Disruptor

One week into Trump 2.0, the whole world needs to catch its breath.

None of what has happened so far is unexpected. The 300 or so executive orders the White House issued on the very first day of Trump’s reassumption of the presidency is a record. But it is also likely a house of cards.

Trump is proceeding with an air of over-confidence, believing he comes back to power with an overwhelming mandate. He does not. He received less than half of the popular vote.

His party may control both chambers of the US Congress, but only by the slimmest of margins. Conservatives do dominate the Supreme Court – although the magistrates operate strictly within the framework of the legal tradition which Trump may not defy.

Still, Trump seems bent on testing the limits. Those limits will come to bite him at some point soon.

One executive order, cancelling birthright citizenship, was trashed by a US judge for being blatantly unconstitutional. Trump’s controversial nominee for the defense portfolio was caught in a 50-50 tie at the Senate, rescued only by the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote. Several other Cabinet nominees will face tough confirmation hearings this week.

Trump fired without cause a score of inspector-generals across multiple government agencies, officials who exercise oversight over government transactions. A prominent lawyer advised those fired to stand their ground. Trump, he claims, does not have the power to do what he did.

It is clear Trump is determined to push the limits of presidential power to advance the conservative agenda that reinstalled him in office. That effort will certainly meet stiff resistance by way of hundreds of court cases.

Trump, on his second term, is certainly better prepared than he was the first time around. He has an extensive agenda for executive action drafted by several right-wing think tanks.

The first broadside of executive orders pushed the culture wars along a broad front: turning back inclusion and environmental policies. He withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), a decision that could cripple global public health programs. Fortunately, Mike Bloomberg has stepped in and committed his foundation to help tide the WHO over.

Even before he took his oath of office, Trump dominated the news cycle. He is truly a master of this. He advanced a barefaced imperialist agenda that includes purchasing Greenland, taking in Canada as the 51st state and retaking control of the Panama Canal. Neither the Canadians nor the Greenlanders have any interest in joining the US. Short of an outright invasion, there is little possibility the US could regain control over the strategic canal.

Some of the imperialist noise he is making is outrightly comical. He ordered that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America. The rest of the world is not likely to go along with that.

By the sheer force of executive authority, he will enforce the renaming of a mountain in Alaska, sacred to the indigenous Inuit people, back to Mount McKinley. That could easily be renamed again later.

Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Accord, a continuing global effort to reverse climate change. Through that withdrawal, the US joins Yemen, North Korea and Libya as the only countries not participating in the global effort.

The more concerning thing this withdrawal signifies is the official abandonment by the US of meaningful efforts to curb global warming. US environmental regulations are being rolled back and the door is wide open for extractive industries to do their thing. This is dismaying news for the rest of the world.

Trump has made a great show of deporting illegal immigrants. He has deployed the US military to the southern border and ordered raids to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. While this will please his base, it threatens to put the US at odds with Hispanic America.

Over the weekend, two planeloads of Colombian nationals were denied landing by Colombia’s president – for the simple reason the flights were not coordinated with Colombia. The country, a staunch US ally, had regularly received planeloads of deported immigrants during the length of the Biden administration.

The incident sparked a sharp but short confrontation. Trump ordered tariffs to be imposed on Colombian exports to the US. Colombia retaliated by imposing trade sanctions on US exports. Eventually, Trump withdrew his tariff order and the incident was unwound.

Brazil, for its part, complained about the degrading treatment of its nationals by US immigration. Other countries in Latin America nurse the same sentiment. Trump’s wholesale deportation campaign could make America lose friends in the region.

It is now clear to most other countries that Trump is using the threat of hefty tariff impositions to bully everyone and win concessions on other concerns. It must have dawned on Trump that other nations can retaliate with their own tariff impositions. The resulting trade war will be most damaging for the US.

Trump, since he reassumed the presidency, never once mentioned imposing tariffs on China’s exports – a favorite campaign theme. He must have understood by now that threatening Chinese trade will cause most harm in rural America.

Consequently, the threat of imposing hefty tariffs has become an empty one. Trump has been using it to force other countries to invest in US industry in defiance of market realities.

Eventually, the overused threat will become an empty one.