Barely two months since he re-entered the White House, Donald Trump has already brought the US to the threshold of a new and unfamiliar world. That bizarre television spectacle of his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a man hailed by the US Congress as the Churchill of our times for standing up to Russia, which outmans and outguns him, is one thing; the 79 executive orders he has signed since his return to the Oval Office is another. With these measures, Trump has unleashed a whirlwind of change in the federal government and US society, not to mention the international shockwaves triggered by the series of tariff hikes he has used to influence or twist the arms of the US’ friends and allies in Europe and North America.
Whether or not he is truly on the road to fulfil his old-new pledge to “make America great again,” the climate of political and economic upheaval has forced the world to adapt to the new realities in Washington. Four years ago, former president Joe Biden would open his speeches in various US forums with the motto “America is back.” The implication was that the US had been missing from the world under his predecessor. Then as now, Trump had vowed to end US involvement abroad while accusing US allies of exploiting American generosity for their own protection so they can skimp on defence and security expenditure. Trump was not keen on preserving US world leadership, what is more, especially in terms of promoting the values of democracy, liberalism and human rights, which he believed blinded the US to the dangers of mixing with those parts of the world that were not advanced and inherently anti-American.
To Biden, America’s return meant not just that the Democrats were back in power but also that Washington would resume applying the policies and principles followed by both Democratic and Republican administrations since World War II. Until Trump, there had never been a difference between a Republican and Democratic president when it came to making the world a single market or championing the collection of essentially capitalist countries in NATO and similar US-led defence pacts with Japan, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand, as an alliance of the forces of good fighting the forces of evil.
“Return” now means the antithesis of Biden’s policies. But this is no longer to be found in the conventional Republican camp, whether among traditional conservatives such as Ronald Reagan or the neoconservatives such as George Bush Jr. Rather it now lies in that movement embodied in the current president who laid the foundations for “Trumpism” – an ideology that fuses white nationalism with Christian evangelicalism and often expresses itself in discriminatory symbols and slogans aimed not only against Blacks, Latinos and Asians, but also against other Christian denominations. During Trump’s first term, the ideology also targeted non-white immigrants from South America and religious minorities, especially Muslims, but sometimes Jews as well, despite the Jewish affiliation of some of Trump’s in-laws.
The key difference between “America is back” and “Trump is back” is the extent to which the Republican Party represents the Trumpist conservative current. This no longer has any connection with the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, which upheld the values of the American Revolution with respect to the federal state. In contrast to that, Trump has captured the party and rallied it behind his vision, which aims to weaken central government while strengthening the executive at home and pursuing a colonialist imperialist policy abroad.
The new element in the second term is that he has become more organised. He had not been idle during his four years out of office. He had been studying ways to reinforce his ideology, giving it teeth and a heavy dose of vengefulness. So much of this was condensed in that meeting with Zelensky, which turned an Oval Office photo op into a public trial of a guest head-of-state, who was expected to sign on the dotted line of a trillion-dollar deal without negotiating and then express his gratitude for everything the US gave him. Following the meeting, the US froze its aid to Ukraine, then, in an unprecedented move, it sided with Russia in the UN on a question related to the war there. Fortunately, Trump’s behaviour was broadcast live, thereby imparting an important lesson to anyone else who has to deal with him.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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