s future.”

[Read: The children Russia kidnapped]

So is the Russian effort to do away with any distinctively Ukrainian religion. In Crimea, Russian authorities have systematically attacked the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, harassed its members, and forced the Church to give up its lands. The largest Ukrainian Orthodox congregation in Crimea closed in 2019, following a decree by occupation authorities that its cathedral in Simferopol be “returned to the state.”

These horrors await the rest of Ukraine if Putin wins. Imagine what that will look like. More than 1 million Ukrainians have taken up arms against Russia since February 2022. What happens to them if, when the fighting stops, Russia has gained control of the entire country? What happens to the politicians, journalists, NGO workers, and human-rights activists who helped in innumerable ways to fight the Russian invaders? What happens to the millions of Ukrainians who, in response to Russia’s attack, have embraced their Ukrainian identity, adopted the Ukrainian language, revived Ukrainian (and invariably anti-Russian) historical narratives, and produced a nascent revival of Ukrainian culture? Russian-occupation authorities will seek to stamp out this resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism across the whole country. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will flee, putting enormous strain on Ukraine’s neighbors to the west. But thousands more will wind up in prison, facing torture or murder. Some commentators argue that it would be better to let Ukraine lose quickly because that, at least, would end the suffering. Yet for many millions of Ukrainians, defeat would be just the beginning of their suffering.

This is where Ukraine is headed unless something changes, and soon. Putin at this moment has no incentive to make any deal that leaves even part of Ukraine intact and independent. Only the prospect of a dramatic, near-term change in his military fortunes could force Putin to take a more accommodating course. He would have to believe that time is not on his side, that Ukraine will not fall within 12 months: that it will instead be supplied and equipped to fight as long as necessary, and that it can count on steady support from the United States and its allies. It’s hard to see why anything short of that would force Putin to veer from his determined drive toward victory.

April 2022. An Orthodox priest presides over a burial for a woman whose husband disappeared in early March in Bucha, which was occupied by Russian troops. His body was not discovered until a month later. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

Which brings us to President-Elect Donald Trump, who now finds himself in a trap only partly of his own devising. When Trump said during his campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, he presumably believed what most observers believed: that Putin needed a respite, that he was prepared to offer peace in exchange for territory, and that a deal would include some kind of security guarantee for whatever remained of Ukraine. Because Trump’s peace proposal at the time was regarded as such a bad deal for Kyiv, most assumed Putin would welcome it. Little did they know that the deal was not remotely bad enough for Putin to accept. So now Trump is in the position of having promised a peace deal that he cannot possibly get without forcing Putin to recalculate.

Compounding Trump’s basic miscalculation is the mythology of Trump as strongman. It has been no small part of Trump’s aura and political success that many expect other world leaders to do his bidding. When he recently summoned the beleaguered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Mar-a-Lago and proceeded to humiliate him as “governor” of America’s “51st state,” Trump boosters in the media rejoiced at his ability to “project strength as the leader of the U.S. while making Trudeau look weak.” Many people, and not just Trump’s supporters, similarly assumed that the mere election of Trump would be enough to force Putin to agree to a peace deal. Trump’s tough-guy image and dealmaking prowess supposedly gave him, in the view of one former Defense official, “the power and the credibility with Putin to tell him he must make a just, lasting peace.”

[Read: The real reason Trump loves Putin]

It’s dangerous to believe your own shtick. Trump himself seemed to think that his election alone would be enough to convince Putin that it was time to cut a deal. In his debate with Kamala Harris, Trump said he would have the war “settled” before he even became president, that as president-elect he would get Putin and Zelensky together to make an agreement. He could do this because “they respect me; they don’t respect Biden.” Trump’s first moves following November 5 exuded confidence that Putin would accommodate the new sheriff in town. Two days after the election, in a phone call with Putin that Trump’s staff leaked to the press, Trump reportedly “advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Beyond these veiled threats, Trump seems to think that something like friendship, high regard, or loyalty will facilitate dealmaking.

That Trump, the most transactional of men, could really believe that Putin would be moved by such sentiments is hard to credit. Days after the phone call in which Trump “advised” him not to escalate, Putin fired a hypersonic, nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine, and he’s been escalating ever since. He also had his spokesmen deny that any phone call had taken place. Even today, Putin insists that he and Trump have not spoken since the election.

Putin has also made clear that he is not interested in peace. As he observed in the days before the missile launch, “Throughout centuries of history, humanity has grown accustomed to resolving disputes by force. Yes, that happens too. Might makes right, and this principle also works.” In a message clearly aimed at Trump’s pretensions of power, Putin suggested that the West make a “rational assessment of events and its own capabilities.” His spokesmen have stated repeatedly that Putin has no interest in “freezing the conflict,” and that anyone who believes Moscow is ready to make concessions at all has either “a short memory or not enough knowledge of the subject.” They have also warned that U.S.-Russian relations are “teetering on the verge of rupture,” with the clear implication that it is up to Trump to repair the damage. Putin is particularly furious at President Joe Biden for finally lifting some of the restrictions on the Ukrainian use of the American long-range ATACMS missiles against Russian targets, threatening to fire intermediate-range ballistic missiles at U.S. and allied targets in response.

Trump has since backed off. When asked about the phone call, Trump these days won’t confirm that it ever happened—“I don’t want to say anything about that, because I don’t want to do anything that could impede the negotiation.” More significantly, he has begun making preemptive concessions in the hope of getting Putin to begin talks. He has declared that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. He has suggested that Ukraine will receive less aid than it has been getting from the United States. And he has criticized Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use American-made ATACMS to strike Russian territory. Putin has simply pocketed all these concessions and offered nothing in return except a willingness to talk “without preconditions.” Now begin the negotiations about beginning the negotiations, while the clock ticks on Kyiv’s ability to endure.

[Read: Trump to Russia’s rescue]

So much for the idea that Putin would simply fold and accept a peace deal once he saw Donald Trump in charge. But what can Trump do now?

Quite a bit, actually. Putin can be forced to accept less than his maximal goals, especially by an American president willing to play genuine hardball. Trump’s reference in his phone call to the superiority of American power and its many troops and facilities in Europe was obviously designed to get Putin’s attention, and it might have if Putin thought Trump was actually prepared to bring all that power into the equation. The thing that Putin has most feared, and has bent over backwards to avoid provoking, is the United States and NATO’s direct involvement in the conflict. He must have been in a panic when his troops were bogged down and losing in Ukraine, vulnerable to NATO air and missile strikes. But the Biden administration refused to even threaten direct involvement, both when it knew Putin’s war plans months in advance, and after the initial invasion, when Putin’s troops were vulnerable. Trump’s supporters like to boast that one of his strengths in dealing with adversaries is his dangerous unpredictability. Hinting at U.S. forces becoming directly involved, as Trump reportedly did in his call with Putin, would certainly have confirmed that reputation. But Putin, one suspects, is not inclined to take such threats seriously without seeing real action to back them. After all, he knows all about bluffs—he paralyzed the Biden administration with them for the better part of three years.

Trump has a credibility problem, partly due to the Biden administration’s failures, but partly of his own making. Putin knows what we all know: that Trump wants out of Ukraine. He does not want to own the war, does not want to spend his first months in a confrontation with Russia, does not want the close cooperation with NATO and other allies that continuing support for Ukraine will require, and, above all, does not want to spend the first months of his new term pushing a Ukraine aid package through Congress after running against that aid. Putin also knows that even if Trump eventually changes his mind, perhaps out of frustration with Putin’s stalling, it will be too late. Months would pass before an aid bill made it through both houses and weaponry began arriving on the battlefield. Putin watched that process grind on last year, and he used the time well. He can afford to wait. After all, if eight months from now Putin feels the tide about to turn against him in the war, he can make the same deal then that Trump would like him to make now. In the meantime, he can continue pummeling the demoralized Ukrainians, taking down what remains of their energy grid, and shrinking the territory under Kyiv’s control.

[Read: How Biden made a mess of Ukraine]

No, in order to change Putin’s calculations, Trump would have to do exactly what he has not wanted to do so far: He would have to renew aid to the Ukrainians immediately, and in sufficient quantity and quality to change the trajectory on the battlefield. He would also have to indicate convincingly that he was prepared to continue providing aid until Putin either acquiesced to a reasonable deal or faced the collapse of his army. Such actions by Trump would change the timelines sufficiently to give Putin cause for concern. Short of that, the Russian president has no reason to talk about peace terms. He need only wait for Ukraine’s collapse.

Putin doesn’t care who the president of the United States is. His goal for more than two decades has been to weaken the U.S. and break its global hegemony and its leadership of the “liberal world order” so that Russia may resume what he sees as its rightful place as a European great power and an empire with global influence. Putin has many immediate reasons to want to subjugate Ukraine, but he also believes that victory will begin the unraveling of eight decades of American global primacy and the oppressive, American-led liberal world order. Think of what he can accomplish by proving through the conquest of Ukraine that even America’s No. 1 tough guy, the man who would “make America great again,” who garnered the support of the majority of American male voters, is helpless to stop him and to prevent a significant blow to American power and influence. In other words, think of what it will mean for Donald Trump’s America to lose. Far from wanting to help Trump, Putin benefits by humiliating him. It wouldn’t be personal. It would be strictly business in this “harsh” and “cynical” world.

Kurakhove, Donetsk. 2023. A 59th Brigade artillery unit fires a rocket. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)

Trump faces a paradox. He and many of his most articulate advisers and supporters share Putin’s hostility to the American order, of which NATO is a central pillar. Some even share his view that the American role in upholding that order is a form of imperialism, as well as a sucker’s bet for the average American. The old America First movement of the early 1940s tried to prevent the United States from becoming a global power with global responsibilities. The thrust of the new America First is to get the United States out of the global-responsibilities business. This is where the Trumpian right and some parts of the American left converge and why some on the left prefer Trump to his “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” opponents. Trump himself is no ideologist, but his sympathies clearly lie with those around the world who share a hatred of what they perceive to be the oppressive and bullying liberal world order, people such as Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s problem, however, is that unlike his fellow travelers in anti-liberalism, he will shortly be the president of the United States. The liberal world order is inseparable from American power, and not just because it depends on American power. America itself would not be so powerful without the alliances and the open international economic and political system that it built after World War II to protect its long-term interests. Trump can’t stop defending the liberal world order without ceding significantly greater influence to Russia and China. Like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Ali Khamenei see the weakening of America as essential to their own ambitions. Trump may share their hostility to the liberal order, but does he also share their desire to weaken America and, by extension, himself?

Unfortunately for Trump, Ukraine is where this titanic struggle is being waged. Today, not only Putin but Xi, Kim, Khamenei, and others whom the American people generally regard as adversaries believe that a Russian victory in Ukraine will do grave damage to American strength everywhere. That is why they are pouring money, weaponry, and, in the case of North Korea, even their own soldiers into the battle. Whatever short-term benefits they may be deriving from assisting Russia, the big payoff they seek is a deadly blow to the American power and influence that has constrained them for decades.

[Read: How Trump can win the peace in Ukraine]

What’s more, America’s allies around the world agree. They, too, believe that a Russian victory in Ukraine, in addition to threatening the immediate security of European states, will undo the American-led security system they depend on. That is why even Asian allies far from the scene of the war have been making their own contributions to the fight.

If Trump fails to support Ukraine, he faces the unpalatable prospect of presiding over a major strategic defeat. Historically, that has never been good for a leader’s political standing. Jimmy Carter looked weak when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which was of far less strategic significance than Ukraine. Henry Kissinger, despite his Nobel Prize, was drummed out of the Republican Party in the mid-1970s in no small part because of America’s failure in Vietnam and the perception that the Soviet Union was on the march during his time in office. Joe Biden ended an unpopular war in Afghanistan, only to pay a political price for doing so. Barack Obama, who moved to increase American forces in Afghanistan, never paid a political price for extending the war. Biden paid that price in part because the exit from Afghanistan was, to say the least, messy. The fall of Ukraine will be far messier—and better televised. Trump has created and cherished an aura of power and toughness, but that can quickly vanish. When the fall of Ukraine comes, it will be hard to spin as anything but a defeat for the United States, and for its president.

This was not what Trump had in mind when he said he could get a peace deal in Ukraine. He no doubt envisioned being lauded as the statesman who persuaded Putin to make a deal, saving the world from the horrors of another endless war. His power and prestige would be enhanced. He would be a winner. His plans do not include being rebuffed, rolled over, and by most of the world’s judgment, defeated.

Whether Trump can figure out where the path he is presently following will lead him is a test of his instincts. He is not on the path to glory. And unless he switches quickly, his choice will determine much more than the future of Ukraine.