Trump moves quickly, and the world holds its breath

When Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States on Tuesday (AEDT), he declared, “The golden age of America begins right now.”

We shall see. Trump took charge of the Oval Office the first time around, in 2017, on the back of the motto that cannot be measured: Make America Great Again. He then lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Now he has returned after 77 million people voted for him. It cannot be denied that victory gives him the green light to govern as he said he would during the campaign. After all, he won.

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg (left), Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk at the inauguration.Credit: AP

Images from his inauguration appear like a gathering of a plutocracy. There were some of the masters of the financial universe, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (worth $US212 billion, or $A340 billion), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($240 billion), Tesla’s Elon Musk ($434 billion) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai ($1.3 billion), all in a row. They took pride of place, ahead of members of Trump’s own cabinet.

This approach should not come as a surprise. Trump’s America First raison d’etre is, by definition, a philosophy of superiority and projecting success. To effect that philosophy, the US must put its interests above all other nations.

His stance on the environment is reckless vandalism. He took the US out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017 (only for Biden to reverse the decision) and now he will take the nation out of it again. He has declared a “national energy emergency” which can only be solved by boosting oil and gas production and throttling investment in a renewable energy future.

Piles of executive orders on Donald Trump’s Oval Office desk.Credit: Bloomberg

Another focus is on America’s border with Mexico. Mass deportations are to begin as soon as possible. Trump has also indicated he will use the threat of tariffs to bring countries such as Canada and China into line. What most likely will happen is the price of goods will rise.

It is more than ironic, and somewhat alarming, that Trump, a convicted felon, has issued pardons to those 1600 found guilty over the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Pardons are traditionally one of the final acts of an outgoing president. Biden has been liberal in his use of them, including the unusual act of granting pre-emptive ones to former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and members of the House committee that investigated the insurrection.

It is a dire state of affairs in which a likely act of revenge (to atone for what was a criminal act) has to be pre-empted. The ripple effect of this is far-reaching and dangerous. In essence, it destroys faith in the courts and legal system.

As Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official, was reported on PBS News as saying of Trump’s pardons, “It’s not about an act of mercy and forgiveness for what people have done that violates the law. It’s part of his entire false narrative that there was no crime, that this was a peaceful protest and that those who’ve been charged and convicted are hostages.”

Tit-for-tat pardons provide a worrying sign of America’s spiral into vendetta politics, something Australian politicians have shown a propensity for through politically motivated inquiries. We should be thankful for our judicial independence in this country. We warned recently in this space of the dangers to strong governance from attacking the individual at the cost of offering strong policy. Party leaders do so at their own political risk.

Most of Trump’s actions on his first day in office suggest the world should expect no more from him than tribal politics at its worst and most destructive.

We leave the last word to Trump, possibly via Elon Musk: “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

Mars, you have been warned.

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