In his first working week in the Oval Office, Donald Trump has announced his return with all the drama to be expected of the noisy disruptor.
He pardoned 1,500 people who took part in the attack on Congress four years ago, including many convicted of violence against the police. He sought to cancel the automatic right to citizenship for those born in the US. He has suspended the admission of refugees. He has ordered troops to the southern border. He has scrapped all public sector diversity posts and initiatives.
He hired a sports stadium and filled it with cheering supporters who watched as he signed executive orders doing all this and more.
He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organisation. He has repudiated – again – the Paris climate agreement. He has renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He has changed the name of the highest mountain in the US, Denali, back to Mount McKinley.
He has dismayed some of America’s allies, including Canada, with his wild talk about it becoming the 51st state of the Union, and Denmark, with his renewed insistence on buying Greenland.
Compared with such neo-imperialist delusions, the retread-president’s snub of Sir Keir Starmer, who is yet to receive a phone call from the White House, is a minor thing. But the British prime minister is also in the uncomfortable position of reading – including in The Independent – about some of the humiliations the 47th president is said to have in store. Sources close to Mr Trump say that he does not think the planned handover of the Chagos Islands, including the US base of Diego Garcia, to Mauritius, is a good deal. They also claim that the president is minded to reject Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.
Mr Trump plainly intends to make the Labour government pay for comments made by some of its senior members – many of whom neither expected him to be re-elected nor to be in office themselves at the time. The description of Mr Trump by David Lammy, now foreign secretary, seven years ago as “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” was particularly undiplomatic.
On the other hand, there are two things that have not happened in Mr Trump’s first week that are more hopeful, not just for Britain and the US but for the world. He did not stop the war in Ukraine on day one. This is good not because the war is being prolonged, but because it could have been brought to an end so abruptly only by the US forcing the Ukrainians to surrender to Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
Mr Trump wants the war to end – so do we all – but he does not want to appear weak in dealing with Putin. The US president prides himself on the art of the deal: let us see if he can strike one that respects the right of Ukrainians to decide their own future.
The other thing that has not happened is that Mr Trump has not imposed tariffs on imports to the US, whether from Mexico, Canada, China, the EU or Britain. He repeated his intention to do so when he spoke by video link to the World Economic Forum in Davos, but he has also ordered a review of the effect of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that he signed in his first term.
It is worth remembering that he imposed only limited tariffs in his first term, and only for a short time. It is as if he knows that they would raise prices for US consumers and constrict growth.
More generally, it is worth remembering that, however much he offended the norms of liberal democracy in his first term, the checks and balances of the US constitution held firm. We trust that they will do so again. Already the courts have intervened to block Mr Trump’s birthright policy, and are likely to declare it unconstitutional.
Let us hope that the things that Mr Trump did not do in his first week turn out to be as significant as some of the alarming things that he did do.
