If one is struggling to understand Donald Trump’s second-term instincts—his reflexes, priorities, and preferred remedies for complex problems—the solution is neither a new think-tank paper nor a fresh psychoanalysis. It is far simpler: reread his first inaugural address. Slowly. Possibly with a stiff drink.
That speech, delivered in January 2017, was not merely ceremonial throat-clearing. It was a manifesto. A grievance-laden, dystopia-infused user manual for how Trump sees America and the world. What we are witnessing now is not evolution but execution: answers being applied to questions he posed years ago.
In that inaugural speech, America was described as a country in near-terminal decline. “American carnage,” he called it—cities ravaged by crime, factories hollowed out, borders in chaos, elites feasting while ordinary people starved. It was less “Morning in America” and more “The Purge: Federal Edition.”
Once you accept that as the baseline diagnosis, the policy prescriptions become predictable, almost mechanical.
If cities are dystopian war zones, then troops—real ones, with real guns—start to look less like a constitutional aberration and more like a customer service response. If disorder is the defining condition, federal force becomes the default solution. The nuance of federalism, the Posse Comitatus Act, and centuries of civil-military caution are treated as fine print—optional extras in an emergency.
Trump does not see social breakdown as something to be mediated, managed, or addressed through institutions. He sees it as something to be crushed. Preferably on live television.
The same logic applies abroad. Trump’s worldview is resolutely transactional and aggressively literal. Why are we in Iraq? Oil. Therefore, the problem was never the war—it was the failure to take the oil. In Trump’s universe, geopolitics is not chess; it is Monopoly. You land on a country, you collect its resources, you move on.
That framing never left him. It simply went into hibernation, waiting for a moment when restraint was no longer fashionable and norms were already bleeding out on the floor. When he looks at other resource-rich but unstable states, the instinct is the same: reduce complex sovereignty questions into a simple balance sheet. Who has the oil? Why isn’t it us?
This is not strategy in the classical sense. It is instinct elevated to doctrine.
What critics often miss is that Trump does not believe he is being radical. From his perspective, he is merely being honest—saying out loud what polite leaders only think in whispers. Institutions, alliances, constitutional guardrails: these are, to him, impediments to action rather than the point of governance itself.
His first inaugural speech told us all of this. It was not subtle. It was not coded. It was a blunt declaration that America was broken and that only forceful, centralized will could fix it. Everything since then—every escalation, every norm trampled, every soldier-as-solution moment—flows naturally from that premise.
The tragedy is not that Trump has remained consistent. It is that so many people assumed he would not be.
In law, we are taught that when someone tells you who they are, you should believe them—especially when it is sworn in public. Trump did exactly that in 2017. The rest is merely precedent playing out, one executive instinct at a time.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 