Trump’s ‘golden age’ spirals into a pit of fool’s gold

Are you being dazzled yet by America’s new “golden age”? Are you feeling the sultry glow from what Donald Trump promised in his inaugural address would be sunlight “pouring over the entire world”? Certainly the global vibe shift is being writ large in giant Trumpian signage. Historically speaking, the Trump restoration feels every bit as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then we were talking about the end of history, the triumph of liberal democracy. Now we are talking about the end of America as we know it, with US democracy under threat.

Less than three weeks in, Trump already stands accused of violating and disregarding a swath of laws. On his first day in office, he even wielded his Sharpie pen in an attempt to unilaterally rewrite the US Constitution. Now he is rewriting the rules of US engagement around the world, and even talking of planting the Stars and Stripes in some of its most bloodily contested territory. Move over Uncle Sam, “the Donald” is back in town.

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Never before in American history has an incoming president sought to make such immediate and dramatic change. Rarely, if ever, has a president been so unperturbed by the global response to his words and actions. “Shocking but unsurprising” was a formulation I found myself regurgitating in covering Trump 1.0. “SHOCKING AND SURPRISING” looks like becoming the journalistic mantra for Trump 2.0, now that he is in “all caps” mode.

Even for a president who has already thought aloud about annexing Greenland and making Canada America’s 51st state, his statement this week that the “US will take over the Gaza Strip” was a geopolitical gobsmacker. “We’ll own it,” he added, talking as if eyeing a plot of Upper East Side real estate with views of Central Park, pontificating as if he were the head of the Trump Organisation rather than the Trump administration. “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal ... the Riviera of the Middle East.”

This will not happen – the White House has already tried to soften his proposals, by ruling out US military boots on the ground – which begs the question of whether his words should receive such wall-to-wall coverage. But this hypothetical Gaza land-grab, and the displacement of Palestinians it implied, tells us so much about Trump’s second term.

First, his flagrant disregard for international law. “It is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing,” said the often taciturn UN Secretary-General António Guterres, words which his spokesman later pointed out were his response to Trump’s proposals.

Second, it shows contempt for the delicacy of diplomacy. In the present context, Trump’s musings were particularly incendiary because they immediately risked blowing up the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas which he, along with the Biden administration, helped orchestrate.

Third, it illustrates how his “America First” foreign policy is essentially an “all-bets-are-off” doctrine. Nothing is sacred. Nothing can be taken for granted. AUKUS-fixated Australia, and other close allies, take note.

Here, Trump’s bloody-minded approach reminds me of the terrace chant of fans of Britain’s most unfashionable soccer club, Millwall FC: “Nobody likes us, we don’t care.” International opprobrium seems only to embolden him. It also offers proof to MAGA supporters, if any were still needed, that he is prepared to say the unsayable, which has always been his selling point. Trump 2.0 is Trump unleashed.

The furore over Gaza distracted from what is arguably the more meaningful international story this week: the life-and-death repercussions of the decision by the indispensable nation to halt dispensing aid. “Stop work” orders at USAID, the world’s single largest donor, have affected everything from programs to develop vaccines against malaria and mine clearance in Sudan and Mali to the provision of prosthetic limbs for soldiers maimed in the Ukraine war. “This ‘stop work’ order is cruel and deadly,” Asia Russell of Health GAP, which works on HIV treatment, told Politico. “It will kill people.”

USAID was established in the early 1960s by president John F. Kennedy, partly to counter the influence of Russia and China at the height of the Cold War. Since then, a case could be persuasively made that it has been the most effective instrument of US soft power, especially in Africa, Asia and South America. Yet writing on his social media platform, X, this week, Elon Musk trashed its hard-earned global reputation.

“USAID is a criminal organisation,” Musk wrote, after his minions at the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took control of the agency’s payment and personnel files. “Time for it to die.” Here was the world’s richest man speaking on behalf of the world’s richest nation denying humanitarian assistance to the world’s poorest people. For China, this is a windfall.

Closer to home, Musk is revelling in his new role as the demolitionist-in-chief at the sinister-sounding DOGE. With office space in the West Wing, and the beds of his lieutenants set up in various government departments so they can carry on working around the clock, he is reportedly in the “demon mode” described by biographer Walter Isaacson.

Musk’s squadron of 20-something Silicon Valley staffers will have no difficulty chopping billions of dollars from Washington’s notoriously flabby budgets. But the manner of his war on waste – which doubles as a war on “woke” – raises serious legal and ethical concerns. Vast data banks of sensitive financial information and personnel records are being accessed. Bureaucrats who stand in his way are being purged. And all this is happening beyond the gaze of normal congressional oversight.

Even if the US president were not a convicted felon, the question would be asked: how much of this is legal? His declaration that the 14th Amendment no longer guaranteed citizenship to those born on American soil flagrantly exceeded his presidential powers, and was halted by a federal court.

His firing of inspectors-general, the watchdogs who look for illegality in government departments, violates a law that requires presidents to give Congress 30 days’ notice before removing them. The foreign aid freeze raises legal questions about a president’s power to block funding already approved by Congress. Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress, not the president, “power of the purse”.

Eventually, the Supreme Court, the country’s constitutional referee, will likely adjudicate. But even if its 6-3 conservative majority makes the court more Trump-friendly, it does not automatically make it a Trumpian rubber stamp. Were it to rule against Trump, would the president abide by its decision? And, if not, who would force him to comply? Ordinarily, the White House backs down when the country’s highest court rules against it, but it hardly requires a great leap of imagination to foresee Trump, the liberator of the January 6 “hostages” and the instigator of their insurrection, standing in defiance. In ensuring compliance with its rulings, the Supreme Court has limited powers, and the Justice Department is in Trump’s pocket.

Congress has the authority to impeach presidents and remove them from office. But impeachment will not happen while the Republicans command a majority in the House of Representatives. Besides, none of the four Senate presidential impeachment trials in US history – two involving Trump – ended in the removal of the president because the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to convict.

A constitutional crisis could be in the offing, and that would highlight the flaws in the Constitution. The founding fathers did an inadequate job of defining the powers of the presidency, partly because they viewed George Washington, who they knew would fill the role, as a one-man check and balance. They did not write him a completely blank cheque, and additional limits have been placed on the executive branch in the two centuries since. To this day, however, the country’s rule book contains gaps and loopholes, the extent of which we are about to discover in what could become a civics lesson from hell.

All of the above comes with the usual proviso: this is what America voted for. Fox News is in paroxysms of joy. Authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 must be doing cartwheels. What’s more, Trump is hardly the first president to push his executive powers to the limit and beyond. In violating the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln was a serial offender, but is now looked upon as a saint. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was pilloried for acting like an American dictator, yet won re-election three times. Trump is already conducting an imperious presidency with the most unlikely of imperial ambitions.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.