Thomas L. Friedman
Trump Has Failed as
Commander in Chief
June 2, 2026
Credit...Photo
Illustration by Naila Ruechel for The New York Times. Source
Opinion
Columnist
With each passing month
of his presidency, Donald Trump behaves more like America’s commander in thief
than its commander in chief.
How so? Let me count the
ways. We are a nation at war today, with tens of thousands of troops deployed
near Iran. Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s
top domestic priority is to keep the country united. Because there is nothing
more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our
country ripping itself apart at home. And there is nothing that encourages an
enemy to hold out for better terms for ending a war with America than seeing
America at war with itself.
And how has Trump risen
to that commander-in-chief unifying duty? He has not lifted a finger to bring
Democrats behind the war. Instead, he’s prioritized acting like a commander in
thief. At the same moment Trump was asking our men and women in uniform to make
the ultimate sacrifice, he engaged in a brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of
the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies,
which could include those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It was
so outrageous that even some of his most reliable Republican Party sycophants
couldn’t accept it.
Trump conspired with his own Justice
Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to
create a $1.776 billion political slush fund, supposedly to compensate those
Trump supporters who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of his predecessor. In fact, as this paper’s editorial board noted, it
would “reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf
of the president.”
Fortunately, a federal
judge put a temporary hold on the scheme that no one described better than the
Republican former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “So the nation’s top
law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault
cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” In the face of all that
opposition, Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday he was withdrawing
this terrible plan.
If Trump had an ounce of
integrity, instead of scheming to set aside $1.776 billion to potentially pay
off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked the
halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to
support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army. It is
both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and
sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God
bless Ukraine’s fighters.
Alas, though, Trump
apparently wants money only for people who tried to overthrow our Constitution
at home, not for those who want to emulate our constitutional democracy abroad.
In addition, the
Trump-directed Justice Department quietly inserted, as a supplement to that
slush fund deal, a one-page document signed by Blanche
stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from
prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Trump, his family members
or his businesses. That measure remains in force, Blanche said on Tuesday.
President Trump has another moniker
suggesting his ethical challenges: “trader in chief,” as The Associated
Press recently proposed. Why? Because “recent
presidents have stayed away from trading stocks in companies whose fortunes
they could lift or scuttle with the stroke of a pen, but Donald Trump smashed
that precedent in the first quarter of this year with more than 3,600 buy and
sell orders,” The A.P. wrote, “many of them involving companies whose
profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government.”
That was an average of
50 trades a day in stocks that included U.S. military suppliers affected by the
Iran war. “If he were defense secretary, he would be committing a crime,”
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics adviser in the George W. Bush administration,
told The A.P. “Technically he can do this, but it is a fundamental breach of
trust.”
Not only has Trump
choked off virtually all U.S. financial aid to Ukraine, but he is also
reducing U.S. troops on the ground in NATO countries right when Putin, sensing
he is losing the war, is increasingly threatening them.
Just as Americans are
starting to realize that Trump is becoming a predator on our system — trying to
manipulate the justice system to generate cash available to his Jan. 6 pirates
and immunity from ongoing inquiries into taxes for himself and his family — our
allies are concluding that Trump’s America is becoming a dangerous predator on
them.
Indeed, something is
happening with America’s traditional allies that I never thought I would see in
this lifetime or the next. In the post-World War II era, we and our allies
together embraced the doctrine of “deterrence” against the Soviet Union, and later
Russia, to prevent any attempt by the Kremlin to forcibly expand its influence
into the free world or put neighbors under its thumb.
Not any longer.
Our allies have watched Trump threaten
to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark. They have
watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that
NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him
slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the
same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless,
ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.
As a result of all that,
something unprecedented is happening: “Deterring Trump’s America is now
becoming a strategic priority of our allies as much as deterring Russia was,”
Nader Mousavizadeh, the chief executive of Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical
consulting firm, and a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi
Annan, told me.
And how could it not?
When you look at how Trump has hammered Canada with tariffs, it is hard not to
conclude that the worst position for a country to be in during the second Trump
administration “is to be America’s closest ally and have integrated your economy,
energy systems and military with that of the United States,” Mousavizadeh said.
Everyone can now see, he added, that Trump will “weaponize any country’s
dependence on America and use it to extract whatever he can in the narrowest
and most tactical and transactional definition of American power.”
No wonder that after
Trump stepped up his rhetoric about taking over Greenland, European NATO
members — Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland and the
United Kingdom — all announced plans to send small military
contingents to Greenland to bolster the Danes.
Daniel Fried, a former
U.S. ambassador to Poland, noted in an essay for the Atlantic Council that
though these NATO allies tried to frame their move as necessary to bolster
Arctic security, they also “have used the word ‘deterrence.’ For Europeans to
speak in such terms about the United States, even implicitly, is a low point,
but it is needed.”
Let’s not forget that early on Trump
forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying
to overrun it. This is the real “Trump Doctrine”: Oppose America, and I will
tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.
The only rational
response for our allies is to try to “deter and diversify,” Mousavizadeh
concluded. And if Trump keeps this up for his full four years, he added, “no
NATO leader can ever again responsibly agree to the degree of dependence on
U.S. technology, U.S. defense systems or financial systems” that NATO countries
long took for granted.
I have been in Portugal
this week and I have been shocked by the degree to which European business
executives speak of having lost faith in American institutions and in America
as the guarantor of global legal norms — something they have always taken for
granted. It is literally disorienting for them, like hikers who have lost their
compass.
In short, having a
president who behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is
costing us dearly at home and abroad. This perversion of the American
presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars
and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and
prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s
future.
