IN his second term in office, beginning in January 2013, President Barack Obama was frequently dubbed as cowardly by critics who saw him as paralysed, failing to take any serious action in any direction.
The Israelis and the Arab allies of the United States viewed him with utter contempt, seeing him as weak for failing to militarily confront Iran and for ultimately signing the 2015 nuclear deal — a move they interpreted as total capitulation to Tehran.
Conversely, the opposing camp reprimanded him for a different kind of cowardice, watching in frustration as he refused to use his immense popularity and historic mandate to crack down on Israel’s absolute stranglehold over US foreign policy in the Middle East.
On the global stage, he was sharply criticised for failing to confront the rising power of China; despite his highly publicized “Pivot to Asia,” his administration stood by as Beijing militarised the South China Sea, proving Washington’s grand strategies were nothing more than empty rhetoric.
Even domestically, Obama was criticised for refusing to use his legitimacy as the country’s first black president to challenge the embedded structural racism and deep socioeconomic inequalities that routinely result in violence against black and brown communities.
This pervasive sense of paralysis was famously captured by intellectual Cornel West in a blistering May 2011 interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig. Reflecting on the administration’s early surrender to systemic corporate power, West bluntly described Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats,” arguing that the president completely lacked the backbone to challenge the economic and military elites running amok.
The brilliant deception of Donald Trump was that he was perceived by his supporters — and even many beyond his core base — as the strong leader who would single-handedly reverse Obama’s supposed failures and inaction. Trump projected this false narrative constantly, using aggressive, unvarnished language before and during his first year in office to market himself as a fearless disruptor.
Critically analysed, however, this machismo was entirely performative — the classic language of a bully designed to project absolute authority while carefully avoiding any risk that might require actual courage.
In actuality, all of Trump’s actions during his first term, and now deep into his second, hardly reflect courage, bravery, or strength. A dark, consistent pattern emerges: every single aggressive action taken by Trump, whether locally or internationally, has been systematically directed at poor nations, vulnerable groups, and situations where the target has no viable means of fighting back.
Nowhere is this cowardly selectivity clearer than in Trump’s policy toward the Palestinians (and other Arab nations) during his first term, executing a calculated, chronological assault to crush a stateless, besieged people:
December 2017-May 2018: He officially recognisedJerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocated the US Embassy, attempting to erase Palestinian history and claims to the Holy City.
March 2019: He signed away the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, trying to legitimise colonial conquest under international law.
November 2019: His administration declared that illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank were no longer inconsistent with international law, greenlighting the systematic theft of Palestinian land.
2020: He engineered the cynical “Abraham Accords,” bypassing the Palestinian people entirely to foster normalisation between Arab regimes and an apartheid state.
In his second term, Trump has doubled down with the same brutal cowardliness. He has permitted Israel to slaughter tens of thousands of trapped, innocent civilians in the Gaza genocide, doing nothing but issuing hollow deadlines and ultimatums. He postures as an omnipotent ruler, but by acting as a rubber stamp for Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet, he projects the absolute opposite of independent strength.
On other international fronts, Trump’s foreign policy has consistently targeted what he perceives to be the weakest and most defenceless of nations. He has routinely tried to bully America’s neighbours and historical targets — threatening the sovereignty of the Panama Canal, bizarrely trying to buy Greenland from Denmark, and using aggressive tariff extortions against many countries around the world.
Yet, at the slightest hint of genuine resistance, Trump has consistently buckled, stumbled, and retreated. His bombastic trade wars ground to a halt when faced with real retaliatory measures, and his territorial ambitions faded the moment Europe presented a unified stance against his designs on Greenland.
In the case of Ukraine, Trump attempted to use raw financial and military leverage to pressure both Kyiv and Moscow into conceding to his arbitrary “peace plan.” Ultimately, when faced with the unyielding realities of a brutal, industrialised war of attrition, he realised the conflict was entirely beyond his ability to alter. Defeated by a real crisis, he promptly retreated to what he does best: returning to bully a fragmented, weak Europe over defence spending.
The administration’s National Defence Strategy, issued on January 23, was meant to give the grand impression that Washington was operating based on a flawless, imperial master plan. The high-profile military operation three weeks earlier — which resulted in the literal kidnappingof a sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, from Caracas — was supposed to be the “proof in the pudding” that this new hemispheric dominance was in motion.
Yet, this critical act carried zero long-term strategic value. Instead, it merely emboldened Trump to return to the Middle East, dragging the US into a major regional warthat has destabilised the area far more than any American intervention since World War II. Now, with his regional war against Iran clearly failing to yield a victory, Trump has cycled back to South America, desperate for a symbolic win. He has launched an aggressive campaign to bully Cuba via a strict naval blockade, attempting to manufacture a domestic distraction away from his catastrophic failures in the Persian Gulf.
The war against Iran stands as a definitive monument to political cowardice. It has deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, schools, and vulnerable communities — striking at a time when the Iranian leadership was actively engaged in earnest diplomatic dialogue to prevent hostilities. Trump quickly became an international case study in mistrust, lies, fabrications, and constant double-speak — qualities fundamentally antithetical to strong leadership. When he realised that a definitive victory in Iran was impossible, he did the exact opposite of what a leader with an iota of courage would do: he stalled, lied, and took to social media to pretend he had achieved stupendous victories.
This dynamic reached a frantic climax on May 29, 2026, when Trump posted a dramatic statement on Truth Social, attempting to project the illusion that a comprehensive peace deal was imminent. Announcing that he was entering the Situation Room to make a “final determination” on a proposed 60-day truce extension, Trump triumphantly declared that the US naval blockade would “now be lifted” and that ships trapped in the Strait of Hormuz could finally “start the process of ‘heading home!’”
Trump used the fully fabricated moment to dictate public ultimatums, demanding that the waterway remain entirely open and toll-free, and that Iran’s deeply buried enriched uranium be unearthed and destroyed.
Yet, the performative strongman narrative immediately fell apart. While Trump claimed a monumental victory was finalised, the broader ceasefire framework required a comprehensive cessation of hostilities across the region — a plan instantly derailed by America’s own dependency. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely ignored Washington’s diplomatic timeline, flatly refusing to stop his military aggression and instead vowing to deepen operations in Lebanon.
By the following morning, White House officials were forced to admit that no final decision had actually been made, exposing a supposedly strong president completely paralysed by his inability to dictate terms to his allies or bring his own chaotic war to a close.
While there is no question that Obama lacked the qualities of a genuinely courageous leader, Trump remains the ultimate case study in political illusion. His rise to power was mistakenly viewed by some as a clean demarcation line in American history — the transition from weak, compromised politicians grovelling for donor money to a strong, self-funded billionaire using his own wealth to “drain the swamp” and restore American greatness.
The exact opposite has manifested. America’s supposedly strong president is actually its greatest structural weakness. He possesses no intrinsic courage, is entirely obsessed with his own ego, and only finds his boldness when punching down at the weak, the blockaded, and the vulnerable.
Ultimately, it can be argued that Trump is not an aberration, but a direct symptom of the American project itself: the perfect avatar of a fading empire that lacks the strength to stop global shifts from occurring, and lacks the wisdom to peacefully be a part of that changing world.
Either way, the fallacy of Trump’s strength must be permanently abandoned for a far more accurate representation of the man: the literal embodiment of weakness and cowardice.
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Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, ‘Before the Flood,’ was published by Seven Stories Press. He is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
