BREAKING: US Supreme Court just ruled — Trump has NO absolute immunity in the Epstein case. This 2026 decision means the president can now be subpoenaed. No immunity. Period.

BREAKING: US Supreme Court just ruled — Trump has NO absolute immunity in the Epstein case. This 2026 decision means the president can now be subpoenaed. No immunity. Period.

US President Donald Trump and his senior cabinet colleagues in the Administration lost no time at the end of 2025 in ticking off the list of their “historic achievements” in the first year of Trump’s return to the White House. These ranged from stopping illegal migration at the southern border and deporting thousands of migrants, overturning Biden-era policies committed to reducing CO2 emissions and combatting climate change, passing a sweeping “Big beautiful bill” of tax and benefit cuts in Congress, pulling in “trillions of dollars” in tariffs from US trading partners on all five continents, curbing inflation, ending “woke culture” in government and business, forcing allies to pay vastly more for their own defence, ending eight conflicts across the globe, to reasserting US dominance in its own backyard, the Western Hemisphere. Whatever we may think of the longer-term consequences of these measures, or the wisdom underlying them, we cannot contest the energetic activism of the Administration in issuing 225 Executive Orders in just 10 months and in achieving almost absolute control over the news agenda, both inside the US and internationally. In Trump’s mind he has more than delivered on his campaign promise to “put America first”, although what that means in practice depends on Trump’s day-by-day interpretation of the concept.

In 2025, it has swung from isolationism and unilateral bullying of allies to hyper-military interventionism as far afield as Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen and Syria, as well as more traditional diplomacy and multilateral negotiations involving Europe, the Gulf Arab countries, Egypt and Türkiye in trying to achieve ceasefires and peace agreements in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. Like experiencing all four seasons in one typical day of Scottish weather, the Trump doctrine tends to embrace every element of policy all the time, making it difficult for observers to determine an overall strategy or vision for global order beyond dealing with events and crises tactically as they emerge from one day to the next. If there is one consistent theme that has emerged from the first year of the Trump Administration it is the absolute assertion of untrammelled presidential (and that means personal) power, and constant activism to demonstrate that power at home and abroad, breaking in the process the normal checks and balances system on which US politics has traditionally been based. It recalls the famous dictum of Louis XIV of France: “L’Etat, c’est moi”.

The pace and extent of the changes that the Trump administration has brought to both US politics and the rules based international order more broadly have justified the sense among many that we are witnessing a revolution. This word conveys several meanings at the same time. There is the sense of lasting upheaval in which the only certainty is that the world of yesterday is gone forever, even if we may not know for years what future order the revolution will produce. There is the sense of an unstoppable dynamic or a chain reaction in which the destruction of one institution or norm inevitably leads to the collapse of several others with no end in sight. There is also the sense of a power vacuum as the Pax Americana, on which the world’s democracies and the liberal order largely depended, fades away increasing security dilemmas and economic risks for the many while producing new opportunities for the few, cynical or ruthless enough to take advantage of the vacuum.

The one characteristic of revolutions, at least in their early stages, is that they define themselves by what they are against, rather than what they are for. As Edmund Burke famously observed: “rage and frenzy can tear down in half an hour what prudence, foresight and deliberation cannot build up in a hundred years“. The dynamic revolutions unleash is more destructive than creative as the old order must be demolished before the new one can be put in its place. The problem is that stage one is much easier to accomplish than stage two, as Burke pointed out, particularly when the revolutionaries themselves are more united in their loathing of the “Ancien R égime” than in their vision of what they want to replace it with. Thus, as we saw in France after 1789 or Russia after 1917 or again after 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, factionalism soon prevails and the revolutionaries spend as much time fighting each other as their reactionary opponents