José Antonio Gurpegui
Director of the Instituto Franklin-UAH
Adverse weather conditions deprived Donald Trump of the predictable mass bath if the inauguration had taken place on the terrace of the Capitol and not in the Rotunda as it happened. He made up for it in the subsequent meeting with his fans at the Capital One Arena, where he signed the first executive orders amidst the enthusiasm -delirium?- of the crowd. If, as the British say, “form is substance”, we are in for four years of unpredictable performances halfway between “posturing” and drama. The newly appointed president turned the signing of the first decrees into an improper -not to say unworthy- political banalization of the first order. The content of the referred provisions will substantially alter the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and to distribute among the audience the markers with which he signed the documents -imitating the launching of MAGA caps in his rallies- implies an absolute lack of empathy with the suffering of those who only aspire to a minimally dignified life.
Beyond the moral obscenity represented by the staging, it is an event, that of the signatures, which foretells the winds that will blow during his presidency. Among the more than one hundred provisions signed in his first days in the Oval Office, the most important ones have to do with the tightening of visas together with decrees of deportation of undocumented immigrants that have been carried out with immediate expulsion. He has also immediately granted amnesty, as he announced, to the thousand or so convicted of the assault on Congress, whom he considered to be “hostages” and on more than one occasion called “patriots”. In his hyperactivity he has declassified secret documents, the most striking being those referring to the assassinations of John Kennedy and his brother Robert, and that of Martin Luther King.
Since I have already mentioned amnesties, another of them has been the one referring to the Israeli nationals who attacked Palestinian citizens and usurped their homes and land, for which they were condemned by the Biden Administration. The transcendence and significance of amnesty for such actions may have unpredictable consequences because it means total impunity for internationally condemned actions. Who knows if this will not lead to Israel annexing the West Bank in the not too distant future, as the most radical Jews are demanding, and even Gaza, as the influential activist Daniella Weiss is demanding. Few presidents like Donald Trump will find Israel so identified with his cause. In the previous term he accepted the capital of Jerusalem and the legality of the annexation of the territories conquered in the Golan Heights; in this term he has lifted the arms restrictions imposed by Biden and is in favor of “resettling” the Palestinian population in Jordan and Egypt in order to “cleanse” Gaza.
In any case, “from words to deeds there is a long way to go” and we will see how far these executive orders become a reality. The first one signed by Obama was the closing of the Guantanamo prison, and it was never consummated; even Trump himself is well aware of the difficulties of substantiating such proposals, since the first one in his previous term was the construction of a border wall between Mexico and the United States, which was never completed.
As for the current ones, not a few states have been reluctant to collaborate with their law enforcement agencies to implement expulsion orders, and although they have increased from 350 to just over 500 every day, in his four years in office he would manage to expel about 700,000 undocumented immigrants, far from the “millions and millions” he promised. Moreover, the proposal to deny U.S. citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States has been contested by a dozen states and a number of judges have invoked the 14th Amendment – “Every person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, shall be a citizen of the United States” – as evidence of its unconstitutionality. One wonders if the president will not intend for such an order to reach the Supreme Court, for who knows what purpose.
In the third and final installment we will discuss the economic and political proposals that represent a radical change to the predominant liberalism in Western societies in recent centuries.
