In his first week, Trump tosses everything out the window, including the rulebook

It has now been just one week since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the US’s 45th or 47th president (depending on whether you count nonconsecutive terms as comprising one or two presidencies).

This past week has been marked by an extraordinary flood of decisions, choices and announcements. They have roiled domestic and international politics — especially given their pace, spread and impact — with their obvious intentions to outflank Trump’s opponents, domestically and internationally.

Despite a feeling these efforts have been going on forever, it has all just been within the first week of Trump’s second term of office. There clearly is a great deal more to come.

While some have tried to compare this turmoil to Franklin Roosevelt’s historic 100 days of actions in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, this time around, with Trump in the White House, it has been very, very different.

Right from the first hours of the new administration, the new president began signing a pile of executive orders, those presidential statements of actions presumed to be based on already enacted law — although some of these executive orders stretch the content of US law. Effectively, the plan is to “flood the zone”, a sports metaphor meaning that a strong team shifts its players to overwhelm a weaker opponent at the precise point of action.

The Trump executive orders include a slew of policies on immigration — including deportations, the despatching of troops to backstop border control, and an end to birthright citizenship. The latter has already been blocked by a federal judge and 22 state governments have pledged to oppose this idea, given that it violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

The new president was gently chastised by the bishop of Washington at a special benediction service when she asked him to demonstrate the value of mercy in his decisions, but instead, her sermon provoked Trump to publicly berate her in his social media rants.

There was so much more in store for the nation by the weekend, however. Trump chose to fire the commander of the nation’s coast guard (presumably for not guarding the coast appropriately by his lights) and more than a dozen inspectors-general in government departments. Some of those individuals had been appointed by Trump in his first administration.

Read more: The Trump 2.0 effect – how the barrage of executive orders could jeopardise SA’s wellbeing

The inspectors-general are there to investigate charges of waste, fraud and corruption. As a result, these firings should be interpreted as a desire to put hardcore Trump loyalists into those jobs rather than ineptitude on the part of those newly out of their jobs.

The new president also went after various manifestations of “woke-ism”, including ridding government departments of any positions dedicated to DEI — diversity, equity and inclusivity — concerns, as well as the very mention of such policies. Even independent quasi-government bodies like the National Gallery of Art felt compelled to go along with such a decision.

The Department of Defence, meanwhile, has determined it will cease instructing incoming personnel about the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-African-American fighter pilot unit in World War 2 noted for its bravery and heroism when it flew patrols in the still-segregated military. In a gratuitous action, the new administration also barred celebrations of Black History Month by government agencies.

Foreign aid halted

By the middle of the week, the new administration had also decreed a temporary, several-month halt to almost all foreign aid programmes, save for aid to Israel and Egypt, while the State Department ascertained every aid programme’s relevance to the Trump administration’s goals. This included payments made as part of the Pepfar programme that has for more than 20 years combatted HIV/Aids.

Further, the president announced that the US would, henceforth, withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris global climate accord.

While it is true the WHO made some problematic decisions at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and that the US has been paying a disproportionate share of the WHO’s budget, this decision has already meant the international body is being forced to cut back on programmes and personnel.

Meanwhile, leaving the Paris Agreement can be read as a vote of support for companies to increase US oil, gas and coal exploitation and thus the use of fossil fuels in power generation, rather than moving towards renewable energy efforts.

On foreign policy, The Economist argued just before the inauguration that “Donald Trump’s critics have often accused him of buffoonery and isolationism. Yet even before taking office on January 20th he has shown how much those words fall short of what his second term is likely to bring. As the inauguration approaches, he has helped secure a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza. Busting taboos, he has bid for control over Greenland, with its minerals and strategic position in the Arctic. Mr Trump’s second term will not only be more disruptive than his first; it will also supplant a vision of foreign policy that has dominated America since the Second World War.

“For decades American leaders have argued that their power comes with the responsibility to be the indispensable defender of a world made more stable and benign by democracy, settled borders and universal values. Mr Trump will ditch the values and focus on amassing and exploiting power. His approach will be tested and defined in three conflicts: the Middle East, Ukraine and America’s cold war with China. Each shows how Mr Trump is impelled to break with recent decades: in his unorthodox methods, his accumulation and opportunistic use of influence, and his belief that power alone creates peace.”

It concluded that the real problems and challenges may come from within: “When the use of power is untethered by values, the result can be chaos on a global scale. If ultra-loyal, out-of-their-depth would-be disruptors like Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are confirmed to head the Pentagon and intelligence, the chaos will spread on the inside, too. Mr Trump is ill-suited to separate his own interests from his country’s, especially if his and his associates’ money is at stake, as Elon Musk’s will be in China. By turning away from the values that made postwar America, Mr Trump will be surrendering the single greatest strength that his despotic opponents do not possess.”

New appointments

Meanwhile, the first wave of the new president’s appointments have been voted upon. The new secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, gained his position only by virtue of the tie-breaking vote from the new vice-president. Based on his track record, Hegseth is manifestly not the man for the job of leading national defence into an era of a revolution in weaponry, let alone managing a massive budget and the department’s personnel cohort and military forces.

The new secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, became famous nationally for having written that she had shot her dog, Cricket, for its failure to learn how to be a good hunting dog.

Up next will be the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard, nominated as the overall head of intelligence institutions, despite earlier awkward engagement with the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and her warmth towards Russian leaders over the years.

One other major decision, among all the others made by the new president, managed to disappoint — or enrage — many Americans, including police unions that had endorsed Trump for the election. This came when he chose to pardon or commute the sentences of about 1,500 people sentenced for their roles in the 6 January 2021 mob attack on the US Capitol. Similarly, public sentiment about this decision, not surprisingly, has not been positive.

These commutations and pardons have been part of the new president’s continuing language that the 2020 election was somehow riven with fraud and corruption, despite there being no evidence to support his claim.

In this first week, the president has tried to flood the zone with pronouncements and executive orders, and with the promise that there is still more to come, in trade and other international economic relations decisions.

Accordingly, he has created a climate of uncertainty on the one hand for many issues, even as the sense that pretty much all of the old ways, domestically and internationally, have now been tossed out the window.

Meanwhile, despite all this feverish activity, one Washington correspondent noted that the “White House still seems pretty disorganised ... even on the mundane level of its failure to send out daily guidance, coordinate the press pool or hold a press briefing”.

So far, perhaps, despite all the excitement, it has been a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing very clearly. DM