The word that aptly describes Trump 2.0 is disruptive. It's established now that he isn't the supposed buffoon that took charge in 2017. One wouldn’t go as far as calling him a man with a plan, but he is strategic this time, so much so that he sometimes makes an effort to deliver memorised, properly crafted statements. So, on the buffoonery spectrum, he’s quite on the lower side.
From the outstart, he rolled out a barrage of executive orders, most of which were bound to start a legal showdown at the least and a constitutional crisis at the worst. It's not that he doesn’t know the legal implications of his orders. After all, he is not the apparently stupid man he was portrayed as last time. And this time, he is making actual efforts to shred that image. Now, he is strategic and firm, intending to bring a paradigm shift in the US legal arena. Ostensibly, his strategy is to throw it all in the air and see what sticks.
From rolling back decades-old regulations and stalling humanitarian aid to reinstating a wartime act, he has taken some very extreme measures. These extreme lengths would open up legal debates on a vast array of issues, potentially leading to the reinterpretation of several laws and constitutional articles, even laying the groundwork for new Supreme Court precedents.
He might cool off in the later tenure of his chaotic regime, but the goal would be achieved by then, or at least en route to being achieved. While many Americans are criticising the Democrats for being complacent and silent on this issue, the thing is many of these initiatives are going to help Trump’s successors in the long run. It's always easier to increase something from zero than to reduce a large established order to that figure. For many political leaders, keeping up appearances viz-a-viz democratic norms, human rights, and liberal principles remains a large issue. Trump has no such concern; he can steamroll everything under the sun and get away under the garb of value system and the fight against deep state. But in the end, these sweeping blows will help those who follow quietly build on the aftermath.
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His plans to limit the role of federal government or precisely dismantle the federal government may arise from firm conviction, but they were by no means well thought out
Many of these changes, like cutting the federal government’s size, reviewing the US’s role in foreign assistance in view of its economy, revising tariff laws and policies, and reforming immigration policies, were needed or at least a discourse on these issues was warranted. But it wasn’t easy to undertake that. While the way Trump is doing all this is devoid of basic decency, it still paves the way to have a revision on all these policy matters.
As for Trump, many of his actions can be viewed in the context of his campaign donors. His hardliner stance on the Palestinian issue, so much so that his administration has started interfering with Ivy League universities now, extorting submission out of them stems from the fact that one of his major campaign donors was a pro-Israel entity. Apart from Musk, oil and gas corporations remained hefty contributors. Even private prison companies contributed to his campaign, and it paid off: soon after the advent of his tenure, their stocks jacked up. Even his stance on Russia doesn’t come as a surprise given his leanings towards Putin in his previous regime.
The rest of Trump’s shenanigans are also strategically motivated. He is defying the courts in a bid to open up the debate on executive powers and judicial limits. He’s daring the legal system to catch up, or break, and in doing so, he’s pressing on some of the most fundamental questions of American governance. However, this doesn’t justify these actions at all, some of which raise a humanitarian crisis. Similarly, the premise about strategic motivations doesn’t apply to all the decisions his administration is taking.
His plans to limit the role of federal government or precisely dismantle the federal government may arise from firm conviction, but they were by no means well thought out. From many firing reversals to givingpatchy statistics, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made a mockery out of itself. The administration’s act of sending off Venezuelans with no criminal records to a cruel prison while terming them terrorist gang members and monsters is downright egregious. Moreover, ironically, the very bureaucratic incompetence he claims to fight against has plagued his own administration from the onset, and he doesn’t seem to care about it at all.
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The US in the next four years appears to be very uncertain, but one thing is for sure: most of these changes are going to stay in some form in the years to come. Some of the doors he’s kicking open won’t be shut again. And that, disruptive or not, is going to have consequences that go far beyond his own time in office.
