January 29, 2025

Trump’s Power Play

He’s going to talk loudly and swing whatever stick he has at hand.

Judging from the first week or so, the Trump doctrine is going to be, We can do it the easy way or the hard way.

Those are the words the president used in a post on Truth Social last week threatening tariffs on Russia if it didn’t cut a peace deal with Ukraine.

Trump is a president who understands, and has no hesitation in using, the leverage the U.S. has abroad as the world’s preeminent economic and military power, and the leverage he has at home as a newly elected president with a mandate and the strong backing of a fervent political movement.

He’s going to talk loudly and swing whatever stick he has at hand.

His brief diplomatic tussle with the president of Colombia was instructive. It started with an exchange of words, and ended with Trump putting his counterpart in what in the WWE they call a Scorpion Death Lock.

President Gustavo Petro didn’t want to accept U.S. flights returning Colombian nationals who had come here illegally. Trump threatened punishing tariffs on Colombian goods, to which Petro responded with his own threat before realizing that he’d be deploying a peashooter against a mechanized infantry division.

Colombia sends a quarter of its exports to the United States, so Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs escalating to 50% within a week was an intolerable risk.

This is likely to be a model for Trump getting other countries to accept our deportation flights, and getting Latin American nations to restore the immigration arrangements that worked so well at the end of Trump’s first term.

Everyone knows the United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. Whereas the conventional thinking has been that this overwhelming might imposes on us an obligation to treat allies with a certain respect, Trump’s belief is that it lends us a crushing disparity in negotiating power that we should use to our advantage.

Traditionally in diplomacy there’s a tendency to want to let the other side save face; Trump’s reflex, apparent in the Colombia episode, is to embarrass the other side to create a cautionary example.

Trump is practicing realpolitik if Otto von Bismarck had an active social-media account and the flair of a former reality TV star.

His hope is clearly that enforcing a small red line at the beginning will make it easier to enforce bigger red lines later on.

We hear a lot in international affairs of deterrence, or making a threat to keep foreign actors from doing something you oppose. Trump is now practicing compellence, or making a threat to coerce foreign actors into doing things we want.

That Trump is a strong believer in tariffs gives him a tool in pursuit of this approach not available to free-trade-oriented presidents.

At home, Trump has always been willing to target dissenters within his party more harshly and personally than any of his predecessors. His record of ending political careers ensures that those Republicans who don’t genuinely love him have to fear him, increasing his political power.

In his second term, he also seems determined to use every lever at his disposal to advance his agenda, including things he might have been talked out of, or not considered, the first time around. If there is an authority hiding somewhere in the federal code that might be of use, his team is surely ferreting it out.

All this adds up to a forceful presidency abroad and at home, bumptious and assertive in a way we haven’t seen perhaps since Teddy Roosevelt.

This is not to suggest that Trump has found the magic key to guaranteed success. Bogota is obviously easier to manhandle into submission than, say, Moscow, while presidencies always look best in the first couple of weeks before unanticipated events take a hand.

Whatever happens, though, it’s almost certain that Trump is going to squeeze every ounce of power and influence out of his presidency.

© 2025 by King Features Syndicate

Want more articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to The Patriot Post today! It's Right. It's Free.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2025 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.