Brace yourself for the rest of Trump 2
I had parked myself in a bar where young Republicans were gathering to watch the results come in. My assignment was to talk to them after Mr. Trump had lost and write something about the future of the Republican Party after his failure. A look at the post-Trump GOP, in other words.
As the evening wore on and state after state went Trump, it became clear that I was never going to do that story. Instead I ended up writing about the reaction of a jittery world to the fact that a real estate mogul and former reality-TV star was poised to become the 45th president of the world's most powerful nation.
It seemed incredible that such a person could obtain such power. It seemed doubly incredible when, eight years later, Americans handed him the keys to the White House again. They could be forgiven for electing him once. The American political system had become stagnant and money-driven. Many Americans wanted someone to go in and break some furniture. Mr. Trump seemed just the man.
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But twice? After everything they had seen in Trump 1? Yes, incredible. Yet it happened, and the world is only beginning to count the cost. We have seen half a year of Trump 2 now (though it seems much longer) and it has been uglier than even his bitterest rivals warned.
The U.S. foreign aid program slashed, putting the health and very survival of countless needy people in jeopardy. America's finest universities attacked because they refused to kiss the ring. Immigrants scooped up and dispatched to dank overseas jails. Efforts to fight climate change trashed. The head of the central bank slurred for the crime of trying to control inflation.
We are only just into August and already this month the rogue President has fired the respected head of a respected statistics agency for issuing a jobs report he didn't like and imposed punishing new tariffs on some of his country's closest friends, raising the average U.S. tariff rate to the highest level since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the rogue Health Secretary he appointed has cancelled half a billion dollars worth of contracts and grants for developing the kind of vaccines that helped beat back COVID-19.
Far worse is to come. Some countries have managed to strike tariff deals with Mr. Trump. Others, like Canada, are trying. Whatever the result, he is overturning a system of trade and exchange that has fuelled the growth of economies around the world for decades, helping to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. The United States built that system and profited immensely from it. Now he wants to destroy it, taking an axe to the goose that laid the golden egg.
Meanwhile, just for the hell of it, he is undermining his country's fiscal standing to such an extent that it threatens the stability of the American dollar and puts the whole world's financial system at risk. His Big Beautiful Bill will add trillions to the U.S. debt.
Then there is the little matter of the future of democracy. America's standing as the citadel of freedom is eroding every day that this man is in office. He refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election and was found to have helped foment a violent rebellion. He is going after judges that question him and journalists that scrutinize him and civil servants that simply annoy him (like that job-stats official). He is wielding the already-immense executive power of the presidency with the abandon of a tinpot dictator. He is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself.
I hate to paint such a dark picture. I am a lifelong admirer of the United States, which for its failings has done far more good than ill. Its sheer dynamism still astonishes, even in the Trump era.
Despite all the damage he has done, much is going right in the world. As I wrote earlier this year, global prosperity, health and education have advanced by huge leaps in the past few decades – a fact we often forget amid all the turmoil. There is no reason they should not continue to advance. We know the formula: science, trade, democracy, sound finances.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is an enemy of all of them. I still think the U.S. will right itself somehow, but no one should underestimate the havoc he can cause in the meantime.
I didn't see what was coming when I sat in that New York bar in 2016. Perhaps none of us did. Now we know. We should brace ourselves and, in every way possible, resist.
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