Under Donald Trump, the US is turning away from the Liberal International Order (LIO) it helped to create together with its Western partners. The US withdrawal from the LIO and its underpinning institutions is commonly assumed to be a Trump-specific phenomenon. We argue that treating Trump as an aberration risks overlooking the broader challenge posed by structural forces that drove the US away from the LIO already before Trump and will likely continue to do so after his presidency. We argue that US decline vis-à-vis China, the loss of control over multilateral institutions, and increasing domestic skepticism of 'liberal internationalism' contributed to the gradual US withdrawal from the LIO since the end of the Cold War. We probe this expectation in the cases of NATO and the WTO. Our findings suggest that instead of short-term responses to Trump, sustainable adjustments to the US retrenchment from the LIO are needed.