Days that shake the world
Whatever you make of it, Donald Trump had a big first week. He signed executive orders with potentially profound implications for health…
Whatever you make of it, Donald Trump had a big first week. He signed executive orders with potentially profound implications for health care, home buying, and climate change, amongst much else besides.
But today, Saturday January 28th, might be the first day that the human cost of Trump’s administration hit home. Climate change, as devastating a threat as it is, has been cursed by its relative slowness (I use “relatively” deliberately, since in meteorological terms, the planet is warming with unprecedented speed). But in the context of today’s whiplashing news cycle, few of Trump’s first moves had truly immediate impact.
That changed today. Trump’s executive order banning people born in, or citizens of, seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States with the single stroke of a pen was a sudden demonstration of the sheer, cruel power of an overgrown executive branch.
It was also a demonstration that one need not erect new walls or establish uniquely punitive trade rules to fundamentally alter America’s relationship to the outside world. Instead, all that was really needed was to implement an explicitly prejudiced, constitutionally preposterous policy for policing the nation’s existing borders.
The trouble for Trump is that such a move instantly creates a fundamentally sympathetic and entirely blameless cast of characters. Harvard postdocs trying to return from fieldwork. Proud owners of green cards eternally banished for attending a family funeral. And, of course, many of the neediest people on the planet: the wretched souls caught between a tyrant on one side and terrorists on the other.
Donald Trump has somehow managed to generate in just eight days the mistrust and resentment in the Middle East that it took George W Bush eight years to cultivate. In eight days, his America has become the lightning rod for justifiable condemnation, seemingly absolving the continent of Europe of its own despicably negligent, but at least somewhat euphemistic, closed-door policy. Even in our contemporary amnesiac media landscape, today marked a shift in American policy that will be as hard to forget as it is to forgive.