Letters & Opinion

Trump’s Second Coming and The Duopoly of Bipartisan Hegemony in American Politics | Part 2

Earl Bousquet
Chronicles Of A Chronic Caribbean Chronicler By Earl Bousquet

GOVERNMENTS and people the world over are still nursing hangovers, or hanging on to high hopes, as they come to grips with the return of the predictably unpredictable Donald Trump to the US Presidency.

His supporters are dreaming, wide awake, of seeing ‘The Donald’ wave his magic political wand to ‘Make America Great Again’, while his opponents at home and abroad lick their wounds.

Over 20 million voters who stayed home or cast protest votes wonder and ponder on whether they could or should have used the lost chance to make a change, while critics everywhere remain largely divided on whether the world is more endangered or much better off now than during President Trump’s first term (2016-2020).

Delivering Promises

But while analysts try to decode his confusing signals, in his first five days President Trump said and did almost everything he’d promised on the campaign trail.

As of Day One of his Second Coming, President Trump:

• Pardoned 1,500 supporters jailed for their roles in the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection

• Declared a State of Emergency at the U.S. southern border with Mexico

• Started ending ‘Birth-right Citizenship’ (that gives legal status to children of immigrants born in the USA)

• Froze government hiring

• Outlawed the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policy that hired government employees usually overlooked through discrimination

• Pulled the US out of the UN Climate Change Convention

• Froze overseas US aid for 90 days

• Attacked a woman Bishop who called for him to protect LBTG and other minority rights

• Pulled security protection from former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State John Bolton

• Targeted members of the original Congressional January 6 Investigative Committee

• Dictated that the Gulf of Mexico now be referred to as ‘Gulf of America’ in official correspondence

• Imposed 20% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada

• Restored Cuba to Washington’s list of ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ – and added more sanctions

• Singled out ‘Venezuelan Gangs’ among the millions of illegal immigrants he plans to deport; and

• Promised to arm the US armed forces to pursue global US domination by ‘Peace Through Strength’

Global Reactions

In the first five days of his second term, the world reacted in different ways to the arrival of the Trump 2.0 era:

• China adopted cautious optimism while continuing to adjust its economic policies to repel promised US tariffs

• China and Russia renewed their ‘Strategic Partnerships’ to ‘navigate global uncertainties’ (after record-breaking trade reaching $245 billion in 2024 and Russia became China’s top natural gas supplier)

• Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas (ALBA) nations welcomed the removal of Cuba from Washington’s list of ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ — and called for lifting its crippling multipronged trade, economic and commercial blockade

• Havana rejected Cuba’s return to the US list of ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’, saying it was a clear case of disrespecting its sovereignty

• Venezuela announced a crackdown on an infamous drug gang accused by Trump of operating in the US

• NATO nations started preparing for Trump’s insistence that they commit an upgraded 5% of their GDP to defence spending

• NATO’s Secretary General said the need for increased spending by member-states will put the alliance in a ‘crisis’ mode

• Greenland and Norway buckled down on their opposition to President Trump’s plan to bring the strategic Scandinavian territory under US control

• Police Officers on duty on Capitol Hill during the January 6, 2021 insurrection and families of those killed or injured said they felt ‘betrayed by their President’s mass pardon of those who violently attacked them while keeping their oath and defending the US Constitution

• Independent Senator Bernie Sanders noted that President Trump said not a word on Health and Housing in his inauguration addresses

• A US court upheld a request by several US states to delay the president’s Executive Order against ‘Birth-right Citizenship’, saying it violated a century of interpretation — and Chapter 14 of the US Constitution; and

• Pope Francis described President Trump’s plan for mass deportation of immigrants as ‘a disgrace’

Hopeful and Hopeless

Nations, governments and people responded differently to Trump’s return to the White House — some hopeful and others hopeless — as they kept trying to read between the new lines and old spots that came with every Inauguration Day speech he delivered to stamp and stomp his Republican Party’s footprints and fingerprints on the Federal bureaucracy.

The word is, however, that Trump 2.0’s US foreign policy will reflect the 201-year-old Monroe Doctrine’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ implemented worldwide through the imposition of ‘American exceptionalism’ and ‘Peace Through Strength.

New Era

In addition to leading the most powerful army in NATO, President Trump will soon assume the Presidency of the G-7 – the world’s seven richest nations.

Latin America and Caribbean governments – like all everywhere else – while contemplating how the announced three-month halt on US aid will affect them, are also readying for the many socio-economic difficulties and challenges to come with the new Trump era, including his planned mass deportation of illegal immigrants.

Today, with America already being ruled more by Presidential Decree than its laws, more governments everywhere will also worry about inevitably clashing with Washington over how President Trump’s second-term policies will affect them – and sooner than during his first presidency.

Developing nations and small-island states have been traditionally referred to as catching colds whenever America sneezes, but much has changed on the global stage lately – and is still changing.

The new ‘Golden Era’ the returned president promises for the US will only come with the numerous crises already facing the world’s richest and poorest nations, while developing countries are already taking more control of their resources and demanding their rightful place on the world stage.

America’s new imperial MAGA era will, therefore, also yield challenging contradictions and inevitable clashes between bigger and smaller, richer and poorer nations, over how the world turns today and where it heads tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the new phase of right-wing Republican political hegemony in two-party America is already going viral.

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