The Man the World Cannot Stop

By Vincent R. Pozon

It used to be a government

I always thought that the president in a presidential system was more prime mover than sovereign, that we vote into office a phalanx, one face known while others remained invisible, whispering, tugging firmly, keeping him on the plan, the one he promised to the people in his campaign speeches, the same plan that won support from big money.

I imagined he deferred to intelligence, to the specialists he appointed to run departments, to career bureaucrats who held institutional memory as ballast. I thought it was like a corporation: one visionary, surrounded by people who actually knew what they were doing, helping him with the wisdom and expertise for which they were chosen.

I always thought that until Trump.

What he has wrought so far

Upon taking office, he ignited a global trade war, targeting immediate neighbors and trading partners— Canada, Mexico, China, and the European Union—with tariffs and threats.

In January of this year, he had US forces extract Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their compound in Caracas before dawn, bomb infrastructure across the capital, fly them to the USA.

A honest-to-goodness kidnapping.

Trump announced it, with glee, on social media. "The oil companies are going to go in," he said afterward. "We're going to take back the oil."

Venezuelan oil.

The next month, he and Netanyahu bombed Iran. While they were negotiating. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed, along with family members, including his son Mojtaba's wife. Mojtaba, who was in the compound that night, was seriously wounded, disfigured, it is said, and has not appeared in public since. The Strait of Hormuz closed. Oil prices rose thirty percent. The world groaned. A ceasefire was brokered, collapsed, and a blockade announced, all within six weeks.

On the first morning of his war, a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls' elementary school in Iran. At least 175 people were killed, most of them schoolchildren, alongside parents who had come to fetch them. Investigations concluded the US was responsible.

He is far from finished

Cuba is next. "Taking Cuba. Whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it." The island's oil has been cut off. Its grid has collapsed twice. The invasion has not begun. The strangulation has.

He wants Canada and Greenland, by force if necessary. He has said the Panama Canal should be returned to the United States. He wants Gaza emptied of its people and turned into a prized real estate. He wants Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, the invader, and call it peace.

America First is America Alone

He has withdrawn the United States from 66 international organizations, agencies, and commissions, including the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, UN Women, the UN Population Fund, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the foundational 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty that every nation on earth had signed.

UNICEF has had $142 million in US funding clawed back by his congress, a budget cut of at least 20 percent. He has threatened to pull the United States out of NATO, the alliance that has kept the peace in Europe since the second world war. USAID, the main engine of American humanitarian assistance worldwide, was shuttered in July 2025, its programs cut by 83 percent.

Allies now consider American guarantees differently now.

He defies court orders, ignores the Supreme Court, demolished the East Wing of the White House without congressional authorization, and continues building after a judge said stop.

This is not the record of a term or of a year. This is all in sixty days.

We inherit devastation

This frail, 80-year old man is in a hurry to produce a legacy of destruction: the price of oil is a tax on everything and everyone. And the whole of West Asia is now a war zone. And every authoritarian on earth has taken note: "so that's how to do it – quickly, brusquely, violently". The rules pala bind only the gentle and the civilized.

A scene from "W.," Oliver Stone's 2008 film about George W. Bush, has been circulating. In it, Dick Cheney, played by Richard Dreyfuss, briefs the war cabinet in the White House Situation Room, pointing to a map. "Where do you see a lack of American presence? What's missing? Iran. The motherlode. Third largest oil reserve in the world. Forty percent of the world's oil goes right through here, through the Strait of Hormuz. Control Iran, control Eurasia, control the world. Empire. Real empire."

While the film is eighteen years old, the map it points to is today's news.

Weeks before the election, Simon Rosenberg wrote, "Donald Trump is a rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon. He is a racist, xenophobe, misogynist and bigot. He is unfit, unwell and unraveling. A babyman not a strong man. He is an extremist who wants to end the American-led global economic system that has made us prosperous, the Western alliance that has kept us safe and our democracy that has kept us free."

Americans still voted for him. The entire world is now living in the aftermath of their choice.

Everybody did little but watch and worry

No one paid the price of holding the line. Not Congress, not the cabinet, not the courts, not NATO, not the inutile UN, which watched and said, as it always does, that it was "deeply concerned".

Why do they let one person get away with things? The phenomenon called Trump befuddled me: are they so respectful of the presidency that his edicts are obeyed without question?

Then I saw this video. And apparently yes. The man is god, allowed god-like powers.

The system was not built for a norm-breaker who holds legitimate power. Every check assumed the man at the top would observe unwritten rules. And the system of checks and balance? Well, the checks are slow.

Then there is the cost of resistance. Members of his own party who challenged him — Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, others — were politically destroyed with such efficiency and thoroughness.

Each transgression, meanwhile, repositions the baseline of what counts as transgression. When he kidnapped a sitting head of state, it registered on a news cycle and was then forgotten.

His second term was staffed entirely with loyalists. No one pulls his sleeve. No one says, "sobra ka na". And in the alliance structures, NATO and the UN, the problem is structural: they operate by consensus; he will block any vote, any attempt to censure or stop him, as America has consistently done for Israel.

By the time they deliberate, the ground has already shifted.

We Filipinos see a resemblance

A democratically elected president, with a genuine mandate from the poor and the angry, announces a war on drugs. Thousands die outside of courts, outside of law, outside of any process that might require justification. Each death makes the next one easier to absorb. And when it is finally over, when the man sits before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the question that remains is the same question this article began with. Why did they let him?

The answer, here as there, is the same:

The system was not built for a man who does not believe the rules apply to him, and because the people inside the system balked, one by one, decided that the price of stopping him was more than they were willing to pay.

Hesitation becomes accommodation. Accommodation becomes complicity.

In the meantime, his military loads up and rests, looking forward, he says, to its next conquest.

Vincent R. Pozon

Koyang has been in advertising for more than half a century, in various agencies, multinational and local. He is known for aberrant strategic successes (e.g., Clusivol’s ‘Bawal Magkasakit’, Promil’s ‘The Gifted Child’, RiteMED’s ‘May RiteMED ba nito?', VP Binay's 'Ganito Kami sa Makati', JV Ejercito's 'The Good One', Akbayan's 'Pag Mahal Mo, Akbayan Mo')). He is chairman of Estima, an ad agency dedicated to helping local industrialists, causes and candidates.

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