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Have we ever seen a year in recent memory begin with as much deliberate turmoil as 2026 has? Less than two weeks into 2026, we have witnessed Donald Trump deploy US forces to depose and abduct the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, along with Cilia Flores, his wife and close political adviser. The US president then informed the world that the United States would “run” Venezuela for the time being, which he later explained could potentially last for several years.
Trump has also threatened – and then seemingly made peace with – the president of Colombia; seized at least five oil tankers in the Caribbean (actions that UN experts label illegal armed aggression); promised US military strikes targeting cartels in Mexico against the wishes of Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum; and frightened the people of Cuba with the prospect that Marco Rubio could be their next president.
Trump has suggested that the US may intervene in Iran, has dropped more than 90 bombs on three dozen Islamic State targets in Syria, and has repeatedly insisted that Greenland must become American territory, throwing the entire North Atlantic security establishment out of kilter.
And it’s not even February.
Welcome to 2026, a year promising more unrest, more imperialism and more upheaval to come. The question to ask about all these exploits is not only why but also why now? The answer is found not just in a return to American imperialism (did it ever leave?) but can perhaps better be summed up in two words: US elections.
Take the midterms, which will happen later this year. Major polls in recent weeks put the Democrats’ chances well above the Republicans’ for retaking control of the House, which the Republicans now control by a paper-thin margin. We all saw how resoundingly upbeat the results in the November 2025 elections were for the Democrats. Think Abigail Spanberger in the Virginia governor’s race or Mikie Sherrill in the New Jersey governor’s race. In Miami, Democrat Eileen Higgins trounced the Trump-backed candidate Emilio González for mayor, an embarrassment to the president and a further foreshadowing of big losses for Republican candidates in a midterm election year.
Perhaps this is why the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has already indicated that the administration plans to get deeply involved in the upcoming elections. “Typically, in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House. You localize the election, and you keep the federal officials out of it,” Wiles told the conservative weekly talkshow The Mom View. “We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot, because so many of those low-propensity voters are Trump voters.”
As the strategy is coming into view, we are beginning to learn what “putting him on the ballot” might mean. We can see how Trump seems determined to create and sustain a level of chaos in political affairs to make the American electorate believe that he, and only he, has the ability to steer the course through the very chaos he has created. (On the global stage, Trump is rivaled in this strategy only by Benjamin Netanyahu.)
This is, to say the least, an extremely self-centered strategy, but for Trump the megalomania is part of the calculus. Asked recently by the New York Times if there were any restrictions on his global power, the president responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” adding: “I don’t need international law.”
Grabbing Greenland was likewise expressed with Trumpian narcissism. Why must the United States own Greenland, the Times reporters asked the president, to which he responded: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.”
Such chaos and unrest isn’t limited to the international sphere, either. After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in her vehicle in Minneapolis on 7 January, Trump and his administration not only bellicosely defended ICE’s tactics, which have been roundly criticized by law enforcement officials around the country, but also aggressively attempted to assassinate Good’s character after ICE had already taken her life.
Rather than seeking to calm tensions between the public and ICE, Trump immediately ratcheted up conflict, baselessly calling Good “very disorderly” and saying that she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer”. JD Vance went even further. The vice-president claimed that Good was connected to a “broader leftwing network” that has been employing “domestic terror techniques” to thwart Trump from enforcing immigration laws. It’s as if this administration is feeding off the violence and discontent that its policies produce.
More worrisome still is that the ramped-up overseas adventurism the administration is now toying with is committing the US to many years of complications – if not hostility – with different parts of the world. Nothing will be over soon. Perhaps that is why the election that Trump may be most focused on is not the midterms of 2026 but, presuming his health holds, the presidential election of 2028.
A third term for Trump, in direct contravention of the 22nd amendment, has been a Maga obsession for a while and is growing louder. Steve Bannon, a Maga mega-leader, emphatically told the Economist recently that Trump is “going to get a third term” and that “people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He continued: “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan, and President Trump will be the president in ’28.” In March of last year, the Harvard law professor and Trump defender Alan Dershowitz will publish his book Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term? Today’s Trump-induced chaos may be laying some of the groundwork for this future power grab.
The administration believes that brute force produces its own and best reality. In an interview with CNN, White House adviser Stephen Miller told Jake Tapper: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
I don’t know if Miller has read his William Shakespeare, but the Bard had a different idea. “O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength,” Shakespeare wrote, “but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.” At first glance, it might appear that Trump and Vance and Miller and the rest of them disagree with the second part of the Bard’s quotation. But maybe they agree. And maybe that’s the problem.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
