I believe that those hoping that 'Team Trump' will self-destruct sooner, rather than later, are mistaken. Not only do the Republicans control the Congress, the Supreme Court and the WH, but soon they will control the Fed (which helps to regulate US banks), and more than likely they will more alt-right populist allies overseas (see the first linked article).
http://www.politico.eu/article/geert-wilders-american-allies-far-right-netherlands-dutch-election-freedom-party-pvv/This indicates to me that 'Team Trump' will be here for at least 4 years; which brings me to the second linked article entitled: "Trump’s Grand Strategic Train Wreck"; which hints at the damage that will playout on the world stage as 'Team Trump' continues on its current train wreck.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/31/trumps-grand-strategic-train-wreck/Extract: "Believe it or not, the president has a grand strategy. But it's a nightmarish mess.
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Believe it or not, President Donald Trump has a grand strategy. According to some analysts, Trump’s endless streams of erratic and apparently improvisational ideas don’t add up to anything consistent or purposeful enough to call a grand strategy. We see it otherwise. Beneath all the rants, tweets, and noise there is actually a discernible pattern of thought — a Trumpian view of the world that goes back decades. Trump has put forward a clear vision to guide his administration’s foreign policy — albeit a dark and highly troubling one, riddled with tensions and vexing dilemmas.
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In particular, three dangers dominate the new president’s worldview. The first is the threat from “radical Islam” — which, for the president and many of his closest advisors, poses an existential and “civilizational” threat to the United States that must be “eradicated” from the face of the Earth.
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Second, Trump portrays unfair trade deals and the trade practices of key competitors as grave threats to the U.S. economy and therefore a national security priority.
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In Trump’s eyes, however, Enemy No. 1 in the economic domain is China …
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Third, and finally, Trump has consistently railed against illegal immigration, arguing that the pace and scale of migration has cost American jobs, lowered wages, and put unsustainable strains on housing, schools, tax bills, and general living conditions.
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To address these perceived threats, Trump has put forward an “America First” grand strategy with four key pillars.
The first is what White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon proudly calls “economic nationalism.”
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A second key pillar is what might be called “extreme” homeland security.
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What we call “amoral transactionalism” represents the third, and perhaps most central, feature of Trump’s grand strategy. In Trump’s view, the United States should be willing to cut deals with any actors that share American interests, regardless of how transactional that relationship is, and regardless of whether they share — or act in accordance with — American values. In the battle against radical Islam, for example, Trump has said: “All actions should be oriented around this goal, and any country which shares this goal will be our ally.”
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The final pillar of Trump’s grand strategy is a muscular but aloof militarism. For decades, Trump has advocated “extreme military strength.”
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Taken together, Trump’s “America First” grand strategy diverges significantly from — and intentionally subverts — the bipartisan consensus underpinning U.S. foreign policy since World War II.
… “Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal international order” it helped construct seven decades ago and sustain to this day. He is therefore hostile to that order, institutionalized through alliances with other democratic states and international agreements that promote an open, rule-based international economy, and refuses to invest blood and treasure to maintain it.
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… Trump’s grand strategy is plagued by internal tensions and dilemmas that will make it difficult to achieve the president’s stated objectives.
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First, it will be difficult for Trump to reconcile his policies toward Russia and Iran on the one hand with his desire to defeat the Islamic State on the other. Trump’s apparent desire to go all-in with Russian President Vladimir Putin — and perhaps Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — to fight the Islamic State in Syria is likely to backfire.
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A second dilemma is that Trump’s extreme measures to protect the homeland could further complicate the fight against the Islamic State.
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Third, Trump’s approach to Europe and Russia — at least as he has outlined it so far — is equally self-defeating and contradictory. Trump’s warm embrace of Putin; intimation that he will throw Ukraine (and potentially the Baltic states) under the Russian bus and lift Ukraine-related sanctions on Moscow; repeated trash-talking of NATO, the European Union, and committed Atlanticist leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel; and celebration of Brexit and European populist movements will all drive a deep wedge between America and its most important democratic allies.
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Fourth, Trump is likely to have difficulty taking punitive action against China while also contending with the growing threat from North Korea.
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Fifth, in a bid to supposedly help American workers by withdrawing from the TPP (a pact creating a free-trade zone among a dozen countries representing 40 percent of global GDP), Trump is in fact helping China by ceding the economic battlefield in Asia to Beijing.
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Finally, Trump’s proposal to “build a wall” and somehow force Mexico to pay for it (perhaps through a 20 percent border tax), his threat to deport millions of illegal immigrants, and his pledge to renegotiate or even withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, could create a train wreck in the U.S.-Mexico relationship …
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Every new president, of course, faces dilemmas to confront and strategic contradictions to resolve. But what is remarkable about Trump’s “America First” grand strategy is the number, pervasiveness, and centrality of such contradictions. In other words: Trump has consistently articulated a set of basic grand strategic concepts, but the policy implications of those concepts add up to a Gordian knot of conflicting initiatives.
This raises the question of why Trump’s grand strategy is so tangled and internally contradictory. And the answer has to do with the process — or rather, the lack thereof — through which these ideas are born, as well as, shall we say, the unique personality of the president himself.
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What all this means, in practical terms, is that the implementation phase of Trump’s grand strategy — the period in which the ideas upon which one campaigns are translated into the day-to-day initiatives by which one governs — is likely to be far messier than is normally the case. The Trump administration will have to determine how to proceed on those issues — such as Russia, Iran, alliance relations, trade, and homeland security — where key advisors have staked out positions very different from those of the president. More fundamentally, the Trump administration will have to determine how to reconcile the president’s various promises and impulses — and where those things cannot be reconciled, how to prioritize among them."
