What If Donald Trump Had Been in Control When the Free World Faced Its Greatest Crises?

By Graham Vanbergen: History occasionally depends upon a leader possessing precisely the qualities Donald Trump lacks: patience, intellectual curiosity, emotional discipline, respect for expertise and the ability to distinguish national interest from personal advantage.

Imagine Trump in the White House in 1940, as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe. Imagine him confronting the Cuban missile crisis, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 or the financial collapse of 2008. We do not have to guess blindly about how he might behave. We now possess an extensive record of how he responds to danger: he disregards unwelcome intelligence, intimidates allies, attacks independent institutions, reduces complex problems to personal contests and treats public office as an extension of his political brand and family business.

His second presidency has turned those instincts into a governing philosophy.

The war with Iran is perhaps the starkest example. American military action has produced neither a decisive victory nor a sustainable settlement. Instead, the conflict has repeatedly reignited, leaving shipping through the Strait of Hormuz dangerously restricted. Before the war, approximately one-fifth of globally traded oil passed through that narrow waterway. Renewed American strikes have driven Brent crude back above $90 a barrel and intensified fears of further disruption. The consequences are not confined to the Middle East: they appear in household energy bills, inflation, interest rates, business investment and the price of transporting almost everything. Reuters reports that the conflict and disrupted shipping are continuing to push up global costs.

This is what happens when military force is used without a coherent political destination. Trump can order an attack, declare success and issue another threat. What he appears unable to do is construct the patient diplomatic coalition required to prevent the next attack or, indeed, win.

Meanwhile, allies are treated less as strategic assets than as disobedient customers. Canada has faced punitive tariffs and extraordinary rhetoric from a president who seems to regard trade deficits as evidence of cheating. His administration recently imposed 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods after negotiations collapsed, prompting Canadian retaliation. Trump then escalated the theatre of grievance by ordering American federal agencies to call Lake Ontario “Lake America”. The renaming followed his earlier attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

Greenland has been treated in much the same way: not as the autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO ally, but as a piece of property America should control. Trump has repeatedly revived the demand even after threatening tariffs against European countries that resisted him. His campaign created what Reuters described as the prospect of the greatest rupture in transatlantic relations for decades.

Behind this foreign-policy chaos lies something more disturbing. Trump’s family has continued to profit from businesses whose interests overlap with presidential power. A Reuters investigation calculated that the family’s cryptocurrency operations generated at least $2.3 billion in profit after his return to office, while more than a million investors were collectively nursing losses of a similar size. The investigation raises profound questions about access, influence and the monetisation of the presidency.

At home, the pressure has spread across the institutions that restrain executive power: courts, universities, lawyers, the media, the civil service and the scientific establishment. Executive orders targeting law firms associated with Trump’s opponents were repeatedly ruled unlawful or unconstitutional. Universities have faced federal investigations and threatened funding freezes. Journalists and broadcasters have been subjected to presidential demands for dismissals and regulatory retaliation. Human Rights Watch concluded in 2026 that Trump had attacked key pillars of American democracy, including voting rights and basic constitutional protections. Reuters summarised that assessment here.

Now place this man in 1940.

Britain stood virtually alone in Europe. France had fallen. The Soviet Union was still bound to Nazi Germany by the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. America was officially neutral and strongly isolationist. Franklin Roosevelt nevertheless recognised that Britain’s survival was inseparable from America’s future security.

Roosevelt did not ask whether supporting Britain produced an immediate profit. He persuaded a reluctant nation to become the “arsenal of democracy”. Lend-Lease eventually supplied more than $50 billion in assistance to over 30 countries. He formed a close, sometimes difficult partnership with Winston Churchill and helped frame the Atlantic Charter, setting out principles for the world that would follow fascism. The US State Department’s historical record describes how Lend-Lease sustained Britain and other Allied nations.

What would Trump have done?

Judging by his treatment of today’s allies, he might have accused Britain of exploiting America. He could have demanded payment in advance, access to British assets or political concessions as the price of assistance. Churchill’s desperate appeals might have been treated as negotiating weakness. The British Empire’s bases and territories could have become bargaining chips.

Trump might have admired Hitler’s apparent strength while dismissing warnings from diplomats and military planners as establishment alarmism. Lend-Lease could have been delayed, reduced or abandoned because Britain was not “paying its fair share”. Without American supplies, ships, aircraft, food and credit, Britain’s capacity to continue the war would have been gravely weakened. Hitler might not have invaded America, but he could have consolidated control over Europe while Japan dominated much of Asia.

The catastrophe would not simply have been Britain’s defeat. It would have left America isolated between hostile imperial powers, eventually confronting a far greater war without the network of alliances and overseas bases that Roosevelt had preserved.

Consider, too, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. John F Kennedy resisted generals urging immediate air strikes against Soviet missile sites. For 13 days he listened, questioned, waited and secretly negotiated. The settlement required both firmness and restraint: Soviet missiles left Cuba, while America quietly agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

Trump’s appetite for public domination would have made such a compromise much harder. He might have announced military plans before they were complete, interpreted restraint as humiliation and demanded the visible surrender of Nikita Khrushchev. A crisis that was resolved through confidential diplomacy could instead have become an exchange of nuclear weapons.

Then there is September 2001. After the terrorist attacks, NATO invoked Article 5—the commitment that an attack on one member is an attack on all—for the first and only time in its history. America’s allies rallied to its defence. NATO records that the alliance subsequently operated beyond the Euro-Atlantic area in support of the United States.

Would those allies have responded so readily after years of tariffs, insults, territorial threats and doubts about American commitments? Alliances are reservoirs of trust. They cannot be emptied every week and expected to remain available in an emergency.

The 2008 financial crisis required another kind of leadership. The Bush and Obama administrations, Congress, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and foreign central banks took controversial but coordinated measures to prevent the banking system from collapsing. TARP stabilised financial institutions, while the Federal Reserve created emergency liquidity programmes and cut interest rates towards zero. The Federal Reserve describes the scale of that intervention.

Trump’s likely response can be inferred from his contempt for independent institutions and his habit of personalising economic policy. Which companies would have been rescued? Which executives would have been punished? Would decisions have followed systemic risk or political loyalty? In a panic, markets need consistent information and credible institutions. A president who changes policy through social-media declarations could have transformed a severe recession into a prolonged depression.

Covid-19 requires no counterfactual because Trump was there. Despite repeated warnings, he publicly minimised the danger, undermined public-health advice and turned masks, treatments and even basic statistics into partisan weapons. His administration also delivered Operation Warp Speed, an important vaccine achievement, but that success cannot erase the confusion and denial surrounding the wider response. A scholarly assessment concluded that the administration failed to mount a timely and effective national response despite ample warning. The peer-reviewed analysis is available through the US National Library of Medicine.

The lesson is not that previous presidents were invariably wise. Roosevelt authorised internment, Kennedy took America perilously close to nuclear war, the post-9/11 response led to disastrous conflicts, and the bank rescues created lasting anger. Serious leadership does not guarantee correct decisions.

But it does require a process capable of correcting mistakes: evidence, argument, expertise, institutional restraint and trusted alliances. Trump treats each of these as an obstacle to personal authority.

The presidency is most dangerous not when everything is calm, but when information is incomplete, emotions are intense and a decision must be made before its consequences are fully understood. At such moments, character becomes policy.

Had Trump governed during the greatest crises of the past century, Britain might have faced Hitler alone, the Cuban missile crisis might have ended in nuclear war, America might have entered the post-9/11 world without dependable allies, and the global banking system might have collapsed amid presidential threats and favouritism.

The grim conclusion is that we no longer need to imagine the experiment. It is already under way with Donald Trump. Iran, Hormuz, Canada, Greenland and the assault on America’s institutions are not isolated episodes. They are warnings about what happens when the most powerful office in the democratic world is occupied by a man who confuses strength with intimidation, loyalty with obedience and national interest with his own.

 

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