It's safe to say that none of his many enemies among the global elites anticipated an intellectual challenge from Donald Trump.  He doesn't look or talk or act the way they think an intellectual should.  Yet somehow, he has placed them in a box.

In his U.N. debut, he challenged the intellectual basis of the world order they are working toward.  He personally addressed many of the political leaders in the audience when he said:

…you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first.

At this point, he received what sounded to me like the most applause he got that day.  Politico's transcript even notes the interruption for applause.

All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.

Globalists are enemies of the nation-state.  They much prefer a global scale and powerful multilateral bureaucracies running things.  The E.U. is their prototype, specifically designed to weaken sovereignty for the common good, following the trauma inflicted by German nationalism in its National Socialist manifestation.  In the E.U. right now, Hungary is supposed to subordinate its national interests to the greater good and take its share of the Muslims entering the E.U., a command it is defying.

This was the vision rejected by U.K. voters in the Brexit referendum.  The globalist vision is fighting a defensive battle right now.

Here comes President Trump, enunciating the principle that "the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition" and putting it on the global agenda for discussion.

He opens up politicians to questions on whether they support the same principle.  And who, in a democracy, wants to tell voters to their faces, "Sometimes, I vote against your interests"?

The peaceful utopian New World Order dreamed of by globalists thrives in darkness, you see.  Stubborn voters think of themselves as citizens, bound together by common interests.  Altruism has its appeal to the segment of the voting public that has enough surplus resources to afford some collective charity toward the rest of the world.  But for most people, as Trump's election showed in the U.S., national interest has great appeal.

Most establishmentarians ignored the challenge, but my favorite response so far to Trump's challenge comes from Spencer Ackerman in the Daily Beast, who played (you guessed it!) the Nazi card, finding "his familiar blood-and-soil themes that echo from the darker moments in European history."

They just can't give up on Trump as a Nazi.  The more sophisticated among them probably believe that Trump personally is not a Jew-hating white supremacist, but that he cynically appeals to a vast undercurrent of latent Nazism among the great unwashed masses.  That completely unrealistic view of the public is, in a sense, even more delusional than the belief that Trump personally is a Nazi.  It reveals a detachment from and contempt for a vast swath of the American population.  This is a delusion with consequences.

The really big problem for the globalists, the one requiring darkness, is that all multilateral institutions requiring sovereign members to behave altruistically fail.  Stanley Meisler's United Nations: A History makes this general point about U.N. failures.

It may or may not turn out to be a "tear down this wall" moment, but I think it is a landmark in the Trump presidency.