This Monday marks the fourth anniversary of the assault on the Capitol, the insurrection fueled by the hoax of Donald Trump about a non-existent electoral fraud in his 2020 defeat against Joe Biden that plunged the United States into the abyss of an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In November, however, many ignored or minimized that serious moment and assured the return to the White House of a man of 78 yearsthe president who enters with older to the Oval Office, whose second presidency can be anticipated to have a extraordinary impact at a global level and also, perhaps above all, at national level.
Those voters gave Trump a victory without a shadow of a doubt. He won over Kamala Harris in both the electoral college and the popular vote, although not for a “sweep” as he insistently says, but for the 1.5% of the voteone of the narrowest margins since the 19th century. And although the “strong mandate” of the people that they assume is questionable, their determination to have a transformative presidency it is not.
To achieve it you can rely on a expansive vision of executive power which predicts a presidency that many fear imperial. In addition, it adds in its favor a Supreme Court of conservative supermajority thanks to the three judges he appointed, who already in the last judicial year extended the immunity of the occupant of the Oval Office to an unprecedented level. And it also has the Republican control of both houses of Congressalthough the slim majority and the internal divisions that were evident in the agonizing negotiation in December to avoid a government shutdown have already made it clear that not everything is going to be easy, not even when the party has been remade in the image of its leader and in a formation where dissent has a price, something that Trump recently recalled when supporting the idea of challenging in primaries “unreasonable” senators who do not support his nominees for cabinet positions.
Even before taking possessionand with Biden often nearly absent, Trump has already been dominating the political and media agenda from the USA. His transition team has gone so far as to send press releases talking about “promises kept.”
They have also returned messages on social networks, exaggerationsstatements disconnected from reality or data… And again the mastery in the strategy of what in sports is known as “flood the area”, a saturation of actions, announcements, statements or proposals for his cabinet and his administration that are cutting or nullifying the impact of the previous one, with a almost anesthetic effect.
A sense of normalization of elements that, in any other circumstance, with any other politician, would be extraordinaryfrom the nomination of unqualified cabinet candidates to political approaches such as using the army on American soil or continuing to deny the 2020 results and announcing a pardon for many of those imprisoned for the assault on the Capitol. And the parade of big technology leaders who, like many others, have “kissed the ring” serves as an example of that acceptance.
Trump himself said it in his first press conference since victory, on December 16 at Mar-a-Lago: “In my first term, everyone fought me. Now, everyone wants to be my friend. “I don’t know, my personality has changed or something.”
That change remains, like many other things, to be seen, but Trump is currently moving with a determined and firm step towards the objectives he has set. Although with him the factor of what always comes into play unpredictable and it can never be clearly determined what is hyperbole, the promises and objectives of measures and transformations that he has already outlined range from the immigration system to taxes on one’s own. government structure of the main power in the world.
Trump arrives at this second presidency with a much greater knowledge of how government works and with a more ambitious agenda that in 2016 you will be able to start implement faster than in that first presidency.
Some of the central and priority axes of this agenda are the largest immigrant deportation operation in history, new tariffs, the freezing or revocation of measures and regulations to combat climate change and the impulse to fossil fuelsthe remodeling of the federal health agencies or ideological changes in the educational system. For those already announced goals, and unlike for other big promises such as tax cuts or alterations to Obamacare, It doesn’t need Congress.
Trump, in addition, will be able to “delve into changes that he began to attempt at the end of his first term with which he tested the limits of the constitutional power of the presidency,” as he explains in a telephone interview from the Center for American Progress. Joe Radosevich. In this area, there are many experts and observers, in addition to the Democratic opposition, who are especially concerned about the possibility that it will reduce or end the independence of federal departments and agencies that have been structured with that autonomy. One thinks, for example, of the Federal Reservebut especially in the Department of Justicewhere with Pam Bondi as nominee for attorney general and the controversial Kash Patel for the FBI, the politicization that Trump and his allies have denounced since his entry into politics and that he has never been able to prove.
Trump, furthermore, according to Radosevich, may try to arrogate to himself powers such as “seize” funds already appropriated by Congress to punish political decisions of states or cities that go against their interests and objectives, such as those who are preparing to resist their crusade against migrants. It is something that will undoubtedly cause intense legal warone of the many that are already predicted in his mandate, but while battles are fought in the courts the impact can be felt directly in communities.
A renewed legacy of his previous mandate that can now culminate is also his efforts to weaken the administrative State. And this time he arrives prepared to transform the civil service that supports the structure of government in a army of 50,000 loyalists. That goal was one of the axes of the controversial Project 2025, something that was already attempted four years ago by eliminating protections for those civilian employees, but that order was annulled by Biden as soon as he arrived at the White House.
“We have a merit-based civil service and officials who give advice independently of politics, a system of checks and balances that has been part of the system since the beginning of the 20th century, and the idea of replacing them with political appointments is worrying”, advises Radosevich.
It is a problematic line similar to that posed by the entry into the government, as Trump intends, of some of those who have been his big donors and especially, of Elon Musk, the richest man on the planetwho gave $277 million to his campaign.
“The idea of external advice is good, for that we have committees or regulatory processes, but allowing That your big donors are the ones potentially dictating decisions should be worrying people a lot,” says Radosevic, one of the many voices pointing to the unleashed potential for corruption and conflicts of interest in a government that will be the richest in history, with at least seven billionaires in cabinet or other appointive positions and another handful of billionaires.
No one is more influential at the moment, and no one has shown more ability to function as an agent of chaos, than Musk, who will lead alongside Vivek Ramaswamy the Department of Government Efficiency, an entity that despite the name is not part of the formal government structure and therefore It does not have controls or accountability either. traditional. They have set the goal of cut two trillion dollars from a budget that last year was 6.8 trillion. Given that nearly four trillion are fixed expenses such as Social Security or Medicare payments and almost another trillion goes to paying interest on the debt, and that of the remaining 1.8 trillion of discretionary spending, almost half correspond to defense , it is difficult to anticipate that the objective can be achieved without cutting off government services. Although Trump has said that “will have no impact on people”, it is impossible to see how it could not be noticed.
The economic impact of these and many other measures proposed by Trump, from mass deportation to tariffs and tax cuts It fuels ghosts not only of shaking up economic and social life but also of stopping what was one of his great campaign promises: reducing inflation and prices. And in the interview he gave to ‘Time’ in November when the magazine decided to declare him “Person of the Year,” he admitted for the first time that lowering prices will be “very difficult”.
Los reproductive and civil rights are under threat of serious regression, as are others principles of democracylike the right to protest or freedom of the press. And although Trump has assured on several occasions that his “revenge will be success”, does not allow us to rule out a persecution of those he considers political enemies, whether they are Biden and his family, the prosecutors who opened criminal or civil cases against him, the Democratic and Republican politicians who They investigated him in his ‘impeachments’ or the press.
Subscribe to continue reading
