Trump: After me, the flood.
Louis XV is said to have declared, “Après moi le déluge.” After me, the flood. Whether he actually spoke those words remains a matter of historical debate. But rarely has that phrase seemed more fitting for a head of state than it does for Donald Trump.
Trump originally came to power promising to drain the Washington swamp. He wanted to take on the political establishment, fight corruption, and make America great again. It was a message that resonated with millions of people. And one does not have to support Trump to acknowledge that American politics had produced more than enough problems to make such a message appealing.
But Trump has not drained the swamp. He has stirred it up.
He tears something apart here, sets something in motion there, then abandons something else altogether. He attacks institutions, alienates allies, provokes opponents, issues threats, makes demands, and occasionally announces the exact opposite of what he had recently declared non-negotiable. Barely has the public begun to digest one controversy before the next arrives.
At times, his presidency resembles an endless series of improvisations in which nobody seems quite sure whether the leading actor still knows the script.
Of course, Trump has political objectives. His position on immigration, his fondness for tariffs, his distrust of international organisations, and his desire for the broadest possible presidential powers are unmistakable. But having political objectives is not the same as practising statesmanship. And constantly setting things in motion is not the same as moving things forward.
With Trump, the disruption itself often seems to count as an achievement.
It is a remarkable confusion of activity with accomplishment. A president announces something, provokes outrage, forces governments, businesses, and the media to respond, and then presents the resulting attention as proof of his political importance. Whether the original problem has actually been solved quickly becomes a secondary consideration.
The next provocation is already waiting.
One might recognise in this the so-called Madman Theory, an idea from international politics according to which a leader deliberately makes his opponents believe that he is unpredictable and capable of almost anything. Richard Nixon experimented with this approach to put pressure on his adversaries during the Vietnam War.
But such a strategy has one essential requirement: the person pretending to be unpredictable must know what he is doing.
The performance of irrationality is supposed to serve a rational objective. It is a tool that can be picked up and put down again.
With Trump, it is often difficult to tell from the outside where the performance ends and actual policy begins. Perhaps some of his provocations really do conceal careful calculations. Perhaps others are only retrospectively presented as brilliant negotiating tactics because people find it difficult to imagine that an American president might simply have set something in motion without sufficiently considering the consequences.
Not every display of unpredictability is a sign of sophistication. Sometimes unpredictability is simply unpredictability.
It occasionally reminds me of professional wrestling. The opponents change, the conflicts escalate, the audience gets excited, and the leading performer makes sure nobody can take their eyes off him. Sometimes I genuinely get the impression that Hulk Hogan has become president. Although that is probably unfair to Hogan. Perhaps the better comparison is the green Hulk: a character whose enormous strength becomes most apparent when everything around him lies in ruins after his appearance.
Except this is not a television show.
The United States possesses an enormous nuclear arsenal, one of the most powerful military forces in the world, and an influence over the global economy that extends far beyond its borders. Its political decisions affect billions of people who have no vote in American presidential elections.
When an American president starts a trade war, threatens an ally, or calls the reliability of international commitments into question, this is not merely a piece of domestic political theatre. Other countries must respond. Businesses postpone investments. Governments revise their security planning. People who have nothing to do with the original conflict bear the consequences.
The real power of an American president lies not only in what he can do. It also lies in how many other people are forced to react to what he does.
And that is precisely why predictability is not some boring middle-class virtue, but a political necessity.
A country can defend its interests forcefully without publicly humiliating every partner. It can renegotiate international agreements without destroying their fundamental credibility. It can confront political opponents fiercely without declaring them enemies of the nation.
Trump repeatedly seems to blur these distinctions.
The full consequences may only become apparent long after he has left office.
A president can change laws, withdraw from international agreements, and reorganise government agencies. His successor can reverse many of those decisions. But some things cannot be restored so easily.
Trust is one of them.
Anyone who has witnessed an American security guarantee suddenly become the subject of public threats will make different arrangements in the future. Anyone who has seen trade relationships come under pressure within days will reconsider their economic dependencies. And anyone who has watched a president question the legitimacy of elections whenever the result conflicts with his interests will no longer take the stability of democratic institutions for granted.
Perhaps Trump will change the world less through what he has built than through what will no longer be taken for granted after he is gone.
That would be a remarkable historical legacy.
American democracy was never as flawless as it liked to portray itself. Its history includes slavery, racial segregation, political persecution, questionable wars, and presidents who abused their power. Richard Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate. George W. Bush launched a war in Iraq based on justifications that proved disastrously flawed. Previous administrations have also damaged international trust.
Trump is therefore by no means the first president to violate fundamental American ideals.
But he has publicly demonstrated something else in a way that strikes me as historically significant: a profound disregard for the political restraint that allows an office to remain greater than the person temporarily occupying it.
A president does not have to like every judge who rules against him. He does not have to admire every newspaper that criticises him. He is entitled to fight political opponents and challenge an election defeat through the proper legal channels.
But he must recognise that courts, the media, the opposition, and elections do not exist to serve him personally.
That is precisely the difference between political power and public office.
Democracy does not survive on written laws alone. It also depends on habits that have become so familiar that we barely notice them. The loser of an election congratulates the winner. A president respects the independence of the judiciary. He understands that his personal convictions do not automatically become the law of the land. And he knows that his time in office will eventually end.
Such habits often appear to be mere formalities. In reality, they prevent every political disagreement from becoming an existential struggle for power.
Trump has demonstrated just how fragile these habits are.
I find this more disturbing than many of his individual political decisions. A bad decision can be corrected. A destroyed political convention must be painstakingly rebuilt.
And this brings us to a question that is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid: How will this presidency end?
After the 2020 election, Trump already demonstrated that he does not simply accept defeat. He disputed the result for a long time and attempted to prevent its recognition. The fact that American institutions held firm at the time offers no guarantee that every future confrontation will end as relatively peacefully.
I consider it unlikely that Trump could permanently maintain power against the entire American constitutional order. The Constitution, the individual states, the courts, and the numerous independent centres of power all place limits on a president.
But that does not mean a transfer of power will necessarily be peaceful.
Even an unsuccessful attempt to retain political power beyond its constitutional limits can cause considerable damage. It can turn people against one another, trigger violence, paralyse government institutions, and further undermine confidence in democratic procedures.
You do not have to abolish a democracy to damage it severely.
Perhaps Trump will one day leave the White House without a major crisis. Perhaps his supporters and opponents will enter the next political era with the same sense of normality with which previous generations accepted a change of government.
I hope so.
But even in that more favourable scenario, the world will not simply return to what it was before.
Trump has shifted too many boundaries and changed too many expectations. He has demonstrated not only what an American president can do, but also what a president can get away with without necessarily destroying his political career.
That is a lesson his successors will have learned as well.
And therein lies the real danger. Not merely in the behaviour of one president, but in the possibility that his approach to power becomes a model for others.
Yet perhaps this is also where a different historical development could begin.
Hegel did not understand history merely as a sequence of great men and significant events. For him, history was also a process in which contradictions become visible and can be overcome. An existing order comes into conflict with its own foundations, and from that conflict a new awareness may emerge.
It would be tempting to see Trump in this sense as a necessary historical shock. Someone whose presidency forces American democracy to confront its own fragility.
But Hegel should not be mistaken for a source of reassurance. History offers no guarantee of a happy ending. Societies can learn from their mistakes. They can also become accustomed to them.
The real question, therefore, is not whether Trump will eventually leave. He will. The question is what Americans, and the rest of the world, will make of his presidency.
Perhaps they will recognise that political leadership demands more than the ability to attract attention. That compromise is not automatically defeat. That reliability is not weakness. That not every provocation demonstrates courage, and not every act of ruthlessness proves determination.
And perhaps they will remember that political office is not personal property.
A thought attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux captures the nature of public responsibility better than many modern theories of leadership: It is not the office that makes a man honourable. It is the man who must bring honour to the office.
That is a remarkable reversal of our modern understanding of political power.
High office grants its holder authority, prestige, and influence. But that does not mean the person occupying it possesses the qualities that the office deserves. He must demonstrate those qualities through his actions.
A president should therefore not ask how much personal importance he can extract from his position. He should ask what he can contribute to that office during his limited time in it, and in what condition he will hand it over to his successor.
Perhaps one day that idea will become fashionable again.
Not as a nostalgic return to some supposedly better past. The past was never as exemplary as it appears in retrospect. Rather, as the conscious rediscovery of a simple truth: political power requires self-restraint precisely because it is power.
A head of state may argue, provoke, reform, and challenge established arrangements. He may be uncomfortable and need not please everyone. But he must understand that the nation is not merely the backdrop to his personal story.
Trump promised to drain the swamp. Instead, he has churned it up, flung mud in every direction, and left behind a political landscape in which much has become harder to recognise than before.
Perhaps future generations will look back on his presidency as one of those historical experiences after which a society learns once again to distinguish between noise and authority, between power and responsibility, between political spectacle and serious statesmanship.
That, at least, would be progress emerging from a profoundly unpleasant experience.
“Après moi le déluge” expresses the attitude of a ruler who no longer considers the future his responsibility. The only answer to such an attitude is a political culture in which nobody is indispensable and every officeholder understands that his most important legacy is not his own greatness, but the integrity of what he leaves behind for his successors.
For the dignity of an office is not measured by how much power its holder managed to accumulate, but by how much of that dignity remains after he has gone.