Trump 2.0 is exposing American exceptionalism for what it is – and has always been
Guantánamo Bay? Imperialism? Alliances with billionaires? Those shocked at the president’s early moves have forgotten what came before.
The dust briefly settled, only for it to be kicked up once again. Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders – causing chaos on everything from foreign aid to world trade – is rapidly rocking and reshaping domestic and foreign policy. And the temptation is, yet again, to think of Donald Trump as an exogenous shock to US democracy. But look closer, and you will see not a rogue president taking a hammer to a hitherto stable political order, but a history of the erosion of norms that paved the way for him. (...)
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Presidents Trump and Biden
This is not to suggest that there is no difference between Trump and his predecessors, or that anyone is under any illusion that the US was a perfect democracy before his arrival on the scene. I do not mean to minimise the president’s violations and their material impact, most of all his lack of adherence to a peaceful transition of power – a super norm, if you will. But the American dream of prosperity at home and supremacy abroad has long masked a much more cynical and transactional order – one that Trump is both exposing and entrenching.
The danger comes from assuming that Trumpism comes out of nowhere. In fact, it comes from many sources, but one of them is his predecessors’ creation of a political system in which serial breaches are seen as acceptable because they are done by the right people. Well, to millions of people, Trump is the right person.
Tags: #english #us #united states #politics #democracy #state of law #guantanamo #immigrants #billionaires #imperialism #iraq war #war on terror