Trump 2.0

See also: Trump 1.0 for the First Trump Administration.

Inaugural portrait of Donald Trump

Trump 2.0 refers to the Second Trump Administration (2021 - present). President Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, is the second President in United States history other than President Grover Cleveland to serve two non-consecutive terms.

Personnel

See also: Second Cabinet of Donald Trump

First actions

One of President Trump's first actions was to issue an Presidential memoranda that read in past:

“

I have determined that it is no longer in the national interest for the following individuals to access classified information: Antony Blinken, Jacob Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Cheney, Kamala Harris, Adam Kinzinger, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and any other member of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s family.

”

Foreign policy

See also: American foreign policy#Second Trump Administration (2025 - present)

George Beebe, the former director of the CIA’s Russia analysis and a staff advisor on Russia matters to Vice President Cheney and currently director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute explained the state of Trump foreign policy in the summer of 2025:

Orban to Trump, August 2025.

George Beebe: President Trump is trying to hold together a Republican party that itself is divided along a number of lines, but particularly over foreign policy. I think there is a large portion of the party that still wants to think that we're in the early 2000s. We're still in a unipolar moment. The United States can essentially dictate to other countries what they can and can't do. And we don't really have to prioritize. We don't really have limited resources and capabilities. We can take on the Russians and the Iranians and the North Koreans and the Chinese all allied together. And we can still triumph. No need for making any kind of compromises or setting any kind of priorities on all this. And I think the reality is that that's just not possible. Now arrayed against that part of the party is another part that I would regard as realists or restrainers or prioritizers. They go by many different names, and there are nuances among them. But they essentially begin from the premise that the United States has limited capabilities and as a result we have to prioritize our interests in the world. We can't have unlimited ambitions with limited capabilities. There has to be a balance there. And so, how do you do that? And part of this, I think, means you've got to have a more pragmatic relationship with Russia, one that doesn't drive Russia and China to cooperate against the United States and the West in security matters to a much greater degree than they would otherwise. You don't pick a two-front fight with great powers in a multipolar world. That's not going to work out well. And I think right now there are significant numbers of Republicans that fall into that realist camp that are saying, "Wait a minute, this is not going well." Our efforts strategically, to find a way out of the culde-sac that we've maneuvered ourselves into, aren't working. We've got to pursue a settlement in Ukraine in ways that are realistic and can work. We've got to figure out how to deal with Iran in ways that don't lead toward perpetual conflict and war in the Middle East. I think Trump rhetorically has said all of this, but the question is, how do you translate those intentions into actual progress? That's where things are breaking down.

National Security Strategy

In December 2025, the new National Security Strategy (NSS25) was released. The document states, "The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over" and can be summarized as follows:

• “Trump Corollary” to Monroe Doctrine is now the core pillar.
• China downgraded from existential threat to economic competitor.
• Taiwan deterrence = “ideal” but conditional on allies paying up.
• Indo-Pacific secondary, Western Hemisphere + homeland first.
• No more democracy crusades, no value imposition abroad.
• Tariffs quietly admitted as failure, focus shifts to multilateral pressure.
• Biggest shift since 1945: from global cop to fortified hemisphere power.
• Allies will be asked to foot the bill while US rebuilds at home.
• Fortress America is back.

Defense One reported that working from the premise that Europe is facing "civilizational erasure" because of its immigration policies and "censorship of free speech," the NSS proposes to focus U.S. relationships with European countries on a few nations with like-minded—right-wing, presumably—current administrations and movements. Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the U.S. should "work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the [ European Union ]."

“And we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American," the document says.

The C5

The Core 5 would replace the Group of 7

Over the summer of 2025, President Trump made headlines when he lamented the expulsion of Russia from the Group of Eight—now the Group of Seven—as a "very big mistake." He even suggested that he'd like to see China added to form a "G9." His national security strategy proposes taking this a step further, creating a new body of major powers, one that isn't hemmed in by the G7's requirements that the countries be both wealthy and supposedly "democratic".

The new strategy proposes a "Core 5," or C5, made up of the U.S., China, Russia, India and Japan—which are several of the countries with more than 100 million people. It would meet regularly, as the G7 does, for summits with specific themes.

First on the C5's proposed agenda: Middle East security—specifically, normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The EU would conspicuously be excluded, presumably because the U.S. finally realized that it's now an ideologically driven organization that revels in grandstanding and rarely gets anything of importance done nowadays.

"Hegemony wasn't achievable"

Sec. of State Marco Rubio: "It's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power".

The full NSS also spends some time discussing the "failure" of American hegemony, a term that isn't mentioned in the declassified version.

"Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn't achievable," according to the document.

In this context, hegemony refers to the leadership by one country of the world, using soft power to encourage other countries to consent to being led.

"After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country," the NSS states. "Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests."

The Trump administration is using this reasoning to bow out of the U.S.'s role in defending Europe, while it turned its attention to Venezuela-based drug cartels.

"The Trump administration inherited a world in which the guns of war have shattered the peace and stability of many countries on many continents," the NSS reads. "We have a natural interest in ameliorating this crisis."

The document says it shouldn't be up to the United States to do it all alone—but also, China and Russia should not be allowed to replace U.S. leadership. The strategy suggests partnering with "regional champions" to help maintain stability.

"We will reward and encourage the region's governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy," according to the document. "But we must not overlook governments with different outlooks with whom we nonetheless share interests and who want to work with us."

2026 Munich Security Conference

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the February 2026 Munich Security Conference that the euphoria following the Fall of the Berlin Wall,

“

led us to a dangerous delusion. That we had entered quote, "the end of history". That every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood. That the rules-based global order, an overused term, would now replace the national interest, and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world. This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history, and it has cost us dearly.

”

Greenland and the diplomatic crisis

On January 6, 2026, a few days after the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, President Trump provoked a diplomatic crisis by announcing his intention to annex Greenland, by agreement or by force, in order to 'secure' the Arctic against China and Russia.

He threatened to impose tariffs ranging from 10% to 25% on the eight European NATO members that refused to sign an agreement. After dragging NATO into a lost war against Russia, Washington, D.C. was now threatening its own allies, emptying Article 5 of its substance and, with it, the very foundation of the NATO alliance.

In response, French president Emmanuel Macron dispatched a symbolic contingent to Greenland, accompanied by German, Scandinavian and UK units, so as not to give in to American blackmail. President Trump went so far as to threaten Macron, claiming that he would have 'only a few months left in power' and brandishing the prospect of tariffs of up to 200% against France.

On January 21, 2026, Trump made a spectacular about-turn at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In his speech, he explicitly ruled out the use of force and announced that he was in the process of concluding an agreement on Greenland and the entire Arctic region. Even though the military and economic escalation has been defused, the damage has been done. Europeans' trust in the United States was deeply shaken. Threatening tariffs and even territorial annexation against a fellow NATO member had badly shaken European trust in US reliability.

Arms control

With the lapse of the START II treaty on February 5, 2026, The New York Times reported on February 10,

“

In the five days since the last remaining nuclear treaty between the United States and Russia expired, statements by administration officials have made two things clear: Washington is actively weighing the deployment of more nuclear weapons, and it is also likely to conduct a nuclear test of some kind...Both steps would reverse nearly 40 years of stricter nuclear control by the United States, which has reduced or kept steady the number of weapons it has loaded into silos, bombers and submarines...President Trump would be the first president since Ronald Reagan to increase them again.

”