Trump’s Fatal Second-term Mistake: Underestimating Nationalism

OTTAWA — When Donald Trump won a new term in the White House, Danielle Smith joined the parade of foreign leaders visiting Mar-a-Lago to honor the president-elect. The populist premier of Alberta, Smith enjoyed lively relationships across the American right, even hosting Tucker Carlson in Western Canada in 2024.

Yet when I asked Smith last fall, at a policy summit in Toronto, how she’d feel about Trump potentially intervening in Alberta’s fragile politics, her MAGA stripes vanished.

“I don’t want any foreign influence in our politics here,” Smith told me.

Admiring Trump from afar is one thing. But sovereignty is sovereignty, and borders are borders.

Trump used to understand that.

A decade ago, Trump waged his first-ever political campaign as a nationalist crusader, demanding harder borders and more muscular American sovereignty. When the United Kingdom held its 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union — the 10-year anniversary is in a few days — Trump cheered it on and crowned himself “Mr. Brexit.”

In his second term, Trump’s grasp of nationalist politics has slipped. He has underestimated the power of patriotism and national pride in countries other than his own.

This serial miscalculation has undermined Trump’s trade wars and military adventures, aggravated the cost-of-living crisis, weakened the Republican Party and battered Trump’s bonds with the global right.

It began even before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, with his campaign of bullying against Canada.

The belittling taunts and tariff threats he aimed at Justin Trudeau that winter did not scare America’s neighbor into prostration. They inspired a patriotic backlash and created a new prime minister, Mark Carney, who preaches middle-power resistance to American economic domination.

In Ukraine, Trump’s bid to push the country into a flimsy peace deal — while dressing down Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and grabbing for a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth — was such an insult to Ukrainian sovereignty that Zelenskyy, even at a political low ebb, faced no consequences for rejecting the terms.

Attempts to meddle with judicial decisions in Brazil, commandeer British and Spanish airfields and dictate military strategy to Israel have gone no better. Dispatching Vice President JD Vance to campaign in Hungary’s election did not save Viktor Orbán from a landslide defeat.

Perhaps most damaging to Trump, his expectation that he could decapitate Iran’s leadership, blast the country into submission and install a compliant proxy — all without using ground troops — led to a monthslong stalemate that spiked energy prices and sapped the global economy.

It should not surprise any nationalist leader that Iran’s generals and clerics preferred months of American bombing over quick subjugation.

So why does Trump seem lost in these political currents?

Somewhere between railing against OPEC in the 1980s, applauding Brexit in 2016 and winning the presidency in 2024, Trump started blurring the difference between a right-wing politics that insists on putting national identity above international institutions, and a purely American variant that wants to replace resolutions from the United Nations with edicts from Truth Social.

His sometime admirers have noticed. In a thoroughly revealing interview with POLITICO’s Marion Soletty, Jordan Bardella, the likely presidential nominee for France’s far-right National Rally, lamented that second-term Trump was very different from the first-term version.

These days, he said, the United States was acting more like an “empire.” Trump himself was “extremely unsteady and constantly shifting,” Bardella said.

Bardella disavowed interest in Trump’s endorsement in Danielle Smith-like terms: “We don’t need to accept or open the door to any form of interference.”

Trump’s rough strong-arming has worked well enough in a handful of countries. He endorsed the winning candidate for Poland’s presidency last year. In Latin America, Trump and members of his administration have helped anoint election winners in Argentina and Honduras — politically unstable, economically distressed countries that rely on U.S. assistance. His decapitation strategy succeeded in Venezuela.

Meanwhile Trump has continued to toy freely with European Union and NATO leaders. He all but ignores the UN and pays no political price for it.

To understand why, let’s return to Canada.

In the winter of 2025, as Trump was menacing Canada’s independence and calling it the “51st State,” the former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper — no friend to his country’s ruling Liberal Party — made a rare appearance in frontline politics. At an event here in Ottawa, he declared it would be worth taking “any level of damage” to protect Canada’s freedom.

“If I was still prime minister, I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we're facing,” Harper said then.

How many leaders — or voters — would say anything similar about preserving the regulatory authority of the European Commission or the treaty commitments of NATO?

Trump’s appreciation for the special force of national pride and patriotic sentiment used to be one of his political superpowers. It remains one of the few things holding the Republican Party together.

After all this imperial thrashing-around, Trump may never recover the clarity of purpose of his “Mr. Brexit” era. He has left a political space for someone else to fill.

And so Americans will soon look to Trump’s potential successors in both parties for a new version of U.S. nationalism. The world has only grown more confusing and dangerous since 2016, and voters still want to take back control.