After six weeks that shook the world, Trump’s honeymoon is over

Moments after his bellicose, State of the Union-style address to US Congress this week, Donald Trump shook hands with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and told him: “Thank you again. Won’t forget.”

There was much speculation about what the president meant – whether he was referring to last year’s decision granting him immunity from criminal prosecution – but Trump later said he was simply thanking Roberts for swearing him in at the inauguration.

President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts at the US Congress.Credit: Bloomberg

Still, the brief interaction on the House of Representatives floor took on extra significance because just hours later, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision in which Roberts sided with liberal justices against the Trump administration.

It was a small matter – the government would have to unfreeze a few billion dollars in foreign aid payments for work already done. Essentially, it would have to pay its bills.

But the decision marked the first ruling from the country’s highest court on a Trump administration initiative – bound to be the first of many. It demonstrated that despite its conservative majority, the court will not always bend to the president’s will. And it came as Trump’s star begins to fall in another court, that of public opinion.

Trump has promised the largest deportation program in American history.Credit: Getty Images

“The president is opening up some vulnerabilities,” says Bill Galston, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “His overall job approval has declined a couple of points since he took office. But more significantly the opposition – people who don’t approve of what he’s doing – has crystallised.”

In other words: the honeymoon is over.

The past six weeks have been a rollercoaster for many Americans – unsettled by the pace of Trump’s policy rampage, stunned by his indulgence of executive power, aghast at the savage cuts being made by unelected bureaucrat Elon Musk even as the administration rails against unelected bureaucrats.

At the same time, many Americans are thrilled. Those who wanted change (that is, most voters) are getting it in spades. Trump is doing largely what he said he would: shaking up Washington, purging “wokeness”, ditching global agreements and enacting a populist nationalist agenda.

“The first six weeks have been much more dramatic than almost anyone was predicting,” says Wolter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Very little has surprised me, but I expected it would unroll over two years rather than six weeks.”

Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky along with Vice President J.D. Vance.Credit: nna\NPearson

But nothing came as a shock to Phyllis Claiborne. “When people are outraged, I’m not,” the 66-year-old tennis fan tells this masthead while having a drink at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California. “Project 2025 told us everything that was going to happen. There’s nothing to me that is surprising thus far.”

Claiborne, a registered Democrat from the Washington metropolitan area, was referring to the conservative manifesto that Trump disavowed during the election campaign but which bears a striking resemblance to the program he has pursued since taking office on January 20.

That agenda is familiar to us by now – immigration, crime, fracking, reducing the size of government, banning transgender women from women’s sports – but it is light on tackling inflation and the cost of living. Indeed, Trump’s main economic preoccupation, tariffs, are likely to increase prices, at least in the short term.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s response to tariffs has given him a starring role in US foreign policy under Trump.Credit: Bloomberg

Before the election, Trump promised working-class supporters he would move fast to bring down the cost of living. And while nobody expects magic in just six weeks, there is a growing sense that he is failing to follow through. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this week found just 31 per cent approved of Trump’s handling of the cost of living, compared to 49 per cent on immigration. His overall approval rating was steady at 44 per cent.

“People are paying enough attention to see that the president hasn’t been paying very much attention to the economy, and especially inflation, since he took office,” says Galston.

“They know that he’s been banging away on immigration and crime, he’s been banging away on the cultural issues, and he’s been attacking the federal government. They’re very aware of all of that.

“But when you ask them is he paying as much time to the economy and high prices – as they both expected and wanted when he took office – you really have only 25 to 30 per cent of the electorate who answer those questions in the affirmative … That is his major weakness right now, and it could turn out to be his Achilles heel if he’s not careful.”

Inflation ticked up in January and now sits at 3 per cent, and the Federal Reserve has paused cutting interest rates. Jobs data to be released at the weekend is expected to show US unemployment steady at 4.1 per cent.

In his address to Congress, Trump blamed his predecessor Joe Biden, particularly for the record price of eggs, which have come to symbolise the cost of living crisis in the US. He has tasked Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins with resolving the avian flu crisis and getting prices back down.

Tariffs aside, Trump’s key economic policy is to cut taxes. The major round of income tax cuts he introduced in his first term are set to expire at the end of this year. Trump wants them renewed and made permanent, as well as eliminating tax from tips and overtime, altogether costing trillions of dollars in government revenue.

There is disagreement in Congress about whether it is best to roll the tax cuts and Trump campaign promises on immigration, energy and defence into “one big beautiful bill”, as Trump prefers, or deal with the tax cuts later in a separate and probably lengthy legislative process. For now, the single-bill approach is advancing.

But another, more imminent problem is looming: another government shutdown. These occur when Congress fails to pass budget bills funding the operation of government agencies, and means non-essential services are suspended and workers don’t get paid. One was averted just before Christmas, and lawmakers have only seven days to avoid another.

So, after a six-week blitz in which Trump used (and potentially abused) executive power to call the shots from the Oval Office, he now needs Congress to approve the appropriations, and the courts to uphold his decisions. And there will be tension, Galston says, between Trump’s desire to get off to a fast start on immigration and energy policies, and his preferred legislative strategy, which may get bogged down in congressional infighting.

In his address to Congress this week, Trump boasted of taking “swift and unrelenting action” to disrupt the business of government, and told Americans he was “just getting started”. Confident and sometimes funny, Trump scolded Democrats for refusing to applaud or stand up at key moments, and in one exchange mocked senator Elizabeth Warren, who clapped when Trump asked – rhetorically – if people wanted to keep funding Ukraine for another five years. “Pocahontas says yes,” Trump said, using his nickname for Warren.

Galston says it was a “deliberately provocative and divisive” speech, with few of the usual appeals to national unity or entreaties to Congress to pass certain laws. “It’s a continuation of the way he campaigned and the way he has governed in the first six weeks of his presidency. It is almost entirely oriented toward his base. He is not trying to expand his support. He’s trying to make sure it remains intense and mobilised.”

Phyllis Claiborne, a Democrat, says she’s not surprised by Trump’s actions in his second term.Credit: Michael Koziol

The differences from Trump’s first term are night and day, says Galston. In 2016, he won an unexpected victory with a team that didn’t fully understand what he stood for and was ineffective in implementing that agenda. This time, he had a blueprint. “He can go a lot further a lot faster, with a lot more competence than he did the first time around, with a team that’s prepared to support him.”

Olson, from the Cato Institute, says of all Trump’s resentments, one of the most acute is his sense that his first-term advisers betrayed him. “He’s not going to make that mistake again,” Olson says. “He wants the people who are revolutionary, or radical, that he didn’t feel he had the first time.”

Olson says we should expect much more disruption to come, including on the foreign policy front, where US neighbour and ally Canada has suddenly become Trump’s bête noire while he cosies up to Vladimir Putin’s Russia – an observation outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made this week as he retaliated against the administration’s 25 per cent tariffs on most Canadian imports.

But on Friday, as the stock market continued to fall, Trump changed his mind again and gave Mexico, then Canada, another one-month reprieve from tariffs on goods covered by the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement.

Trump continued to toy with Trudeau on social media, suggesting the Canadian PM was using the tariff tiff to stay in power after pledging to resign. But the policy flip-flop suggested the president’s bark may be worse than his bite.

The most dramatic foreign policy shift has been the end of explicit US support for Ukraine, and Trump’s insistence that a deal be made to end the war with Russia quickly, on terms that give something to both sides, even though Russia launched the illegal invasion (a fact Trump only begrudgingly acknowledges).

This came to a head in the heated, televised argument between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last weekend, when Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance berated the wartime leader and ally for being “disrespectful” and insufficiently grateful for US aid.

One of the overlooked but extraordinary moments of that exchange came when Trump began sympathising with Putin for what he “had to go through” during investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

“He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia,” Trump said. “That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton. Shifty Adam Schiff. It was a Democrat scam ... [Putin] had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom ... It was disgusting.”

Zelensky, whose country is being torn apart by a long and bloody war, could only watch on in silence as Trump ranted, lied about the historical record and made himself the victim.

The catastrophic meeting ended with Zelensky forced to leave the White House early, and a planned minerals deal and joint press conference cancelled. This week, both leaders have rekindled hopes of a deal and détente.

But as much as the episode shocked Europe and appalled many US allies, it did not necessarily faze Americans. Polling shows more voters support Trump’s handling of the Russia/Ukraine war than Biden in his final year.

Even Phyllis Claiborne, the Democrat tennis fan sitting in the beer garden at Indian Wells, said it was unfair for Americans to keep footing the bill for a war in Europe. “I do think that the UN and European Union should play more of a part ... We have starvation, we have things in this country, we have social issues that I think should be getting addressed.”

For a small US ally such as Australia, navigating this new world order is tricky. Trump’s willingness to abandon Ukraine (He told Zelensky: “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out”) has implications for Taiwan, which Beijing asserts belongs to China and which the US has implicitly agreed to defend.

Both Galston and Olson say Trump is following a “sphere of influence” approach to geopolitics whereby great powers assert control over territory without directly ruling it. This starts first and foremost with the US, but Trump appears comfortable with Russia and China exercising power in their own domains.

Galston asks: “Are we saying that despite long-standing US policy, we view Taiwan as being within China’s sphere of influence? Is that what he’s saying? People are beginning to ask that question.”

It was not beyond imagination, he said, that Trump would negotiate a deal in which Beijing made economic concessions in return for an implicit or tacit understanding the US would stay out of the Taiwan Strait.

Australia now sweats on a potential tariff exemption for steel and aluminium and the future of the AUKUS defence pact. Trump’s pick for under-secretary of defence, Elbridge Colby, this week became the first Trump administration official to explicitly call on Australia to increase its defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP.

Olson says Australia might need to “come up with a gimmick” to please the showman Trump.

“If Australia can be a player that comes on stage with some kind of proposition that he can’t get from any of his other entertainers, maybe he’ll start thinking of it that way,” he says.

“But you might argue just as persuasively that it’s better not to be a main character in Trump’s thinking and not cross his mind for weeks at a time.”

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