Donald Trump must be having cramps in his right wrist. Signing so many executive orders one after another within just a few hours has to be hard for someone his age.
Here’s a man who rolls up his sleeves and gets down to business with gusto, even though he’s only working from home, you know, the one in Pennsylvania Avenue. Moreover, he gets most things right.
If I succumbed to delusions of grandeur and imagined myself in Trump’s shoes, I’d happily sign my name to most of his edicts. Whether or not he’ll manage to get all of them through Congress and the courts remains to be seen, but the intent is clear and it’s mostly laudable.
One thing that isn’t is changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, as a way of “reasserting America’s greatness”. This is simply playing to the populist galleries by singing a tune that makes them get up and salute. In fact, rather than reasserting greatness, this sort of thing screams insecurity.
Taking such liberties with geography is just venting churlish pique at Mexico, which does little to stem the flow of huddled masses across the border. In that case, why stop there? Why not rebaptise the Rio Grande as the Big River or, better still, the Wetback Stream?
While at it, perhaps all those Spanish-sounding locations ought to be renamed too. San Francisco, for example, could become St Donald, Los Angeles Ivanka City and San Antonio Barronburg. This is just silly, isn’t it?
Some of Trump’s ideas are contradictory to the point of being self-refuting. Even though he hasn’t yet signed any edicts featuring what he calls his “favourite word in the dictionary”, tariffs, the idea hasn’t gone away.
Yet if he goes through with it, Trump will find it hard to keep his promise of lowering the cost of living. Quite the opposite, things will cost more, as a result of both the higher cost of imports and an increase in inflation. At the same time, his pet idea of kicking illegals out and not letting even legals in is bound to create short-term labour shortages, pushing prices up even higher.
I also have doubts about Trump’s foreign policy, described by his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, as “America First”. As a barely post-pubescent person (she is 27), Miss Levitt may not be aware of the historic associations, but they aren’t necessarily positive.
The term was first used by the America First Committee (AFC), a group of cross-party isolationists that existed from September, 1940, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour just over a year later. Their principal idea was that America had no business taking sides in the on-going war, what with the ocean making her immune to invasion.
If America’s neutrality meant Britain’s defeat and Nazi domination of Europe, America Firsters had no problems with that. A few of those chaps didn’t have a problem with fascism either, while having a big one with Jews.
Trump himself made a reference to the ocean in a similar current context, which probably means he is familiar and sympathetic with AFC mentality, if not its nastier edge. In that case, he should also know that, had the AFC had its way, America wouldn’t have emerged as the dominant world power after the war, and neither would we have had several decades of relative peace.
So far Trump has announced he is pausing foreign aid until a thorough review of it, which is a sound idea in general. In particular, however, I wonder whether supplies to the Ukraine fall under the rubric of foreign aid or else that of stopping evil in its tracks. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.
With these reservations out of the way, I have to applaud Trump’s other executive orders, each taking a wrecking ball to this or that pillar of New Age wokery: climate, DEI, gender madness, globalism.
I’m not convinced he can defeat all those enemies of sanity, but at least he gets top marks for trying. For example, Trump has stated that the US will only recognise “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality”. That’s Genesis truth against genital lies, and godspeed to the President.
Trump has also put paid to all DEI programmes within the federal government, calling them “radical and wasteful”. That description is unnecessarily moderate, which is out of character. Such programmes are actively and deliberately subversive, driven by hatred of our civilisation, its history and tradition.
Trump knows this, but there are things even he can’t say in public. I just hope a legal mechanism may be found for extending such measures to the private sector, though I’m not sure presidential power packs that much punch.
In any case, I hope our own lot are taking notes, although I suspect they aren’t. Wokery has seeped into their viscera and they have no minds capable of combatting its toxic effects.
The same hope goes for Trump’s climate policies that one wishes our own government adopted. Trump has again pulled the US out of the Paris Accords, leaving bogus concerns for ‘our planet’ to the EU and, alas, HMG.
Realising that it’s not ‘our planet’ that’s in trouble, but its inhabitants reeling under the blows of woke ideologies, Trump has also put an end to Biden’s pet project, the Green New Deal. If ‘tariffs’ takes pride of place in Trump’s lexicon, ‘net zero’ doesn’t figure in it at all and, for once, I have no quibble with such a limited vocabulary.
No more leasing of wind farms, Trump has ruled, and say good-bye to the “electric vehicle mandate”. Are you listening, Sir Keir? No, you are too busy beggaring Britain for the sake of a stupid ideology, which is to say an ideology.
Immigration is another one of Trump’s bugbears, and he is right to be concerned about what he calls, somewhat excessively, “America’s sovereignty under attack”. If he can stop the swarms of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border, more power to his elbow. I just hope Trump doesn’t go too far, as he is prone to do, and stops legal immigration too, while he is at it.
As I’ve mentioned before, this may create severe labour shortages, especially in agriculture and construction. As a former Texas resident, I can testify to the vital importance of Mexican migration to the economy of the border states. But Trump is right: the perennial problem of illegal immigration must be solved at last. Best of luck to him.
Another good idea of his may run headlong into legal challenges. This concerns birthright citizenship, with any child born on US territory automatically becoming a citizen regardless of the parents’ immigration status. Trump has ordered the denial of citizenship to children born to migrants who are in the US illegally or temporarily.
I like this, although I can foresee a slippery-slope argument against it. Trump’s idea bears a direct relevance to our own situation, what with some native-born British Muslims prevented from re-entering the country after a stint in Middle Eastern terrorism.
Some of Trump’s closest confidants, namely Elon Musk, demanded in a rather peremptory tone that HMG abandon that practice. Perhaps Donald should put a quiet word into Elon’s shell-like, to the effect that some people may not be morally entitled to a citizenship even if born in the country.
The legal problem may arise from constitutional pedants invoking the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which says that: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Not being an expert in constitutional law, I don’t know if that Amendment has a loophole wide enough to repeal birthright citizenship. But on general principle, I find Trump’s idea defensible morally and intellectually, if perhaps not legally.
All in all, Trump’s first day in office is interesting, even invigorating. I hate being bored, and usual humdrum politics are boring in the extreme. That’s not a charge that can be levelled against the President, and I hope some Hollywood diva will croon her appreciation.
P.S. In his inaugural speech, Trump listed the splitting of the atom among America’s great achievements. In fact, this was done by Sir Ernest Rutherford at Victoria University in Manchester. I know this may come as a surprise to the President, but America can’t take credit for everything good in the world.
Encouraging to see that you appreciate the correct attribution of scientific credit.