Soon after Joe Biden had become president, I travelled with him to Carbis Bay in Cornwall to the G7 summit. It would be the new president's first major outing onto the world stage, and he had a message to deliver to his allies in Europe: America is back - American leadership internationally would resume.
The leaders who were gathered there on the Cornish coast breathed a huge sigh of relief America would be looking out again across that big Atlantic Ocean. But one of the leaders with whom I caught up for a drink whispered to me: That's all very well, but for how long?
This week the American people delivered a brutally straightforward answer: four years. And no more. Could it be that Biden was the blip and outlier? Could it be that Donald Trump, Trumpism and the Maga majority are the new normal? It certainly looks like it after the astonishing scale of his victory, because not much stands in his way. And this is profoundly different to when Trump took up the presidency in 2017.
Then, Trump had given little thought to what America First - a phrase coined by the isolationists before the Second World War - meant in practice. Sure, he had a set of instincts but not much more. He never thought he was going to win in 2016, and hadn't spent much time thinking about how he would govern and with what policies. It really did feel like he would see a general in uniform and say, "Oh, you can be my national security adviser. Yeah, and you the multimillionaire Goldman Sachs investment banker, you be my treasury secretary."
But he would later find that these strong, independent-minded people would act as a block on him. He came to loathe the so-called grown-ups in his administration who would impede and thwart his wilder ambitions.
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