In a discussion following the third assassination attempt on President Donald Trump since he became president for the second time, a friend commented that “Everyone in the world hates Donald Trump”. In retrospect as I thought about it, I was reminded of a case study we had at the Harvard Business School where a new man in a production environment was ostracized for producing more than the other workers. In Union Shops, ‘rate-busters’ are hatred only more than are ‘scabs’. One of the points in the case was that disrupting a group’s norm makes a new outsider in the group hated, and a threat to their livelihood.
Trump’s original sin was to challenge the status quo candidates within the Republican Party living in the shadow of World War II sixty years later in the 2016 election. Then in campaigning, he recognized the weakness in each of his opponents that mockingly made them seem unworthy or unprepared for the office in the Republican Party.
Old mainline Republicans loathed caught short in political perception and have hated him since. They became the ‘Never-Trumpers’. In that election Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States.
The 2016 presidential election win by Trump was much worse than an original sin to the Democrat Party. The progressives in the party were expecting Hillary Clinton to win which could prolong them in office for sixteen years or more. This would enable them to fully transform America into the one-party, authoritarian Marxist welfare state as envisioned by Barack Obama, but Trump delays it temporarily. Not since Roosevelt/Truman years from 1933 to 1953 had the Democrats enjoyed such a long opportunity to remake the United States of America in their new uutopian image.
As a result, even before Trump had moved into the White House in January 2017, with the media, academia, and the cultural elites, the Democrats implemented an all-hands-on-deck campaign to destroy Trump for becoming an existential threat to their progressive plans for America.
The Covid 19 pandemic gave the progressives another opportunity in the 2020 election when Joe Biden was elected president. But Trump again rained on the Democrat’s victory parade in 2024 becoming the 47th American president by defeating Vice President Kamala Harris and becoming for them the most hated man in America.
Historians will name Joe Biden as one of America’s worst presidents. In just four years Biden allowed wars in Ukraine and Gaza, an ignominious retreat in Afghanistan, anti-Semitism to dominate our elite universities, and a massive increase in federal debt. Obama’s progressive agenda continued at full speed while Biden remained behind the scenes napping. He did not overtly rattle anyone’s special interests, and no one hated good ole Joe!
What President Trump did in waking up our two political parties, overseas he demanded that allies carry their load in defending Western Europe and our western values. He questioned trade policies that the U.S. had enacted following WWII to help our allies recover from the war. Tariffs to level the economic trading system were universally condemned. He questioned sacred shibboleths like NATO, which won him no plaudits here or abroad.
European leaders hate Trump for reminding the world that their nations’ economic, political, and military weaknesses make them no longer relevant in controlling their own destinies without help from the United States led by a strong leader. So far, Trump is still defiant after three assassination attempts in less than two years. Do European leaders really wish us to return leadership to the Bidens of the progressive world?
Calling laggards to accountability did not win a contestant the ‘Miss Congeniality’ Award when Trump owned the Miss World and Miss USA Contests, nor do ‘Mister Nice Guy’ acts deter hardened dictators like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or the recently departed Ayatollah. Yes, I must agree, Donald Trump is the most hated man in the world, but he is the most feared man today in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing.
As such, I am reminded by a quote from Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), “It is much safer to be feared than loved because love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails”.
TW3
April 30, 2026
John Whitmore Jenkins
