Peter Baker wrote a post that has been well-received, but not by me. Here’s what it claims:
At Home and Abroad, Deference to Trump Turns Increasingly to Defiance
While the president remains the most dominant figure in the world, other leaders and institutions are pushing back more vigorously than at the beginning of his second term.
[snip]
The age of capitulation that defined Mr. Trump’s return to office may be starting to fade. World leaders and domestic institutions are, in some cases at least, showing less willingness to submit to Mr. Trump’s will. European leaders have refused to join his war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel flatly rejected his Gaza plan. Gulf Arab states forced him to abandon plans to charge a shipping toll in the Strait of Hormuz.
Universities and law firms are rebuffing his directives rather than signing on the bottom line. Bond markets are rebelling against his fiscal policies. Even the ABC network, whose $16 million payment to settle a Trump lawsuit was seen as an early example of yielding to the president, has discovered that it did not buy peace and is now suing his administration for threatening its broadcast licenses.
None of which means that Mr. Trump should be underestimated. Although his poll numbers are at or near historic lows, he remains the most dominant figure on the planet, able to reset the terms of the global conversation on a whim with a social media post and unafraid of wielding power in ways that his predecessors did not.
I will now tell you why I think it is shite analysis.
First, the post itself tells you the analysis — at least as it pertains to Baker’s claim that people have newly stopped capitulating domestically — is unsound.
Baker tells you universities are rebuffing Trump’s directives, but in ¶16, Baker describes that, “Yale University began negotiating with the Trump administration.” He says law firms are doing so too — except many of the chief capitulators, starting with Sullivan & Cromwell, remain mired in Trump’s corruption, and the so-called defiance from other law firms started in March 2025, when Perkins Coie started a wave of lawsuits against Trump, culminating in an ABA lawsuit in which Trump has tried to further split the legal community to protect Boris Epshteyn. Baker says that “Even the ABC network” is suing, but remains silent about Bari Weiss’ destruction of CBS to serve Trump, to say nothing of the larger effort to destroy the media. (Very curiously, Baker does not mention his own paper’s so-called defiance in the face of Trump’s legal threats, which deserve a mention.)
In ¶¶7 and 8, Baker treats Republicans in Congress and Republicans in primaries as the same, admitting that Republicans in Congress have not so-called defied Trump, while noting that voters increasingly are.
And every time someone predicts that Republicans in Congress will finally begin exhibiting some independence, they prove the prognosticators wrong. While they have resisted his pressure in some instances lately, Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general made clear that he still dominates his party’s congressional wing.
But even among Republicans, there are some worrisome signs for the president. Although he has successfully punished several prominent Republican lawmakers he deemed disloyal by rallying his MAGA base to defeat them in party primaries this year, G.O.P. voters have rejected Mr. Trump’s endorsed candidates in 10 nominating contests, including six in August alone. Polls show his support among Republicans slipping.
They’re not the same, and the actual facts Baker describes here — Republicans in Congress remain blindly loyal but Republican voters increasingly do not — ought to be an entry point for more nuanced analysis, particularly if Baker had considered overall polling, but he doesn’t. With the notable exception of Norm Eisen, one of Trump’s most effective opponents, Democrats are entirely absent from Baker’s story tale, and Baker largely ignores Eisen’s comment about why Trump increasingly fails: “Mr. Eisen said, it owes in part to overreaching by Mr. Trump. ‘Trump has been his own worst enemy,’ he said.”
Before I turn to the case Baker makes internationally, let me lay out how Baker structures this narratively.
The first ¶ of this post — the seventh and eighth words!! — adopt the passive voice.
This is a summer movie that’s been seen before: President Trump makes demands. When the other side does not give him what he wants, he escalates with bombastic threats of crippling punishment. The other side surrenders. [my emphasis]
Even just on the matter of law firms, this summer movie of surrender was not “seen before.” I certainly didn’t see that movie. Perkins Coie sued in March 2025. So did Jenner & Block. WilmerHale sued the same day. Susman Godfrey sued in April. The ABA sued, in a far more interesting lawsuit, in June.
Nor is Baker’s story true for universities. Harvard sued in April, slowing the capitulation of universities not infiltrated by Trump flunkies.
It’s not even true for businesses. One of the business community’s first acts of so-called defiance came on tariffs, on which Trump suffered a humiliating loss at SCOTUS.
In his very first paragraph, Baker takes a story he has told to himself — that last summer everyone capitulated in the face of Trump’s increasing threats — and outsources that false belief to the passive voice. The story has been seen before, but I won’t confess that it’s a story that I, Peter Baker, significantly made up.
Now check out ¶5, immediately after the three I quote above, where Baker starts hedging his bets.
None of which means that Mr. Trump should be underestimated. Although his poll numbers are at or near historic lows, he remains the most dominant figure on the planet, able to reset the terms of the global conversation on a whim with a social media post and unafraid of wielding power in ways that his predecessors did not.
Having made a claim of some significant change, Baker backtracks by saying Trump should not be underestimated (that passive voice, again) because 1) He is able to reset the global conversation with a tweet and 2) He’s unafraid of wielding power in ways his predecessors did not.
When you wade through the passive voice, this is how presidential historian Peter Baker measures Donald Trump: His tweets. And how he attempts to wield power, but not its efficacy (ignoring Eisen to his peril).
Now check out how Peter Baker, who is purportedly a journalist, includes Trump’s objections to this entire premise (or perhaps to Eisen’s assertion that Trump is his own worst enemy, which it immediately follows) 6¶¶ later.
Mr. Trump and his advisers reject that assessment, of course, and point to his continuing ability to shape events. In a series of social media posts in recent days, the president has taken credit for falling crime rates and insisted that he is winning the war with Iran. He has disputed polls showing his unpopularity and rejected stories about recent primary losses.
“The actual Polls are tremendous, and the Spirit in our Country has never been higher,” he wrote. “We’re winning against EVERYONE, including Iran, whose Country is in Economic and Military Death Spiral.”
He said that his “endorsements are stronger than ever” and asserted that the Republican candidates who were defeated despite his support were never going to prevail. “The few that lost were done out of loyalty,” he wrote. “It was almost impossible for them to win but, I felt obligated to go with them because they were, in my opinion, good people!”
The White House rejects Peter Baker’s assessment, in Peter Baker’s description, by pointing to tweets where Trump lied. Lied about his role in dropping crime rates, lied about losing the war in Iran, lied about his polling, lied about primary losses.
And Peter Baker, in a post that hides his own false illusions behind the passive voice, does not correct those lies, nor even comment about Trump’s life-long reliance on lies to accrue power. Baker points to Trump’s lies as if they were a substantive rebuttal and not, instead, a symptom of weakness.
Not to mention, a sign that the false tweets appear to still work with Baker when they’ve lost some of their magic with much of the world and even, increasingly, GOP voters.
What Baker does in his description of foreign so-called defiance is just as stupid. Baker underestimates the degree to which Bibi has always been willing to blow off American Presidents, of either party. He understates the degree to which Gulf allies are rethinking their relationship with Trump and just as importantly, their reliance on the US for defense.
Mark Carney, on whose imagined new so-called defiance this story tale rests, stopped reading from Trump’s script no later than January 20 of this year, when he rolled out the doctrine of Middle Powers. Holy Hell, Mark Carney got elected because of his so-called defiance to Trump’s threats against Canada early last year.
And that’s a point — the extent to which Trump has become toxic internationally — Baker entirely misses when he describes how both left and right don’t just resist Trump’s demands, but find doing so politically advantageous, arguably even politically necessary.
There are indications that is happening overseas as well, at least in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East. When Mr. Trump became president again last year, NATO allies bowed to his pressure and agreed to increase military spending. But now they are more resistant to his demands across the board, from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain on the left to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy on the right.
Crazier still, as part of his defense of the claim that Europe is so-called defying Trump, he describes that NATO “bowed” to Trump’s pressure to increase defense spending.
This claim is a very American trope, but it is, in my opinion, a sign of an analytical blind spot I commonly see in US commentary. Sure, Trump demanded more defense spending from NATO countries and spending went up. But it went up, in significant part, because — at best — the US is no longer a reliable security partner and is — realistically — a potential adversary. I don’t know how you miss that in a piece where you claim, “That seemed to change [sic] early in the year when Mr. Trump pushed to take over Greenland.” Greenland was the final straw, but Europe had already started shifting its approach to defense throughout last year, because it is obvious to everyone outside the US that the US world order is dead, suffocated with a My Pillow by Donald Trump.
Baker’s treatment of Iran is perhaps most telling. As with NATO spending, he reads it exclusively in terms of Trump. Europe has refused to join Trump’s war but Germany has allowed the US to use bases. Trump claims he’s winning but it’s not Peter Baker’s job to point out that’s not true, much less consider how that lie is a key part of Trump’s dissolving power.
Baker never ever questions the why here. What does it mean to the rest of the world that Trump destroyed the world order by launching an ill-considered war as a tantrum. Worse still, for a guy who deems Trump powerful because he is “able to reset the terms of the global conversation on a whim with a social media post,” Baker doesn’t consider how impotent that ultimately proves, how Trump’s repeated resort to attempting to will victory by tweet rather than leadership and strategy — even assuming Trump is sending those tweets and not his comfort blonde who refused a security review for a year — has exposed the Emperor’s fat and aging nakedness.
If Donald Trump has pissed away American hegemony at every opportunity — by pissing off his closest allies, picking serial trade wars that backfire in the market and even at SCOTUS (which setback Baker doesn’t mention), and starting then losing a war that significantly damages the world economy and likely ends the era of petro-power — then it can no longer be assumed by people like Peter Baker that Trump’s apparent power within the United States extends to the rest of the world.
Once the President of the United States commits hegemonic suicide, the President of the United States is no longer the most powerful man in the world.
This piece was well-received, I think, because people want what Peter Baker trades in: appearances. The appearance that we’re over the hump.
The reality is more nuanced, both because work Baker ignored last summer is coming to fruition but because Republicans politicians refuse to save their political future by so-called defying Trump.
But a far more important point, in my opinion, is that if you’re going to yoke analysis of domestic so-called defiance to what is something else internationally, it is high time to consider what it means both within and outside of the US that the President of the United States pissed away his own power by committing hegemonic suicide.
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