While President Donald Trump prepares for G7 and NATO summits this month, political circles and media in Europe are busy trying to cut him down to size before the two events.
"Trump will come empty-handed," says one commentator. "None of the things he announced with fanfare has been achieved."
Other commentators use such phrases as "deflated balloon" and "bogged down in the mess he created."
At first sight, it looks certain that he has not scored big on any of the dramatic goals he announced.
His tariff campaign is stalled in a maze of zigzags.
His peace-making gambit in Ukraine has led to him humiliating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and labelling Russian President Vladimir Putin as "quite mad".
Worse still, scores of US judges have lined up to block some of his dramatic measures, including the crackdown on illegal immigration.
His purge of bureaucracy has also been stalled, and the federal government is desperately rehiring many of the staff that Elon Musk fired as "do-nothing parasites."
In another register, the Gaza tragedy continues, and the ceasefire promised seems as remote as ever.
The cherry on the top of all that is the riot triggered by illegal immigrants in Los Angeles, leading to the deployment of the National Guard and the US Marines, a rare move in American history.
Even on the personal side of things, his success in securing business contracts for Trump holdings plus a 747 jet is counterbalanced by the acrimonious split with his most ardent backer, Elon Musk.
With such a tableau, Trump's favorite words "amazing" and "wonderful," used to describe his first 100 days in office, sound hollow.
Well, what can one make of all that?
At the start of Trump's second term, I suggested that the sky hasn't fallen and advised those who saw the events as an end-of-time catastrophe to take a deep breath and not judge Trump by what he says he might do, but wait and see what he does.
At the time many Trump critics overestimated his power, indeed the power of any president of the United States, and assumed he could do what he likes by fiat or ukase. This time they may be underestimating the United States as the indispensable world power.
That misunderstanding is due to the fact that the American model doesn't easily fit into concepts such as democracy and republic.
What became the United States was the fruit of a rebellion against a system in which concentration of power contained the threat of tyranny.
For the Founding Fathers, therefore, the priority was to set up a system of checks and balances, learned from Xenophon in his "Cyropaedia" and Montesquieu in "The Spirit of Laws," in order to prevent any one person or institution of the state to monopolize power.
Thus, the US couldn't become a state modeled on Athenian democracy, in which the "people", which in fact meant a small minority of free male citizens, could do whatever they liked with the power won through elections.
Nor could the US become a republic modeled on the Roman Republic or the more recent Venetian version, where power was wielded by narrow patrician elites.
To complicate matters further, the system the founding fathers designed included elements both of democracy and republic.
It is a democracy because almost all public positions are filled through elections. However, those elected face a series of constraints both in having their election confirmed and when exercising the power delegated to them. Worse still, the art of winning an election isn't the same as the craft of governing. In other words, a genius in winning elections may turn out to be a dunce in governing.
In that system the Leviathan, Hobbes' symbol of state power, is heavily chained down. The aim of those who designed it was to make sure it did as little as possible. In what could be a constitutional republic, democracy is more of a point of moral reference than a blank cheque to exercise power.
This is why President Barack Obama, a closet collectivist, was unable to implement his agenda and inject a heavy dose of socialism into the American economy and foreign policy.
George Shultz, one of the wisest American politicians of the last century, noted that no political battle in the US is ever won or lost forever. The US is a giant cruiser set on its course by mystical elements and couldn't be suddenly put on another course wished by the captain of the moment and his crew.
Politicians, therefore, are either swimming with the tide or, as L.H. Mencken charged, "brothers in pillage."
According to Shultz, the American system doesn't allow radical changes; its reform could only be incremental. A passing revolutionary mood may help you win an election. Soon, however, you shall find out that you are in office but not in power to implement your promised revolutionary agenda.
The American system is designed to slow down decision-making to avoid both tyranny and anarchy. The ideal government in that model is one that doesn't do anything, thus allowing individuals who make up the society to shape their lives in a framework of laws that guarantees freedom.
The key concept in the American system is consent which, if and when achieved, could allow changes of course, innovations and what is branded as reform.
The political set-up against which Trump led his "revolution" was the fruit of a consent that started with President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" reforms and took almost half a century to shape the status quo that Trump challenged.
The Trump "revolution" was also the fruit of a new consent that took decades to shape as a challenge to the status quo created by the previous consent in its many forms including positive discrimination, political correctness, globalism and, more recently, wokism.
But, once the revolutionary mood ebbs, reality strikes back with people who wish to light the chimney without setting their home on fire. Though the fruit of a rebellion dressed as a revolution, American society has always been deeply conservative in politics.
In some cases, political power comes with a heavy dose of personal attributes.
Nero wasn't satisfied with just being Roman Emperor, and fancied himself as a great musician and poet. Although he had a squeaking voice, he was convinced he was the best singer in the empire. Commodus believed he was a descendant of Hercules and showed his strength by strangling savage beasts in the forum.
More recently, Obama saw himself as a magician to conjure a new American rabbit out of his top hat while reforming the Islamic world.
The Caesar may be able to tame the whole world, but is unable to rule his own inner self. That task is always performed by reality, which obeys no Caesar.
Thus, the best option is to wait until that golden rule of history is applied to Trump, who continues to represent a desire by many Americans, perhaps still a majority, to put the giant cruiser on a new course. Reality will teach them that the American system allows only incremental changes of course.
The Trump-Musk falling out may not be a mere lovers' tiff, but is also unlikely to be as final as it seems. Love cools, friends fall away, brothers divide; this belongs to theater. In politics, a Cato cannot re-script his role as a Brutus.
The Trump-Musk duel may turn out to be a palatial version of the professional wrestling popular in the US, in which adversaries seem to be killing each other with incredibly violent attacks, but which turn out to be harmless show-off gestures. These are known as "kayfabe" in wrestling circles and regarded as an art form.
Let us return to George Shultz.
He believed that a US president could regard himself as immensely successful if he manages to implement 10 percent of his agenda. Mencken, for his part, noted that all US presidential terms end either with a scandal or a sense of dissatisfaction. Well, who knows, maybe the system is so designed to produce only such outcomes.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
