Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2025. He has spent about two weeks in office, and is known to Americans because he is also the 45th President of the United States of America.
Within two weeks, Trump has issued more than 200 executive orders to implement his policies and programmes. He eliminated the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policy in all of American institutions. This means that there’s no more protection for the vulnerable and minority groups. To drive this point home, he stopped all American government-funded aid to the vulnerable, poor, and needy – both local and foreign recipients. It took judicial intervention to temporarily pause this ill-advised policy before he backed down on it. He scrapped constitutionally backed birthright citizenship which a court blocked temporarily.
Trump muscled the social media by ordering them to remove all the caution they created to flag down lies and untruthful statements in their platforms. Lies have become an acceptable policy of government provided you can repeat them many times and make them persuadable. In furtherance of this policy, the White House Press Secretary, in order to justify the freezing of all foreign aid, told the world that the Biden administration granted aid to Gaza to the tune of $50m for the purchase of condoms, while the aid was for about $46,000 for the entire middle-east, and for about $60m for the whole world, to help the fight against sexually transmitted diseases, and more importantly, to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Trump stripped his former political appointees of Secret Service protection, including Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, John Bolton, former National Security Adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, former Director of Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Gen Mark Miller, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so on. These men have been described as being under threats from foreign powers and domestic violent terrorists for some of their policies during their time in office, just as it was decided by American intelligence that Trump was under threat from Iranian government because of the assassination of Gen Qasem Soleimani, which necessitated security being beefed up around Trump. Unfortunately, Trump decided to deny former officials of the State their due security after leaving office on the excuse that they were no longer his friends.
He went further to fire all the officials in the Department of Justice (DOJ) who were part of the investigation team that investigated him and his alleged crimes while in office and after leaving office. Sacking an officer for doing his or her legitimate job will certainly send the wrong messages to the present officers that they are not protected from persecution in future for doing their jobs. This might lead to fear that will prevent officers in the Justice Department to give in their best in the service of America and may gradually erode the age long independence of the department in the handling of its investigations and prosecutions.
His immigration policy is already well known. Deport all illegal and undocumented immigrants. We all understand that people who look like Trump and share his race, skin colour, and ancestry come from countries that are not required to obtain a visa to travel to America. Most of them can be automatic residents in America if they choose to. So all these hullabaloo about deportation of immigrants are essentially geared towards blacks and people of colour from majority of poor African, Caribbean, South American, Asian, and a bit of some poor European countries. The whole America has become a large prison yard where immigrants will be arrested even in churches. Some of the arrested immigrants, especially those that may have committed crimes, no matter how minor, will be sent to Guantanamo Bay for confinement. This is the same venue where the most hardened terrorists were kept in the past.
American institutions have in-built guardrails to ensure transparency and accountability in all the departments and agencies. The officials are called Inspector-Generals. They are meant to be independent and autonomous. They uphold ethics and rule of law in all the departments and agencies. Trump sacked majority of them without cogent reasons. The entire public servants in America, less very few agencies, who do not feel comfortable with Trump’s ways of doing things have been offered some money as buyouts to voluntarily resign or be fired. Most political appointees are recruited not on the basis of merit but on the basis of loyalty.
Gradually, Trump wants to transform America into Trump’s country by decapitating democratic institutions that will obstruct him or hinder him from transitioning from a President to a dictator or life President. He has not hidden his admiration for dictators like Putin, Kim, and Xi of Russia, North Korea, and China, who have subdued their people under inhumane conditions in order to achieve complete domination over them and govern them for life. Trump is already signalling his readiness, if allowed, to continue his presidency, after the second term in office. Mark his words, “I think I’m not allowed to run again. I’m not sure”. He first fired this salvo immediately after he was reelected into office during his address to the Republican members of Congress. He told them that this might be his last term in office, unless they did something about it.
Till date he has refused to recognise that the presidential election of 2020 in which President Joe Biden defeated him was free, fair, and credible, even when he lost all the cases he filed against the election in courts. He pardoned all the January 6, 2021 rioters who stormed the capitol on his invitation to obstruct the certification of the results of Joe Biden. They risked the lives of all the members of the Congress and the Senate, including Mike Pence, former Vice President of Trump who was to be hanged by the rioters. They were investigated, prosecuted, and convicted for the riots but were pardoned by Donald Trump including some of them who brutalised police and other law enforcement agencies resulting in deaths of some people on that day.
It’s important to note that Trump is a very smart person. He noticed a yearning in the hearts of the silent majority of Americans to return to the Judeo-Christian cultural way of life in America that are very conservative and abhors some practices deemed as abomination. Such practices like unbridled reproductive rights that encourage abortion of unborn babies no matter how late into the pregnancy, unchecked sexual and homosexual rights which have included transgender rights, even among children. The Democrats are the most vociferous advocates of these practices, which they masquerade as fundamental rights. Trump, sensing this silent dissatisfaction of majority of Americans capitalised on it and finished the Democrats at the polls. Unfortunately for Kamala Harris, his presidential election opponent on the Democratic side, she was the first Attorney-General of a State to formally officiate same-sex marriage in California. This made Americans, engineered by Trump’s campaign team, to refer to her as Satan. In order to assuage his base, Trump, rightly wiped out every aspect of the transgender intrusion in America daily life. He publicly proclaimed, to the admiration of the evangelicals that going forward, America will recognise only two genders in its official activities – male and female.
On foreign relations, Trump insisted that he will take over the Panama Canal, annex Greenland and convert Canada into the 51st State of the US. Any nation which fails to comply with his orders are afflicted with tariffs into submission. He has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, Paris Agreement on Climate, and is not favourably disposed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation security arrangement. He imposed 25 percent tariff on Colombia for rejecting its deported citizens until they rescinded their decision and accepted their citizens. The whole world is turned upside down and is on edge because of the uncertainty of what Trump will do next.
The next four years will be interesting. Trump had engaged in a fight with America in his first term, in which he wanted to truncate democracy, by rejecting the outcome of a presidential election and waged war to overturn the result in order to continue in office, and failed. In this his second term, he is better equipped and better experienced. Will he succeed this time in decimating the democratic institutions and emerging as the executive King, Emperor, or Czar of America, whose words are laws and must be obeyed without resistance, or will the strong democratic institutions of America, rooted in separation of powers and rule of law, come again to the rescue of America. Only time will tell. For the meantime, welcome to Trump’s America.