Teflon wears out: Trump’s flailing second term endangers key global alliances

Donald Trump’s teflon is wearing thin. He’s at 33 per cent approval, the lowest of his second term; his disapproval ratings are 64 per cent, just lower than Richard Nixon’s at the time of his resignation. With the mid-terms around the corner, alarm bells are ringing. A Trump endorsement, as recent primaries show, is no longer a coronation but the cold kiss of death. Shenanigans no longer pass for governance: Americans are tiring of bluster, lies, cronyism, vanity projects and gaslighting. Inflation, health care and the extended war against Iran are immediate problems.

The fatigue is showing on Trump, too. He is flailing without method, lurching from one incoherent statement to another, sleepwalking through U-turns. In a classic emperor syndrome, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and flatterers who are either too clever to speak up or too incompetent to know the difference. Top generals have been fired in the middle of a war; real estate developers are conducting nuclear negotiations. Beltway insiders claim that Trump’s worldview is formed by what his constant companion, the unvetted 35-year-old Natalie Harp, with no background in anything that matters, lets him see. She controls all access, types out his Truth Social rants late into the night and prints out stories that feed his worst demons. All this is a recipe for utter chaos that sends out destabilising waves to distant shores.

Take just three recent Trump head-scratchers which defy logic.

Frustrated by Iran-Oman talks for the control of Hormuz, the president threatened to “bomb the s…” out of not Iran, but Oman, an old US ally. Oman has been a reliable mediator for US with Tehran, including during the 2015 JCPOA negotiations and in the 2025 indirect nuclear negotiations. It has facilitated the release of US citizens from Iran and was the first Gulf state to permit the US military the use of its facilities, including Salalah and Al Duqm ports, the latter large enough to handle US aircraft carriers. But then Trump is not expected to know all this.

More than once he has labelled the Strait of Hormuz, 7,000 miles away, a US territory, even posting a map that says so. Now who—certainly not Harp—is going to show him the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and explain the concepts of international waters, sovereignty, territorial waters, transit passage and so on. Sovereignty cannot be created by a blockade or a statement at a campaign rally or a map issued on social media. The Iranians have found the right word for such daydreams: delusional.

And when all else is crumbling, Trump has turned to Kim Jong-un with whom, it will be recalled, it was love at first sight. They went on three dates and exchanged love letters, though Kim wanted his delivered to Washington on a rocket. Now Trump wants to rekindle the old flame. A Kim meeting could be spun as a bleak victory in Trump’s blotched deal-making report card of Gaza, Ukraine and Hormuz. To get the dim lighting and seductive music right, he has thrown another old US ally, South Korea, under the bus. The longstanding US-South Korea military exercises have been curtailed and called “inappropriate” and “hostile” not by North Korea but by Trump himself. This at a time when North Korea is Russia’s close partner and gaining valuable battlefield experience by sending troops to Ukraine.

But the world, too, is tiring of Trump. Re-alignments and strategic reviews are factoring in an unreliable US presidency. There’s also much less flattery on show. It is difficult to flatter someone who has just been smuggled out in a catering container during the rather cruelly nick-named Operation Orange Chicken.

The author was India’s high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to the United States.