In November 2015, Kenneth Maxwell wrote an essay looking ahead to the coming Trump presidency and we are republishing that essay as a baseline reminder of one element of the launch into a new historical epoch.
Reading his piece today, in January 2026 reveals both how much Maxwell understood about the forces at work and how the intervening years have validated his core insights while deepening our understanding of their strategic implications.
Maxwell recognized immediately what many establishment observers missed: Trump’s election represented not merely a political aberration but a fundamental shift in how power operates in contemporary democracies. His observation that Trump “knew something they did not” about the transformation in communication and public discourse has proven more consequential than even Maxwell might have anticipated. The direct connection between leader and public, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and interpretive filters, has become not just a campaign tactic but a governing method with profound implications for statecraft.
What Maxwell captured in that moment of shock and disruption was the beginning of something larger than a single election or administration. He documented the collision between an exhausted post-Cold War consensus and a public that had lost faith in the institutions and elites who claimed to represent their interests. The “rust belt” voters, the lies told to pollsters, the resonance of attacks on “political correctness”, these were not merely electoral phenomena but symptoms of a deeper crisis in the relationship between governed and governors.
Yet Maxwell was writing at a moment of maximum uncertainty, when Trump’s victory seemed impossible to many and his methods appeared chaotic rather than strategic. Eight years later, we have enough evidence to move beyond documentation of disruption toward analysis of what that disruption reveals about power, strategy, and statecraft in the contemporary environment. This is the purpose of our “Strategic Vibes” series: to examine Trump’s approach not as deviation from proper policy formulation but as a distinct operational method suited to the multipolar era.
Maxwell identified the phenomenon; we can now analyze the mechanism. His observation that Trump “aims to be unpredictable” becomes, in strategic terms, the generation of productive ambiguity that keeps adversaries off-balance. His documentation of Trump’s attacks on trade agreements and alliances connects to the concrete outcomes we can now measure: European defense budgets rising substantially, Japan and South Korea assuming greater regional security responsibilities, fundamental recalibration of alliance relationships based on capability rather than sentiment.
The questions Maxwell posed in 2016 remain urgent in 2026: How will Trump’s approach affect America’s relationships with allies, competitors, and enemies? Can his methods produce sustainable strategic outcomes? What does his success reveal about the failure of traditional approaches? But we now have eight years of evidence, interrupted by four years of attempted return to conventional frameworks, that allows more rigorous assessment.
Maxwell noted Trump’s cabinet would resemble the “Gilded Age” and that “the world is a very complicated and dangerous place.” If anything, complexity has intensified. The multipolar authoritarian axis he glimpsed forming has solidified. Russia’s use of force to reshape its periphery has become routine. China’s challenge to American primacy has grown more explicit. The structures that organized international relations for seventy-five years no longer serve their intended purposes.
What Maxwell could not have known in 2016 was whether Trump’s approach represented a momentary disruption or the beginning of a longer transformation in how democracies engage with an international system that no longer corresponds to the assumptions embedded in our institutions and processes. The answer, it turns out, is the latter.
Maxwell’s piece deserves reading not as historical artifact but as essential context for understanding where we are now. He captured the shock of the moment while recognizing its deeper causes. His analysis provides the foundation for examining what has emerged from that initial disruption: not chaos, but a different kind of order – one that operates through demonstrated capability, strategic ambiguity, and the generation of pressure rather than through formal processes and articulated doctrine.
The Trump epoch Maxwell identified has proven more durable and consequential than the temporary political phenomenon many observers expected. Understanding why requires returning to that initial moment of rupture and tracing how the forces Maxwell identified have shaped the strategic landscape we now inhabit.
The Trump Epoch
by Kenneth Maxwell
The Trump Epoch is about to begin. What does his inauguration as the U.S. president tell is about the the U.S. and its politics? What will be the impact, both on the USA, and on America’s relationship with its allies, competitors and enemies? Many are concerned at the prospect. Should they be?
Donald Trump’s election as the president of the USA sent shock waves around the world. It was certainly unanticipated by many observers who should at least have prepared for the eventuality. But evidently they were not. This was mainly because the “Main Stream Media” (MSM), which Trump had attacked so vociferously throughout his campaign, had consistently held that his election was impossible.
He was after all the ultimate outsider. He had never been taken seriously, much less accepted, by the “high priests” of the foreign policy establishment. In fact they had almost all of them signed a joint letter declaring his total incapacity and unsuitability to hold the highest office in the land. And his sexist, misanthropic, anti-immigrant diatribes, only served to confirm their opinion.
Despite being a New York billionaire developer, Donald Trump had never be accepted as a member of the Manhattan elite. Even his gaudy trump tower, enveloping as it does, that symbol of the New York establishment on Fifth Avenue, the headquarters building of Tiffany and Company, did not help. He was a from the outer boroughs, and in New York City terms this meant he could never make it the rarified corridors of New York society. And he resents the fact. He is a billionaire from the outside, from the wrong side of the tracks as the saying goes, with a chip on his shoulder.
But the “Donald” knew something they did not. As a showman and a successful TV realty star, who has just completed 14 seasons as the boss on realty TV show “The Apprentice,” he understood that the world of communication had changed dramatically over the past decade, especially in the U.S., but also elsewhere in the world, as a result of the rise of almost universal penetration of the internet, and the ability of anyone, anywhere, to get the news they chose to get, regardless for the filtering and interpretation of the editors and columnists of the the establishment newspapers and the major television networks
His attacks on the MSM became one of his most popular rallying cries. His use of short, pungent “tweets” has also a defining feature of his presidential campaign, as well as his late night preferred method of communication with the general public since he was elected. He uses the tweet rather than the traditional press conference, or giving special access to preferred journalists.
In fact Trump prefers methods once used by Fiorello La Guardia, the legendary mayor of New York City, who used comic strips to get his message across, or Franklin Roosevelt who used his fireside chats, to directly communicate with the people. Trump uses his tweets for this same purpose. And like La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt, he does so without intermediaries or pundits or editors or journalists interpreting what he says.
Trump also knows how “truth” or “facts” in this new age of Internet communication can be a very relative matter. His truth is often what he (currently) believes it is. He will not allow himself to be constrained by what he claims is the “censorship” of the “political correctness ” of the MSM.
Trump in his campaigning in effect turned his attacks on ” political correctness” into a battle cry of the excluded, galvanizing the passionate support of those segments of society who had lost most over the past two decades of rampant globalisation and stagnant and diminishing income and opportunities, especially in the so called “rust-belt” of the upper mid-west, where the old working class has seen their manufacturing industries devastated, and their formally well paid and secure union jobs lost, as businesses moved their factories and operations to low wage Mexico.
Trump’s attacks on free trade and on the North American free trade area (NAFTA), targeted one of the the much touted achievements of the Clinton administration when the deal was negotiated and signed. His attacks on Mexico, and on Mexican immigrants, and his claim he would built a wall to keep illegal Mexican immigrants out of the USA, were his most successful rallying calls. And of course in these attacks Hillary Clinton was the most vulnerable of targets.
Just like another of “The Donald’s” early victims, Jeb Bush, the lackluster heir apparent to the Bush dynasty, Hillary Clinton was also an integral part of the other recent dynastic family of American politics, the dynasty of her husband and former president Bill Clinton, and she could never escape from the compromised legacy of the Clinton years in office, the sex scandals of his time in the Oval Office, and the subsequent money making mania of Bill Clinton “incorporated” and the tangled international operations of the Clinton Foundation.
The e-mail “money-for- access” allegations against Hillary Clinton, while she was serving as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State stuck. The involvement of the insatiably “sexting” former congressman Weiner and his wife, who was also Hilary Clinton”s closest advisers and friends did not help. The cries of “lock her up” about Hilary Clinton were pure theatre at all his campaign stops. But they resonated with a disenchanted public already deeply troubled by questions about her integrity and honesty. And the fact was that she represented more than any other candidate could have, the political status quo, which voters were finding increasingly distasteful, and were blaming for many of their present discontents.
The pollsters had also got it wrong. And for that they had no excuse. It was not as if they were without warning. The Brexit vote in the British referendum over EU membership should have been signal that all was not right in the world of public opinion evaluation and prediction. But it was a lesson Trump very much saw. Trump invited Nigel Farage, who had invented the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and was the most effective campaigner for Britain to leave the EU, to join him at his own campaign appearances. And after he was elected he meet with Nigel Farage at Trump Tower in New York City and tweeted that he though Farage would be an excellent new UK ambassador to the USA.
Since Theresa May, the post-referendum British prime minister, had been eleventh on Trump’s call list after his victory, this did not go down well in Downing Street. The new post-Brexit referendum British foreign secretary, the Trump-lite, clown like, equally hair-endowed, Boris Johnson, told the House of Commons, rather grumpily, that “the job was not vacant.” But the error of the opinion polls on both Brexit and on the potential for a Trump victory revealed that the disenchantment with the status quo extended also to what people told the pollsters.
Trump voters evidently lied to the pollsters. They did not tell them how in fact they were going to vote in Pennsylvania and in Michigan for example. An UBS survey post-election in the USA of 1,200 of their American clients found that 36% of them, mainly well healed voters, did not tell their friends who they intended to support in order “to fend off arguments or to avoid judgement.” The anti-Trump satirical portrayals on “Saturday Night Live” which have provoked tweet outbursts from the top floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, actually misses the point.
The failure of the pollsters to accurately predict the outcomes of elections is in fact very significant, since it does not bode well for the ability of the opinion polls to predict the electoral outcomes in France, the Netherlands, or Italy, next year, where “non traditional” choices, like Farage and Trump may well be the new normal. And where Beppe Grillo, after the crushing defeat of Matteo Renzi in the Italian constitutional referendum has already celebrated the rise of the nationalist and populist anti establishment forces against what Grillo callers the conspiracy of “freemasons”, huge banking groups and the Chinese.”
Trump of course also attacked the Chinese. And his post election conversation with Tsaii Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan, uprooted an American policy of “deliberate ambiguity” with respect to a “one China” policy and an unspoken “agreement to disagree” which had been in place since Jimmy Carter was president in 1979. And it is unlikely that this call was an accident.
Many of Trump’s hard-line supporters in the U.S. military and national security apparatus have been worried for some time about the aggressive behaviour of the Chinese in the South China Sea, their construction of artificial islands in disputed waters, and their expansionist efforts in this sensitive and territorially disputed region of the world. Trump has also already indicated he will withdraw the U.S. from the trans-Pacific partnership negotiation (the TPP) in effect killing off one of the Obama administration’s major foreign policy initiatives. And already the value of the Mexican peso has gyrated widely in response to Trump’s victory.
Trump has promised to “make America great again” and no one should underestimate his desire to achieve this goal. His election is in this sense is a revolution in the making. Or perhaps more accurately it is a counter revolution against globalisation which draws for its language on deep roots of mid western populism which always also had a radical agenda, often lost in its more racially charged language, just as it has been in Trump’s campaign rhetoric, and is powered by a deep frustration with the status quo, and anger at the politicians and bankers and business leaders who have done so well over the past decade while the wages and living conditions and the future prospects of the average citizen has stagnated or declined. This was the root cause of the pro-BREXIT victory in the U.K. And it is also the prime cause of Trump’s decisive victory in the key battleground States in the American presidential elections.
It is too soon to say how all this will work out.
But Trump has already indicated who he wants to lead his new administration. He wants retired marine general “mad dog” James Mathis to be his defence secretary. This will require a special dispensation by congress. But Mattis is according to Trump a man in the spirit of General George Patten, the legendary and controversial WW2 commander. If he is confirmed he will be the first retired general to run the pentagon since George Marshall after the end of the Second World War. He wants Patsy De Vos to be his education secretary. Former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood movie producer, Steven Mnuchin, will be secretary of the treasury. And private equity mogul Wilber Ross will become secretary of commerce. Both men have promised to push through Trump’s proposals to slash taxes, loosen bank regulation, and to shake up trading relations with China and other trading partners. Ross rejected the “Protectionist” label. He said that “There’s trade, there’s sensible trade, and there’s dumb trade. We’ve been doing a lot of dumb trade. and that’s the part that that’s going to be fixed.” Trump wants Elaine Chão as transport secretary. And for health secretary he wants Tom Price, a zealous cretic of Obamacare, which was also one of Trump’s main targets during the presidential campaign, and who wants to give e consumers more market-led choices, a very popular position among Congressional republicans who control both houses of the congress after the elections.
Some observers have said it will be a cabinet that resembles the “guilded age.” Well! No one ever claimed that Trump was poor, or that he did not appreciate gold furniture, or revel in bling. He is a showman. This should be a surprise to no one. He aims in fact to be unpredictable.
But Trump also has to run a government. He has 4,000 White House and executive branch positions to fill, including more than a 1000 that require senate confirmation. And all these individuals will have to go though FBI security clearance, political vetting and a review by the office of government ethics to avoid financial conflicts. None of these processes will be speedy or uncomplicated.
And the world is a very complicated and dangerous place. More so perhaps than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Russia is led. by a determined and skillful and ruthless tactician, who does not hesitate to use force where it can be effective in Russia’s national interests. China is growing power with an increasingly important economic and political role in Africa and Latin America as well as in its immediate vicinity. The war in Syria continues unabated. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is unresolved.
Trump also attacked Muslims in his campaign, said he would deport convicted foreign felons, and severely tighten visa requirements. He criticized the Iranian nuclear deal, also one of president Obama’s major negotiations. Europe is facing more lectins next year which could well see the right wing anti Muslim anti EU nationalist and populist marine le penn become the next president of France, and bring nationalist populist electoral success in the Netherlands. And the Brexit negotiations will be at their tortuous beginnings.
About one thing we can be absolutely certain: There will be mighty challenges ahead for President Trump.
Kenneth Maxwell on Global Trends: An Historian of the 18th Century Looks at the Contemporary World