Donald Trump has made life harder for his Oval Office successor with a series of changes that will likely be impossible to undo, an analyst claimed.
The president's tough stance on geopolitical relations during his second term has hindered the chance of reconciliation under the 48th President of the United States, Salon writer Mike Lofgren argued. The political analyst suggested that Trump's team was undermining steps taken by previous administrations to improve international relations.
Lofgren claims that Trump has pressed the US into a position where there is "no going back to the status quo ante" of previous administrations.
Actions taken against Venezuela and Iran, as well as a period of time where the president appeared set on subsuming Greenland into US territory has seemingly worn international relations thin.
This, Lofgren suggests, is a point of no return that a future president from either party would struggle to navigate.
He wrote, "Yet another future president might have retraced a path toward more balanced economic or security policies once the disadvantages of trade wars or diplomatic and military isolation became obvious.
"But Trump, in large part through his feral nastiness and adolescent vulgarity, has made that sort of reversal all but impossible. A hypothetical president might have distanced himself from NATO, but it’s inconceivable that he would covet an alliance partner’s territory to the point where that government made plans to blow up the airfields in the coveted territory in case of invasion."
Lofgren went on to suggest that longstanding treaties and decades-old friendships between the US and other countries had been ground down slowly, and that Trump had simply sped up the process of a breakdown.
"Trump hates reading, as his spotty education and lack of general knowledge testify," Lofgren wrote. "That reflects his profound lack of intellectual curiosity.
"He attempts to disguise this deficiency with endless boasting about himself and endless denigration of others. He is obsessed with popular media and showbiz and the shabby values they embody.
"It is almost certain, to this observer anyway, that after the last hanging chad in Florida, after the rubble of the World Trade Center had cooled, after the first improvised roadside bomb exploded in Iraq, and after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Trump, or someone like him, was inevitable."