Donald Trump – The President Who Accidentally Toppled His Own Empire

Donald Trump demands a Nobel Peace Prize, and we should grant him exactly that, because in a blaze of bloated ego and profound ignorance, he triggered the long-overdue implosion of the American Empire. It wasn’t revolution in the traditional sense. It was something closer to empire-building in reverse, a blustering, blundering unravelling of hegemony performed by a man convinced he was the saviour of it all.

Trump is a parody of power. A Marvel-shaped messiah with a jutted chin, puffed chest, and a Twitter finger aching for attention.

He imagined himself as Captain America, returning to restore greatness, glory, and white cowboy justice. Instead, he became a wrecking ball in a spray tan, smashing through the ideological machinery that had long underpinned US imperialism. In his crusade to crown himself emperor of a dying order, he became its undertaker. Call it his own orange revolution... against himself. No one in the Global South could have written a more grotesque tragicomedy.

Without grasping the significance of his actions, Trump set fire to the soft power architecture that had held the empire in place for decades. His ignorance of geopolitics, disdain for diplomacy, contempt for multilateralism, and budget-slashing frenzy against USAID and liberal think tanks eviscerated the regime-change industry. These institutions, long disguised as promoters of democracy, were ideological war rooms. They funded colour revolutions, manufactured uprisings, and propped up puppet regimes from Caracas to Kyiv. Trump called them useless, stripped their budgets, and exposed their fraudulence. In doing so, he gutted the soft core of American global influence.

The propaganda machinery, that slick engine of humanitarian pretence, began to stall. The carefully constructed myths began to shatter. Across the world, nations finally saw the empire for what it was, a brutal apparatus of coercion, coated in liberal language. The velvet glove slipped, and what remained was a flailing iron fist.

Zelensky, once cast as democracy’s golden boy, was abandoned mid-act. With US support receding, he dragged Europe into economic and military freefall. The war in Ukraine, scripted as a NATO fairytale, began to unravel. Europe, trapped in its own spin, funded a proxy war it no longer believed in. Meanwhile, Russia, the cartoon villain of Western imagination, gained respect in the Global South. Putin emerged as a steady hand amid the West’s decline. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, he became a symbol of defiance, a face of the unfolding multipolar world.

Then came Israel. Netanyahu launched airstrikes on Tehran and the world braced. Trump, after some performative hesitation, offered full-throated support. Bombs fell on Iranian cities as though Gaza had been a dress rehearsal. Trump clapped from the sidelines like he was watching a cage fight, oblivious to history’s weight. Israel, long cast in the Western imagination as eternal victim, stood exposed as a terrorist state. The genocide in Gaza had already revealed the grotesque truth, with mountains of children’s corpses beamed into the world’s living rooms. But Tehran made it undeniable. Iran struck back with sharp precision, revealing the Israeli Defence Force to be more myth than might.

And in the midst of this carnage, Trump declared himself a peacemaker. He took to Truth Social to announce that he had brokered a ceasefire between Iran and Israel — a declaration with no diplomatic grounding. He demanded praise, divine blessing, and even called on the Israeli courts to halt Netanyahu’s corruption trials as a gesture of goodwill. It was delusional statesmanship from a man who cheered bombings one day and imagined himself the broker of peace the next. His hypocrisy was staggering, his narcissism blinding. The world watched in disbelief as Trump anointed himself saviour of a fire he had helped ignite.

Trump’s bluster tore through the veil of liberal imperialism. What anti-imperialists had argued for decades, that the US props up apartheid, funds terror, and crushes dissent, was suddenly undeniable. His chaotic ignorance did what no calculated resistance could achieve. He blew open the contradictions of the old world order.

And while he stuffed cheeseburgers into his mouth in Florida, the world shifted. BRICS expanded. The dollar began to lose its power. The youth, from Baltimore to Baghdad, Johannesburg to Qatar, filled the streets, demanding the fall of empire. Statues were pulled down. Diplomats scrambled. The empire, once bulletproof in its PR, began to haemorrhage credibility.

Yet perhaps we do owe him something. Not for peace, for cracking open the gates of a multipolar future that he never intended, and never understood.

He deserves a special citation. A historical footnote drenched in irony: ⁠"Awarded to Donald J. Trump, whose reckless arrogance, white supremacist worldview, and jingoistic chaos dismantled the ideological machinery of empire more effectively than any revolutionary movement."

But let no one mistake this twisted contribution for redemption. Trump caged migrant children like livestock. He tore families apart and deported tattooed men into the jaws of Tecoluca and other hellhole prisons, outsourcing brutality with bureaucratic glee. His blood-resort fantasies sprawled across Palestine, where he greenlit settlements, blessed dispossession, and imagined golf courses rising over ancestral ruins. His indifference to the Gaza genocide, the most livestreamed slaughter in modern memory, is etched into history as the manifestation of his white supremacist DNA.

He belongs among the rogues of American power. Bush the Invasionist. Obama the Libyan Bomber. Biden the senile arms dealer. But Trump dispensed with the mask. The White House, under his rule, became the padded cell of empire.

Still, history must record it. The empire collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. And Trump, the emperor in MAGA drag, presided over its final tantrum. He is no revolutionary. He is the calamity that cleared the stage for one.

So yes, give him the medal. Hang it above the golden toilet in Mar-a-Lago. Engrave it deeply. The wreckage he leaves behind deserves to be remembered.

And let us celebrate the emergence of the new multipolar world, not as a Western design, but as an uprising forged by the Global South, hastened by the absurdity of empire’s last custodian, and steadied by the defiant leadership of Russia, Iran, and their growing coalition.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker and social critic. She writes on decoloniality, media and political resistance across the Global South.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.