To the best of my ability I write about my experience of the Universe Past, Present and Future
Thursday, April 27, 2017
100 days: America in a time of Trump: BBC
Though ordinarily I'm not that interested in the whole U.S. being psychoanalyzed in this direction, if you are a big country (300 million or more people) maybe it comes with the territory. I think Trump was primarily elected by people who either barely finished high school or didn't finish high school at all. This kind of person would be expected to have a more depressing view of life than those who went to college.
And then you are going to have a much more optimistic viewpoint from people who have a broader world view, have been to college and have traveled the world. This would be inevitable. However, it is also true that 70% of the U.S. population never even gets a passport and often never even leaves the state they live in so this point of view would also necessarily be stilted from lack of experience of anything away from their homes. So, unfortunately, in exposes of other nations like this they are focusing on the more dysfunctional aspects of American Society.
But, it might be important to know what the world thinks of us because then you aren't at least hiding your head in the sand like many people worldwide do.
It's sort of like the song "Yankee Doodle" was written by the English way back when to demonstrate just how "Backwoods" Americans were. However, American humor being what it is an was we just used this song to march into battle against the British with.
So, right away, you see there is quite a difference between Britishers and the U.S. One way to put this would be to say we are two peoples separated by a common language.
To show you how this is true when I was young the accents in the South were much more thick than now and often I couldn't understand what people were saying from places like Alabama or even Georgia in the 1950s because they spoke so differently if they were from out in the country than people where I lived in California or Washington State.
Accents have faded out mostly because of television now so most people sport often some variation of a California accent because that was the one used on TV. So, Accents are much less profound now than when I grew up in the 1950s when most people hadn't even bought a TV yet.
Make America
Great Again not only became a mission statement but a nostalgic...the
homeland was more homogenised and the world was less globalised. The
first 100days of ...
These are external links and will open in a new window
Presidential elections are always something of a national Rorschach test.
The
reaction to candidates, like the perception of inkblots, helps to
divulge the nation's character, underlying disorders and emotional
condition. Donald Trump's unexpected victory showed that America had a
split personality.
It also revealed that, among his 62 million
supporters, rage and fear were over-riding emotions. Make America Great
Again not only became a mission statement but a nostalgic catch-all. For
many of his white working class supporters, it implied a return to an
era when the homeland was more homogenised and the world was less
globalised.
The first 100 days of an administration, though in
many ways a bogus measure, can also be diagnostic. They can reveal the
character of a presidency and set the tone.
Also they are
indicative of the health of US democracy: the functioning of its
institutions, executive, legislative and judicial; the workability of
the US constitution and the dispersion of political, economic and
cultural power.
Inauguration day was a celebration for some, a convulsion for others. What is the state of the nation now?
The Character of the Presidency
What
has become clear since Donald Trump delivered his inaugural address is
that he has changed the presidency more than the presidency has changed
him.
The vocabulary of President Trump, if not all his policies,
is much the same as that of candidate Trump. To the White House he has
brought the same aggression and plain-speaking that characterised his
insurgent campaign.
Social media remains his favoured conduit
with the American people. Twitter is to Trump what television was to JFK
and radio was to FDR. But it is his means of expression, more than the
utilisation of a new medium, that marks such a break from the past. Image copyrightGetty ImagesAt his inaugural ball he vowed to keep tweeting. By
choosing Frank Sinatra's "My Way" for his first dance, he also gave us a
musical clue as to how he would govern. Trump would be Trump. The
anti-politician had morphed into the anti-president.
His so-far
unsubstantiated allegation that Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of
Trump Tower - "Bad (or sick) guy!" he tweeted - emphasised how he does
not feel bound by presidential protocols or conventions. Here he
disdained the longstanding tradition that incumbent presidents avoid
savage attacks on their predecessors.
From his ongoing refusal to
release his tax returns to his stonewalling of requests to disclose
visitor logs at the White House, he has indicated normal rules do not
apply to him.
All this continues to horrify his critics but not
most of his supporters. They voted for unorthodoxy, and seem to have
granted him dispensation to flout norms so long as he delivers results.
And yet, he has received highest marks when he is at his most conventionally presidential.
His
speech to the joint session of Congress, which was similar in language
and tone to normal State of the Union addresses, was probably the
highpoint of his first 100 days. It got far better reviews than his
inaugural, both from Republicans and some Democrats.
His decision
to strike Syria also trod the path of orthodoxy. Cool-headed and
cogent, his late-night statement explaining his decision to strike was
also standard presidential fare. Even some of his detractors remarked
how in these two moments he truly assumed the mantles of president and
commander-in-chief.
Lauded by many Democrats who wished Obama had
enforced his red line on chemical weapons, the strike on Syria angered
some hardline loyalists.
Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Michael
Cernovich, a self-styled "American nationalist", were dismayed that
pictures of dying children moved him so easily and that he acted like a
neo-conservative rather than a neo-isolationist. Unsurprisingly perhaps,
conformism infuriates the alt-right.
Media captionThe divided newlyweds split over Trump's performanceFlip-flops on Syria, Chinese currency manipulation and Nato
have made Trump's foreign policy appear erratic and incoherent. The
confusion over whether or not his administration continues to support a
two-state solution in the Middle East displayed a lack of clarity that
perplexed foreign diplomats.
His congratulations to the Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan following a referendum granting him more
authoritarian powers was markedly different from the cautious reaction
of European leaders. Ahead of the French presidential election, Trump
said of Marine Le Pen "she's the strongest on borders and she's the
strongest on what's been going on in France".
His words, which
came close to an endorsement, prompted this shocked response from former
Bush speechwriter David Frum: "Collect jaw from floor, reinsert in
head."
Had one of his predecessors implied support for a
far-right candidate, the political storm would have lasted days, and
possibly overshadowed their entire presidency. But the response to
Trump's remarks was more like a passing shower. It spoke of how quickly
the abnormal has become quotidian under this presidency.
There's
an argument to be made that Trump is at his most successful in foreign
affairs when he's at his most unpredictable for the simple reason that
is when he's most feared. The Assad regime will surely hesitate before
ordering another chemical strike.
Nato's Secretary General Jens
Stoltenberg said he's already seeing the effect of Trump's focus on
financial burden-sharing within the military alliance. The American aid
worker Aya Hijazi was released after three years in detention only when
Trump raised her case with President Sisi.
At the United Nations,
there's a new focus on reform, especially of peacekeeping operations.
This is partly because there is a new reformist Secretary General,
Antonio Guterres, but mainly because of the fear that the US, by far the
organisation's biggest donor, could pull funding. Trump has brought a
fear factor to the American presidency often absent during the Obama
years.
Richard Nixon labelled this kind of strategic unpredictability the
"Madman Theory," and saw it as an essential diplomatic tool. Communist
bloc leaders, the theory went, would not provoke America because of the
unpredictability of the president's response. It might be crazed.
Nuclear even.
But the fact that Nixon used this approach in
Vietnam shows its shortcomings. In the present context, it's a risky
approach to apply to North Korea, but the Trump administration clearly
believes "the era of strategic patience" towards Kim Jong-un is over,
and that sabre rattling will jolt the Beijing into pressuring Pyongyang.
The next 100 days, presumably, will tell.
Overall, there's a
"good cop bad cop" dynamic to the Trump administration's diplomacy.
Mainstream foreign policy types such as Defence Secretary James Mattis
and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson adopt the more conventional
approach. Trump lends menace, often through his tweets.
Sometimes
the very administration seems to have a split personality. Yet the
first 100 days have probably yielded more results in the foreign realm
than the domestic.
Noticeable in these first 100 days has been the
corporatisation of the presidency. There's a chairman-of-the-board feel
to his daily routine, with its meetings and photo opportunities that
often place him in a leather-backed chair in the presidential boardroom -
the West Wing basically has two, the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet
Room - surrounded by corporate chiefs. His cabinet is also packed with
fellow billionaires and multi-millionaires.
This raises the
question of whether a super-rich president at the head of a super-rich
cabinet can remain a working class hero in the all-important Rust Belt.
After spending time last week in the Ohio River Valley, which is dotted
with derelict steelworks, what struck me was how few of his supporters
cared. "No one works for a poor man," said one Trump devotee. Image copyrightWhite House/BBCImage caption
Some of the Trump Cabinet and his senior advisers watch the US air strike on Syria
There's a nagging sense one business that's undoubtedly seen an uptick is Trump Inc.
Potential
conflicts of interests abound, and it is hard sometimes to
differentiate where the presidency ends and the family business begins.
There's
been criticism that Trump spends so much time at resorts owned by the
Trump Organization. The mixing of business with the presidency could yet
be his undoing .
An aim of staffing the administration with so
many executives was to vest government with corporate know-how and
efficiency. But this presidential start-up has been surprisingly
accident-prone, critics would say incompetent.
Whether with big-ticket items such as the original travel ban or
fairly trivial matters, like misspelling Theresa May's name in a White
House memo handed to reporters, it has often shown itself to be
slapdash.
Turf battles between hardline figures like Steve Bannon
and moderates like Jared Kushner also belie Trump's boast that it is a
"fine-tuned machine". David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New
York Times, has labelled it "a golden age of malfunction".
When a
new administration fumbles what should have been a pro-forma
presidential statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day you sense there
is a problem. When the White House spokesman claims that Hitler did not
use chemical weapons against his own people, it suggests it has lost
the historical plot.
These last examples showed not only a disregard for detail but also
an apparent disdain for truth. The first 100 days has produced a litany
of falsehoods. A scorecard compiled by the website Politifact found that of Trump's statements 69% were either mostly false, false or "pants on fire".
Alternative
facts: Kellyanne Conway was lampooned when she first used this
Orwellian-sounding phrase, but it perfectly captured the twilight zone
of truth often found at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Under Donald Trump,
the White House is no longer a reliable source.
Victories are
often lost in the swirl of controversy. Illegal crossings over the
southern border have fallen sharply, by 40% during the first month of
Trump's presidency, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
That's
the steepest decline since 2009. With immigration arrests up by almost a
third in the first month, there's a feeling among his supporters that
he is delivering on his pledge to protect America's border, even if
construction has not yet started on his famed wall.
Trump would argue he has already made the homeland safer. A by-product of Trump's troubled
presidential launch has been to burnish the reputations of his
predecessors. For Democrats, the idolatry of Barack Obama gathers pace.
George Herbert Walker Bush, recently ailing in hospital, has become even
more of a revered national elder.
His son, George W, the
one-time Toxic Texan, has been subject to some speedy historical
revisionism. Not only has his newly published collection of portraits of
wounded warriors won acclaim, as a work of the hand and the heart. His
reported remarks at Trump's inauguration - "That was some weird sh**" -
have come close to making him a folk hero of the left.
Might
Trump one day be subject to this kind of reassessment? The hostile
commentary on him is similar to the scorn heaped on Ronald Reagan. Yet
the movie star president is now widely seen as the leader who, by
winning the Cold War, ended America's long national nightmare after
Vietnam and Watergate.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was pilloried as a
racist vulgarian, but nonetheless enacted transformative legislation
such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, dismantling segregation, and
launching Medicare. Image copyrightReutersImage caption
Remember this guy?
History remembers John F Kennedy's early presidency
for the elegance of his inaugural address and the photogenic beauty of
his New Frontier, but his first months in office were full of missteps.
They
included the Bay of Pigs, a string of congressional setbacks and a
disastrous summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, which emboldened the
Soviet leader to build the Berlin Wall. While Trump cannot yet boast
much of a record of accomplishment in these first 100 days, there are
still 1361 to go.
Checks and Balances
A
"civics lesson from hell" was how the Harvard academic Louis Menand
described the contested aftermath of the 2000 presidential election,
with its hanging chads, thwarted recounts and litigation. Not since the
Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Bush versus Gore has the US
constitution faced such a stress test.
Now, as then, we have
learned where power in America truly lies, and how the checks and
balances hard-wired into the US system operate in practice.
Donald
Trump's executive power has continually been constrained. After signing
that early executive order banning entrants from seven mainly-Muslim
countries, the courts intervened to block him.
It was an early
constitutional test. But although Trump railed against the "so-called
judges" who thwarted him, using unusually vehement language, his
administration abided by the court's decision and kept within the law.
With the checks and balances working as the founding fathers intended, a
constitutional crisis was averted.
With Trumpcare, it wasn't the
courts that blocked Trump but Congress. As he sought to repeal and
replace Obamacare, Trump could not even secure a simple majority in a
House of Representatives under Republican control. Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Trump's promise to repeal Obamacare was stymied - by fellow Republicans
Had his healthcare proposals cleared that hurdle in
the lower house, parts of the reform package would have run into trouble
in the Senate. There the Republicans also enjoy a majority but not one
big enough to enact bills into law without bipartisan support. With the
legislative branch restraining the executive branch, again the
constitution worked as intended.
The Republican leadership,
frustrated by these checks, successfully removed one of them: the use of
the filibuster in blocking nominees to America's highest court - in
this instance, Trump's nominee Neil Gorsuch.
This did not involve
an amendment to the constitution, rather a revision of Senate rules,
but it was nonetheless momentous. This nuclear option, as it is called,
delivered a clear win for the president: the elevation of Judge Gorsuch
to the bench. However, the filibuster remains intact to block his
legislative agenda, and Democrats will use it to thwart Trump.
In
recent years, as Washington has become more ungovernable, there's been a
growing literature about the inoperability of the constitution, and how
its checks and balances have acted more like spanners in the works.
Just
as Republicans, the great practitioners of the politics of No, used the
constitution to stymie Barack Obama, Democrats are relying upon it to
impede Donald Trump. For them, the constitution must now seem timeless
and timely. A number of Democrats have told me that the genius of the
Founding Fathers was to anticipate this kind of presidency.
In
these first 100 days, we have been reminded of the power of states and
municipalities. We have seen an inversion of the doctrine of states'
rights. For decades, states' rights was the battle-cry of white
supremacists determined to uphold segregation in defiance of federal
court orders demanding integration. Now progressive states are using
this principle.
Some of the biggest cities in the country,
including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC, are
wilfully obstructing Trump's immigration crackdown. Thus, sanctuary
cities have become to the progressive left what segregationist citadels
were to the racist right, emblematic battlefields in a tug of war
between local government and the federal government.
Similar battle-lines have been marked out over climate change.
Protest
power has also emerged as a significant force, as something akin to a
national passion play has unfolded on the streets. The sea of pink pussy
hats at the massive woman's marches on the first weekend of the
presidency vividly highlighted a new sense of personal political
empowerment: people ready to take matters into their own hands.
The
speed at which demonstrators congregated at US airports in the
immediate aftermath of the ban surely had an emboldening effect on the
state attorneys general who successfully challenged it in the courts. Image copyrightGetty ImagesThe death certificate of Trumpcare may have been
signed in the House of Representatives, but mortal wounds were inflicted
in those angry town meetings, which alarmed Republican lawmakers. Maybe
one of the reasons President Donald Trump has not yet returned to Trump
Tower in Manhattan is the fear of massive demonstrations in the city of
his birth.
For the past eight years, popular anger was on the
right of US politics. Now it is on the left. The pertinent political
question over the coming years will be to what extent the Democratic
Party can harness this street agitation.
Will there be a
Tea-Party-style mobilisation of progressives that translates into real
political power? Or are opponents of Donald Trump pinning more faith in
pressure groups than the Democratic Party?
The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has witnessed a
fundraising bonanza. The ACLU raked in $24m (£18.7m) in online
donations the weekend after the first travel ban, six times the amount
it normally raises in a year.
Constrained by Congress, the
courts and his own party, so far this has not been an imperial
presidency, the phrase coined by the historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr
to describe the Nixon White House, which was accused, even before the
Watergate break-in, of pushing constitutional bounds.
Rather it
has been an inhibited presidency, in which Donald Trump has been made
all too aware of the limits of his executive power.
Economy, Business and Culture
Donald
Trump's promise to Make America Great Again was primarily an economic
pledge, and there were early signs of a Trump Bump on Wall Street and
Main Street.
Just three trading days after the new president took
the oath of office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average broke through the
20,000 mark for the first time in its history. Investors expected him to
slash corporate taxes and set fire to business regulations. Not since
2000, a report suggested last month, has consumer confidence been so
buoyant.
This rosy soft data has not been matched by hard economic
data. The US economy added just 98,000 jobs in March, almost half of
what some economists expected. Industrial production and housing starts
were lower than expected.
Retail sales, which should have risen
with consumer confidence, actually fell by 0.2% in March, their first
decline in over a year. The markets, having watched the healthcare
debacle, are no longer so confident Trump can deliver lower corporate
tax rates and a $1tn infrastructure spend. Barron's, the weekly
financial newspaper, recently opined: "Trump bump, we hardly knew ye."
As for the impact of Trump's "Buy American, Hire American" doctrine,
it is too early to judge. Industry groups have voiced concerns it will
raise costs, making it prohibitively expensive to build the new bridges
and roads. The tech sector is worried Hire American policies will block
or discourage high-skilled immigrants. The tourism industry is reporting
a "Trump Slump," because of the off-putting effect of the travel ban
and its author.
After signalling his willingness to name and shame
corporations accused of exporting US jobs abroad or stiffing the
federal government, there's evidence it has had a chastening effect.
Presumably, no senior executive of a publicly traded company wants to
reach for their smartphone in the morning to find their name on his
Twitter feed, if only because of the effect it can have on the share
price.
Boeing, a company that Trump shamed publicly during the
transition, says it's made progress with the administration over
bringing down the costs of the replacement for Air Force One. The Trump
administration also claims to have created jobs by pressuring major
corporations to invest in new American plants.
Most of these expansion plans were in place, however, before Barack Obama left office.
That's
true of Ford's Michigan investment, ExxonMobil's Gulf Coast expansion,
and Intel's Arizona plant, all of which were touted by the
administration as totems of Trumpism.
Arguably, the main effect of his self-congratulatory tweets about saving US jobs has been political rather than economic.
It
has persuaded blue-collars voters that this billionaire populist is
battling on their behalf. As for his tweets lambasting business? They've
created a love/fear relationship with the corporate sector, which
welcomes his deregulation and proposed tax cuts but not necessarily his
efforts to rollback globalisation. Image copyrightGetty ImagesOne sector that has undoubtedly benefited from a
Trump bump is the media. The New York Times and Washington Post have
seen subscriptions soar. CNN, a network of which obituaries were being
written only a few years ago, is enjoying a ratings windfall. Twitter,
whose once stagnant user numbers have risen, is finally winning again.
Despite
high-profile exits, Fox News remains the most influential news channel
in America, if only because its breakfast show Fox and Friends is what
Trump watches in the morning.
Overall, the response of the US
journalistic community to Trump's presidency has been to become more
adversarial. Reporters like Jim Acosta, anchors like Jake Tapper, and
even mild-mannered Wolf Blitzer have adopted a more hard-edged approach.
The New York Times has replaced bland headlines with more judgmental
wording.
A headline three days into his presidency signalled its
new approach: "Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With
Lawmakers."
Elsewhere, cultural lines are being blurred, an
inevitable response perhaps to a president who turned politics in a new
reality show genre. Comedians, faced with the dilemma of satirising a
self-satirising White House, have adopted a more journalistic persona.
John Oliver and Samantha Bee mix gags with serious reportage, much of it
directed against Trump.
Stephen Colbert, who struggled at first as David Letterman's
successor after shedding his mock right-wing persona, may overtake
apolitical Jimmy Fallon in the late-night ratings.
The mimicry of
Alec Baldwin and the casting of Melissa McCarthy as Sean "Spicey"
Spicer has once again made SNL appointment viewing.
In the arts,
the expectation is that Trump will produce a burst of creativity, in
line with the "Take your broken heart, make it into art" plea from Meryl
Streep at this year's Golden Globes. But much of that art, whether
paintings, screenplays or novels, may still be unfinished.
Media captionPresident Trump joked about the special relationship with the UK after the BBC's political editor's questionJust as we await the great Trump-era movie - a Doctor
Strangelove, The Deer Hunter or Wall Street - there's not yet been a
great Trump-inspired novel. For now, literary classics are filling the
void. George Orwell's 1984, with an assist from Kellyanne Conway's
"alternative facts", rose to the top of bestseller lists.
Philip
Roth's The Plot Against America, which imagines as president Charles
Lindbergh, the aviator who became the spokesman of the America First
Committee in the early years of World War II, has also enjoyed a
revival. Hulu is streaming a dramatisation of Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a totalitarian America.
On
Broadway, a stage adaptation of 1984 is in the works. Then there has
been the unexpected success of Come From Away, a feel good 9/11 musical
of all things, which tells the story of the nearly 7,000 airline
passengers stranded in Gander, Newfoundland, in the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks.
Foot-tapping and tear-jerking, the show is
all about making outsiders feel at home. Rather pointedly, the Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took Ivanka Trump to see it.
Next
month unveils the fifth season of House of Cards, but in the wake of
accusations of Russian meddling, its plotlines, once considered so
outlandish, now seem more run-of-the-mill, a case perhaps of life
overtaking art.
Two Americas
To
journey from the major coastal cities into the American heartland feels
right now like travelling between different countries. There has long
been two Americas, one that favours pick-up trucks over Prius hybrids,
Walmart over Whole Foods, Duck Dynasty over This American Life. This age
of Trump, as well as accentuating those divisions, has brought with it
new identifying markers.
Do you wear a scarlet Make America Great
Again baseball cap or a pink woollen hat? Would you buy an Ivanka Trump
dress? Do you agree with Alex Jones, the host of the far-right
Infowars, or Van Jones, CNN's leading pundit? Or, more simply, do you
have faith in the president? Increasingly, how you respond to Trump
determines which America you inhabit.
Barack Obama entered office
vowing to bring together red and blue state America, though he was a
deeply polarising figure who singularly failed in that endeavour. Donald
Trump has not tried particularly hard to be a unifying figure.
His
travel largely has been to states that voted for him. Many of his
appearances outside the White House and Mar-a-Lago have essentially been
campaign rallies. His Attorney General Jeff Sessions, angry that a
judge had challenged the latest travel ban, even referred to Hawaii,
which achieved statehood in 1959, as "an island in the Pacific".
My
own travels around the country, mainly into the Bible and Rust Belt,
suggest he remains strong in the regions that sent him to the White
House. Last week on the Ohio River Valley, businessmen told me how the
Trump Bump is for real. They see it on their balance sheets, with the
relaxation of Environmental Protection Agency rules over coal often
cited as the reason for the turnaround.
Media captionTrump's presidency a big hit in Rust BeltMany Rust Belt voters continue to adore Trump because
liberals hate him so. They voted for the billionaire partly to punch
sneering bicoastal liberals in the nose. They are enjoying the sight of
elite blood being shed in such quantities.
Because of the shadow
cast by the Russian allegations, these first 100 days have sometimes
felt like the final days of an ailing administration. Trump is routinely
cast as a modern-day Richard Nixon. Yet while it is difficult sometimes
to see how this administration can remain viable in its present form,
it is harder to imagine how it would be brought to a premature end.
Barring
some catastrophic revelation emerging from the FBI's investigation into
Team Trump's alleged links with the Kremlin or some massive financial
scandal, the Republican leadership is unlikely to move against him. In
the unlikely event that it launched impeachment proceedings, here the
constitution is his friend.
It is hard to dislodge an incumbent president.
The
Founding Fathers, who came up with a governing model that has
constrained Trump, also came up with an electoral model, the Electoral
College, which has already helped him and may do so again. That will be
true if the Rust Belt remains a stronghold.
My overwhelming sense,
based on the popular vote in November and opinion polls since, is that
more Americans are anti-Trump than pro.
But my sense also is that
many blue-collar battlers remain fiercely loyal. So to write him off
would be to repeat the same analytical mistake commentators have made
since he first announced for the presidency, that of underestimation.
For
while Democrats regard their new president as a national embarrassment,
many of his supporters continue to view him as a potential national
saviour.
One hundred days into a presidency the like of which this country has never seen before, the state of the union is disunion.
No comments:
Post a Comment