COLUMN: Trump — The Cup Has Been Full Since 2017, and Yet It’s Still Overflowing

What IFRI Hoped for in 2017

The 2017 episode posed a crucial question: “What checks and balances could limit the damage?” Analysts at the time pointed to institutional checks—Congress, the courts, the press, and the Republican Party itself. The idea was that the American system, designed by the Founding Fathers precisely to prevent the tyranny of a single man, would hold firm.

Let’s review these mechanisms. One by one. With the detachment of a medical examiner.

Congress: A Complete Capitulation

The Republican Party—the very same one that was “gritting its teeth” in 2017, according to the IFRI—has turned into a rubber-stamp chamber. Senators who expressed reservations were either purged, converted, or silenced. The promise of a legislative counterweight evaporated like a puddle of water on an Arizona sidewalk in August.

Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney—the list of Republicans who dared to criticize Trump reads like a memorial. Not a political party. A graveyard of careers.

The Courts: The Last Line of Defense, Now Cracked

The judiciary held out longer than the others. But three Supreme Court appointments and hundreds of federal judges later, the balance of power has structurally shifted. The courts are no longer a brake—they have become, in many cases, an accelerator.

And yet, even Trump-appointed judges sometimes surprise us. The American justice system isn’t dead. It’s on life support.

The steps no one wanted to see

Normalization doesn’t happen all at once. It creeps up on us, and each step erases the trace of the one before it.

In 2017, threatening North Korea with total destruction came as a shock. In 2018, separating migrant children from their parents at the border was a scandal. In 2019, asking Ukraine to investigate his political rival was grounds for impeachment. In 2020, suggesting that people inject disinfectant to fight COVID-19 caused global consternation. In 2021, inciting a mob to storm the Capitol triggered a second impeachment.

And in 2025, back in the White House, all of that became just the prologue.

The Law of Constant Escalation

Every unpunished transgression shifts the boundary. Not by a millimeter—by a kilometer. For the lesson a man in power learns from the absence of consequences is never moderation. It is always the same: I can go further.

In 2017, experts at IFRI referred to it as a “misstep.” Today, the word seems unintentionally tender. It’s like calling a tsunami a “little wave.”

The Syndrome of Indignation Fatigue

There is a phenomenon that political psychologists call “outrage fatigue.” The human brain is not designed to maintain a constant state of alertness. Faced with a relentless stream of transgressions, two reactions occur: either exhaustion (we stop reacting) or recalibration (we unconsciously adjust our scale of severity).

Both are fatal to a democracy.

The Hidden Cost of Captive Attention

Every minute spent reacting to Trump’s latest provocation is a minute stolen from building something better.

Perhaps this is the unintended—or perfectly calculated—genius of Trumpism. Not in what it builds, but in what it prevents us from building. The collective energy of an entire nation, sucked into a permanent media black hole, is energy that serves neither education, nor public health, nor the climate transition, nor the reduction of inequality.

The opportunity cost of Trumpism is measured in lost decades.

The 2017 Speech as Seen from Allied Capitals

When Trump threatened to destroy North Korea before the General Assembly, the cameras captured a telling moment: even the U.S. delegation itself seemed petrified. John Kelly, then White House Chief of Staff, buried his face in his hands. That gesture—a four-star general unable to hide his dismay—said it all.

But the allies, for their part, did not have the luxury of burying their heads in their hands. They had to recalculate their strategic trajectories in real time. If the president of the world’s leading power could threaten to annihilate a country of 25 million people in a speech meant to promote peace, then all the certainties of the postwar international order had just collapsed.

2026: Strategic Autonomy Is No Longer a Choice

Nine years later, Europeans have drawn—slowly, painfully, and incompletely—the conclusions from that moment. European strategic autonomy, long an academic seminar topic, has become an existential necessity. Not because Europe wanted it, but because the United States, under Trump, made dependence unsustainable.

And yet. Europe remains dependent. The U.S. nuclear umbrella remains irreplaceable in the short term. European defense budgets, despite increases, remain insufficient. The question from 2017—“What control mechanisms?”—has simply shifted. It is no longer an American question. It is a European one.

The Attention Economy in the Service of Chaos

In 2017, every one of Trump’s tweets made the headlines on the evening news. 24-hour news channels displayed his messages full screen. Newsrooms held emergency meetings after every statement. The result? Billions of dollars in free media coverage for a man who had understood, before anyone else, that the information age was, in reality, the age of provocation.

The media didn’t create Trump. But they gave him the oxygen his flame needed to turn into a wildfire.

The Irresolvable Dilemma of Democratic Journalism

Covering every outrage amplifies it. Ignoring every outrage normalizes it. Caught between these two pitfalls, democratic journalism has been navigating without a compass for nine years. Newsrooms that tried to remain measured lost audience. Those that chose hysteria lost credibility.

There is no “right” media response to Trumpism. That, in fact, is part of the problem.

The party that was “gritting its teeth” has stopped gritting them

In 2017, the IFRI noted that Trump’s style “makes even Republicans cringe.” That observation, perfectly accurate at the time, is now a thing of the past. The Republican Party of 2017 and that of 2026 share only a name.

The party of Reagan, Bush Sr., and McCain—the party of liberal internationalism, free trade, and the Atlantic alliance—has been replaced. Not reformed. Not adapted. Replaced. By a movement whose center of gravity is neither an ideology nor a platform, but a man.

The historical precedent that no one mentions

Historians are looking for parallels. They cite Jacksonian populism, McCarthyism, and the 19th-century Know-Nothing movement. But none of these precedents fully captures the phenomenon. For no American political movement has ever succeeded in transforming a century-old party into a personal vehicle so completely, so quickly, so irreversibly.

And yet, the word “irreversible” deserves an asterisk. American parties have reinvented themselves before. The Democrats went from being the party of segregation to the party of civil rights in a single generation. Nothing is permanent in politics—except the consequences of decisions left undone.

Informal Checks and Balances

Constitutions protect democracies on paper. It is citizens who protect them in reality.

It would be false and unfair to claim that American society did not resist. The Women’s March protests in 2017, the climate protests, the Black Lives Matter movements, the state attorneys general in Democratic states who blocked executive orders—resistance did exist. It was massive, diverse, and persistent.

But it was also insufficient. And the cruel question that arises in 2026 is this: did the resistance fail because it was too weak, or because the institutional mechanisms on which it relied had already been too severely eroded?

The Generational Divide as a Key to Understanding

Those under 30 in 2026 have no memory of a pre-Trump political world. For them, the U.S. presidency has always been this: a constant spectacle of confrontation, provocation, and transgression. Their parents’ “normal” is not their normal. And this is perhaps the most profound damage caused by Trumpism: having redefined, for an entire generation, what a president can say, can do, and can be.

When the norm shifts, it never returns exactly to its original position.

Why IFRI Asked the Right Question at the Wrong Time

The French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) is one of Europe’s most respected think tanks. The fact that its analysts identified the potentially destructive trajectory of Trumpism as early as 2017 is a testament to their remarkable insight. But insight without action is a sophisticated form of powerlessness.

For the question posed in 2017—“What checks and balances?”—contained an implicit assumption: that external levers existed to rein in a U.S. president. Yet the uncomfortable truth that took Europe nine years to accept is that no external actor can constrain a U.S. president who does not want to be constrained. None.

Trumpism as a Catalyst for European History

There is a cruel irony in the fact that Trump—the man who scorns alliances—has unwittingly accelerated European strategic integration more than any European leader of the past thirty years. The threat has done what vision failed to do: force the movement forward.

And yet, the pace remains too slow. European strategic decisions require unanimous approval by all 27 member states in a world where crises do not wait for consensus. The contrast between the speed of Trumpian chaos and the slowness of the European decision-making process is an existential vulnerability.

The Fragility of Mature Democracies

If the world’s oldest constitutional democracy can be shaken by a single man, then no democracy is safe.

That is the lesson that autocrats around the world have learned—with a smirk. And that is the lesson that democrats around the world refuse to accept—with a denial that borders on cowardice. Trumpism is not an American anomaly. It is a stress test whose results apply to any democracy that believes its institutions are invulnerable.

They are not. They never have been.

The Conditions for Replication

A fragmented media landscape. A middle class in decline. A political elite perceived as out of touch. Immigration exploited as a scapegoat. An electoral system that allows a minority to govern. These conditions are not exclusively American. They exist—to varying degrees—in France, Italy, Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines, and India.

Trumpism is an exportable model. It has already been exported.

The Resilience of Popular Support

The biggest analytical mistake of 2017—and this isn’t a criticism, since almost everyone made it—was underestimating the depth of popular support for Trump. Analysts saw only a superficial phenomenon: a crude man elected by accident, whom the “adults in the room” would eventually rein in.

They failed to see—or refused to see—that Trump was tapping into something real: legitimate anger at a form of globalization that had enriched urban centers while impoverishing the peripheries; a sense of cultural abandonment in rural, working-class America, which felt scorned by its own elites.

Understanding this does not excuse anything. But ignoring it means you’ll never understand anything.

The Transformation of Social Media

In 2017, Twitter was Trump’s megaphone. By 2026, the information ecosystem had fragmented beyond recognition. Algorithms no longer promote debate—they promote emotional engagement. And nothing generates more emotional engagement than provocation, outrage, and fear.

Social media hasn’t been hijacked from its original purpose. Its purpose has always been this: to maximize attention. Trump understood this. Democracies still haven’t.

What’s Spilling Over

Institutional trust? Overwhelmed. According to Gallup, Americans’ trust in their federal institutions has reached historic lows. Congress, the Supreme Court, the media—no institution has been spared.

International alliances? Overwhelmed. NATO survives, but existential doubt about U.S. commitment has profoundly altered the strategic calculations of every ally.

The democratic norm? Overwhelmed. The peaceful transfer of power—the most sacred convention of American democracy—was violated on January 6, 2021. And the man who violated it has returned to power.

What Still Holds

And yet. Elections are held. The courts function—imperfectly, but they function. The press publishes. Protests are allowed. The opposition exists. American democracy is not dead. It is seriously ill. And the difference between a serious illness and a terminal one is the treatment.

Is there a treatment? That is the only question that matters.

No, the cup isn’t full—it never had a rim

IFRI’s question was based on a flawed premise. The metaphor of the full cup presupposes an objective breaking point—a moment when “too much” becomes universally recognized, when the system reacts automatically. But political systems do not function like physical containers.

There is no objective threshold. There are only subjective thresholds—and these are infinitely malleable. What 60 million Americans consider intolerable, another 70 million consider necessary. One group’s cup is not another’s. And in a polarized democracy, there is no longer a common cup.

What This Means for the Future

Passively waiting for a breaking point is the most dangerous stance one can take. Because that breaking point might never come—or might come only when it’s too late.

Democracies do not die with a crash. They die in a slow slide. One more decree. One more precedent. One more lie, accepted by one million more people. The cup does not overflow—it grows. Indefinitely. Until the day we realize that what was once a cup has become an ocean.

And that we no longer know how to swim.

It’s Not Just One Man

It would be convenient to reduce the problem to Donald Trump. One man, one temperament, one style. Remove the man, and the problem disappears. That is the implicit thesis of the 2017 show. It is a false thesis.

Trump is a symptom. A spectacular, loud, dangerous symptom—but a symptom nonetheless. The causes are structural: growing economic inequality, deindustrialization, the crisis in education, the collapse of trust in institutions, media fragmentation, and the winner-take-all electoral system. Treating the symptom without addressing the causes is like giving aspirin to a patient with sepsis.

To all of us

And yet, we must also treat the symptom. Because an untreated symptom worsens the disease. Indifference—the idea that “it can’t happen here,” that “the institutions will hold,” that “the adults will eventually regain control”—this indifference is the fertile ground on which autocracies thrive.

Has the cup runneth over? The question itself is a trap. Because it invites us to wait. To measure. To passively watch the level rise. As if the responsibility for overturning the cup belonged to someone else. To a mechanism. To an institution. To a hero who would come and save democracy for us.

That hero does not exist. He never has. Democracy is not a given right—it is a daily struggle. And every day we choose the comfort of indifference, the cup grows by one centimeter.

Nine years after the IFRI’s question, the answer is there, stark and terrible: the cup is never full, because we are the ones pushing back its edges.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost