On a recent bonus episode of The Rest is History, the hosts speculated on the most important events of the first quarter of the 21st century, with Dominic Sandbrook concluding that the 2007-8 financial crash was of greatest significance, and Barack Obama’s presidency in retrospect was probably of little.
In fact, perhaps Obama’s most consequential act was to roast Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, a humiliation which supposedly spurred the real estate mogul to stand for president. I saw one person on Twitter liken it to a 21st century Sarajevo assassination.
Trump is, whatever else you want to say about him, of huge consequence: his legacy in reshaping American politics will be lasting, and he is also reshaping European politics as we speak.
Since becoming president for the second time, Trump has enforced his will on America in a way that is already being watched with great interest in Britain. Unlike in 2017, his team have come into office ready with a whole array of executive orders – on energy, foreign policy immigration and affirmative action.
‘The president moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the federal government with a flurry of executive orders, upending decades of policy,’ reported the Washington Post, calling it a ‘death blow’ to affirmative action. ‘In the first 48 hours of his second term, President Donald Trump moved to eviscerate the surviving remnants of affirmative action, swiftly upending decades of policy — actions observers say are sure to touch every aspect of American life.’ To which many people reading must be thinking ‘Yes… ha ha ha YES!’
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who played a huge part in raising awareness about the excesses of DEI programmes, told the paper that ‘This is a sea change and my sources in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Ivy League are confirming that the institutions are adapting to the new reality. We won. The next four years are going to be about making these changes permanent.’ Rufo has heralded the end of ‘race-based discrimination’ amid a general mood of triumph on the Right.
Trump has also sent troops to the Mexican border, and accelerated the deportation of illegal migrants, a policy he promised and which is widely popular with the American public (and has become more so). Colombia initially refused to accept their returned nationals, leading Trump to respond in a characteristically, well, Trumpian, manner. The South American country, despite its president’s show of defiance on social media, eccentrically praising Noam Chomsky and Paul Simon, caved in.
What is very notable this time around is the sense of dynamism in the new American regime – they’ve decided that you can just do things. This contrasts with Keir Starmer’s government, and a party which came into office seemingly without any plan. It is not even clear why Starmer wants to run the country, what he wishes to change, or what his vision of a good society is. He seems to exist simply to continue the system as it is - one in which decision making is taken from democratically elected politicians towards arm’s-length bodies, NGOs or activist judges, held in place by the post-1997 new British constitution. Starmer’s government has a strong echo of the 1970s, the dying days of an exhausted worldview, and I suspect this is one reason for its unpopularity. Voters like a sense of dynamism and action; exhaustion depresses them.
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