Trump ramps up pressure on allies as he marks first year back

Jan 21, 2026 News

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(AL-JAZEERA) President Donald Trump marks his first year back in the White House by expanding presidential power and reshaping relations between the United States and the world.

The 79-year-old Republican has linked his drive to take control of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize, saying he no longer thinks “purely of Peace”, as the row over the island threatens to reignite a trade war with Europe.

Over the past year, Trump has also taken a more confrontational approach towards foes and allies alike, ordered hundreds of military strikes overseas and withdrawn the US from dozens of United Nations bodies and international organisations.

During the first year of his second term, he issued more than 200 executive orders and revoked at least 80, issued by his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.

More than 225 executive orders. At least 1,740 acts of clemency. And deadly military strikes in at least seven foreign countries, plus 35 more in international waters.

Few presidents in United States history have tallied as many dramatic changes as Donald Trump has in the first year of his second term.

But historians warn the whirlwind pace of the past year has tested the bounds of democracy, plunging the US into an unprecedented period of presidential might.

Disrupting the status quo in the federal government appears to be the aim, according to Russell Riley, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

He explained that Trump’s tenure could even be seen as “one of the least conservative presidencies in American history”, when judged by the speed and scope of its upheavals.

“‘Act fast and break things’ seems to be the strategy, which is appealing to those who consider their political inheritance completely ineffective or corrupt,” Riley said.

“This is the modern-day equivalent of the famous Vietnam War dictum: Destroy the village in order to save it.”

Still, the rat-a-tat tempo of Trump’s second term was not without warning.

As far back as 2018, Trump adviser Steve Bannon outlined a strategy that involved overwhelming the public — and the news media in particular — with a maelstrom of activity.

“The real opposition is the media,” Bannon told interviewer Michael Lewis. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh**.”

The pacing, he later indicated, should be akin to muzzle velocity: the speed at which bullets leave a gun barrel.

While journalists are distracted with one news item, “we’ll get all our stuff done, bang, bang, bang”, Bannon told the investigative show Frontline.

Executing that strategy arguably became easier thanks to the gap between Trump’s first and second terms.

No other president in US history, except Grover Cleveland in the 19th century, has been elected non-consecutively. And Trump’s allies used his four years out of office to construct policy documents like Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for his second term.

Still, it is not unusual for presidents to begin new terms with a flurry of action.

Presidential historian Mark Updegrove points to the first election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 as ushering in another period of fast-paced federal change.

“America, for the first time, was creating a robust federal government to alleviate the plight of our citizens around the ravages of the Great Depression,” Updegrove explained.

Roosevelt, he added, was aided by a “very compliant legislative branch” that allowed him to swiftly enact his agenda, which included financial reforms, large-scale public works and the creation of new government commissions.

“Because Americans were suffering, I think they were rubber-stamping a lot of these policies and getting them signed into law as soon as possible,” Updegrove said.

But Updegrove considers the present-day circumstances to be “profoundly different” from Roosevelt’s time. For starters, he said, “The change is far more radical.”

“I think any comparisons you might draw to previous presidents are false, in a sense, because they don’t even remotely approach the same scale on which Trump is doing these things,” Updegrove explained.

“That’s the difference. You can call them apples and oranges, but that’s not the right analogy. It’s more watermelons and raisins. They’re minor compared to what we see from Donald Trump.”

One of the departures from presidential precedent is Trump’s heavy reliance on executive orders.

Trump has signed no fewer than 228 since taking his second oath of office on January 20, 2025. Not since 1942, during World War II, have so many executive orders been signed in a single year.

“It’s hard to keep track of everything that’s going on and the ramifications, given the sheer volume of activity,” Updegrove said. “And this has been a very conscious strategy.”

The number of executive orders over the past year even outstrips the total number from all four years of Trump’s first term.

Back then, he only issued 220 executive orders overall. But from the very first hours of term two, Trump adopted a different stride: He signed a record 26 orders in a single day.

Updegrove believes that Trump’s new approach is partly a distillation of his past as a businessman, leading the real-estate empire he inherited from his father.

As the sole owner of the Trump Organisation, a private company, Trump does not have to answer to shareholders or a board of directors for his business decisions.

Nor is he bound by the corporate governance rules designed to prevent self-dealing in publicly traded companies.

“He was able to do things without consulting other people,” Updegrove explained. “He didn’t have the things that would even slow down a corporate executive.”

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• Donald Trump, Greenland, Nobel Peace Prize, presidential power, trade war, United States

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