If a good day begins in the morning, Donald Trump’s golden age is turning out to be more of an age of iron, and in some cases of stone. A few minutes after his inauguration, the new American president put his signature on some acts that take America out of many things, isolating it from the rest of the world, making it slide back in time. From the first minutes of his mandate, the new president of the United States has given a sharp acceleration to his political vision, signing decrees that push America towards global isolation and temporal regression, far from modernity. Applauding the speed with which he kept certain political promises is frankly childish, as if the form (the speed) mattered more than the substance (the measures). There are some ferocious ones. The death penalty returns at a federal level, for example, even if limited to certain crimes, such as terrorism, taking a step back on the path of human rights, when America was starting to limit it (there were already 23 states that had abolished and many had established a moratorium, in fact a suspension).
On the immigrant front, we’ll see, but real raids are announced on the lives of poor people guilty only of escaping a life of violence and abject misery, as the Episcopal Bishop Marianna Budde dared to say to his face, the only one to do so. from the pulpit of the National Cathedral in Washington, during the prayer mass following his inauguration. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender kids in both Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who are now afraid for their lives,” said Budde, who then addressed her thoughts to the people who “work on our farms, clean our homes and offices, work in the poultry and meat plants, who wash the dishes after we dine in restaurants and they work the night shift in hospitals: maybe they are not citizens, maybe they don’t have the right documents, but the majority of immigrants are not criminals.” The bishop asked the most powerful man in America for “mercy” but the recipient, who also feels predestined by God, did not like it.
Trump’s America wants to leave as soon as possible (but it will take a year to complete the regulatory procedures) from the World Health Organization, the UN agency that it has never digested, settling yet another blow to the already weakened United Nations. What will happen if there is – God forbid – another pandemic? The American tycoon has always shown that he prefers Bolsonaro-style management of the virus rather than focusing on medical research and vaccines. Even the fight against global warming – despite the fact that the Los Angeles fires were there to demonstrate how urgent it is to save the planet – is ignored. The Paris Agreement, the most important treaty on global warming, is canceled in the name of America first because Trump says he represents “the people of Paris and not Pittsburgh”.
A step back in time, we said. However, implemented together with the masters of new technologies, in a strange mixture of a return to the ancient times of fossil coal and drills with financial means and cutting-edge production, such as Big Tech, the digital multinationals whose masters were all in the front row during the inauguration, from the “fascist on Mars” Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos. For them, Trump signed a big gift worth billions of dollars, canceling the 15 percent extraterritorial tax that risked affecting their revenues. And as America turns inward, the rest of the world watches. Trade tariffs and “us versus them” rhetoric risk alienating historic allies and exacerbating tensions with great powers. The European Union, already weakened by internal divisions, could find itself forced to redefine its role in a geopolitical chessboard dominated by American arrogance. And China, with its expanding economy, could take advantage of this vacuum to strengthen its global influence.
Is this really the new Trump era? A brazen wealth that isolates America from the rest of the world with tariffs? Who will present the bill to the rest of the planet, to NATO and to the old ally Europe transformed into a subject, into a colonial province, with the new terminology such as the Gulf of America instead of the Gulf of Mexico to sanction the new American imperial colonialism? And are we sure that the world will stand by and watch, from the European Union to the superpower China, from Russia to the other BRIC countries, to the Gulf countries?
