Barely one week into his refurbished presidential tenure, America’s Donald Trump seems poised to set new precedents in the model of the Presidency as the pinnacle of America’s democracy. From a bumbling and bigoted first term, the newly minted Donald Trump seems to be a refurbished version of his original version. A combination of sickening egotism and perennial television consciousness has now become an urgent desire to be historical. He has relentlessly branded his return to the White House as the ‘greatest political come back’ in modern history. He has spent the week touting his America as the dream nation, the “ golden age of America”. forgetting that the triumphs he is praising are in deed the achievements of his immediate past predecessor whose record he has been so viciouskly shredding.
Right from his inauguration, he has unleashed a slew of wild changes in both the presidency as an institution and indeed the place of the United States as a nation. Against the backdrop of his landslide electoral victory, he stepped onto the podium of presidential power with an air of absolutism which is unlikely to help the presidency as an institution governed by the constraints of constitutionalism. Trump has an addiction to saluting and dressing himself in superlatives. In his mind, he is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the American presidency.
Nonetheless, his predecessor’s lack luster style and business as usual Washington manners created a backdrop of anxious expectation and excitement about the return of the more dramatic Trump. Unlike his first inauguration which was greeted by a divided nation, this time around there was a veneer of unity of purpose and reconciliation in the Capitol Rotunda where the inauguration took place. A cross section of his predecessors and the Washington political elite conferred a certain air of unity on the event. Moreover, Trump was surrounded by some of the richest business elite especially the leaders of the tech industry.
Right from the inauguration ground, Mr. Trump launched what he himself called a sane revolution. His dream of the new America is one in which the nation reassumes a supremacist position among nations. It is a new America that looks out first for itself and relates to the rest of the world from a nationalist almost isolationist perspective. It is :
“America First” in real practical terms once again. In relation to the rest of the world, Trump’s America is a somewhat isolationist, ultra nationalistic nation.
Trump has boasted that he would slam all manner of prohibitive tariffs on nations as close and strategic as Canada, Mexico and China. Under his new hostile foreign policy posture, he has renamed the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of Amerca, He is looking to forcefully snatch Greenland from Denmark and to retake the Panama Canal from Panama.
He has since restated to the World Economic Forum in Davos that nations who want to do business with the US must be ready to move their manufacturing operations to the US or face the penalty of hostile tariffs. He would increase the contribution of NATO nations to their joint defense fund from 2% to 5%. Europe has heard him but kept silent for now.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organisation. He has also claimed credit for the ceasefire accord between Israel and Hamas over Gaza. On his much trumpeted bluster to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day, he has scorched the snake of Russia’s authoritarian Putin. It seems that he has just reminded Messrs Xi Jiping and Vladimir Puutin that they are at the helm of an authoritarian counter weight to the West. He is likely to hit a brick wall of resistance to his absolutism posturing if he fails to embrace diplomacy and tact over the Ukraine war.
Taken together, the utterances and actions of the comeback Trump clearly indicate a clear absolutist slant which will put democracy to test and also place the new global order under a severe stress test.
Inside America itself, his stiff position against illegal immigration has already kicked off with raids on illegal immigrants in major cities. His executive order banning birther rights for children born in the United States has already been blocked by a judge as a violation of the constitution. The possibility that more court actions will challenge a number of his executive orders that touch on citizens rights is clear and present. The judiciary is more likely to temper Trump’s bravado and absolutist adolescence.
Either in terms of his domestic or foreign policy activism, everything about the new Donald Trump rings of power absolutism. He is proceeding as though the electoral mandate that returned him to the White House is a blank cheque to carry on in office as he alone deems fit. That would be putting his new mandate to too much test.
On the domestic front, the powers which American democracy confer on a president are every inch subject to the limits placed by the US constitution and the institutional guardrails of American democracy: the judiciary, the media, popular pressure etc. Even when a president’s party has an overwhelming majority in Congress as Trump indeed now has, the responsibility of Congress to curtail and limit the absolutism of the president is what has prevented the United states from degenerating into an absolutist monarchy in the last over 200 years.
The institutions of American democracy may sometimes be tortured by changing political exigencies but they remain in place as checks and balances for those who may want to usurp the advantages of electoral superiority to disfigure the liberal democratic essence of the republic.
Even though it is still quite early in the day, Trump seems poised to twist the American presidency in illiberal directions. He may want to arm twist his partisan majority to derive advantages that may force those who do not belong to or believe in the ideas of his party. Yet the freedom of Americans to disagree with the president and his party cannot be eroded to the extent of what obtains in illiberal democracies like Russia, Turkey, Rwanda or Hungary.
Perhaps the strongest guardrail against the rise of presidential absolutism in today’s America is the sanctity of the constitution and the power of the Supreme Court to uphold the constitution against the absolutist ambitions of an individual president no matter how popular he may be. Mr. Trump’s personal idiosyncracies may tempt him towards absolutist and authoritarian flirtations but the powers of the constitution, the Supreme Court and Congress remain as perennial barriers to extremes of power absolutism.
On the international plane, the global order in the post Second World war era is a complex of interconnected international relations held together by a network of alliances, alignments and interests. No nation, no matter how strong its military and economic power, can pursue its interests in random violation of the interests of other nations. Therefore, when Mr. Trump adopts a rhetoric that appears to threaten other nations in the international community, he risks alienating America’s allies. Worse still, the powers of any one nation cannot block the ability of other nations to enter into and pursue fresh alliances in order to protect and advance their own national interests.
In the post Cold War era, the world has rapidly shifted from a unipolar world to one in which the polarity of international power is now scattered among centres of power both old and new. Broadly, we are now looking at a new world order in which the triumphant Western bloc is being actively counter balanced by a new authoritarian centre of power led by China and Russia with nations like North Korea, Iran, Hungary and Turkey in fellowship. In addition, other minor coalitions and blocs have risen as we see with the birth BRICS nations. Therefore, the possibility of Individual national leaders emerging as absolutism leaders has been reduced to nearly nil. More impossible is the prospect of absolutist nations to lord it over other nations. Over time, Mr. Trump will come to a realization of the naked reality of the new world order and the limits it poses to absolute unilateral power.
Beyond the limitations of power and politics at the individual national level and even among nations, a new determinant of power has emerged. Technology has emerged in recent times as a major determinant of national power and precedence. Information technology was until very lately the major determinant of gradations of power among nations. Even that has now been superseded by the graduation into Artificial Intelligence –AI. The race among great nations is going to be a race to lead the AI race in the next few years. It is perhaps beneficial that Mr. Trump has gathered the world’s most powerful technology oligarchs into a future AI conglomerate. Whether his rowdy personal ego will allow him to maintain the harmony among the tech oligarchs to work harmoniously for America’s global superiority is going to be the determinant of the road ahead. It can only be hoped that Mr. Trump does not mistake his transient enabling political advantage for a blank cheque to absolutism. He must not allow this political moment to blind him to the contradictory nature of power absolutism in a fast changing world. Economic reality and diplomatic compulsion are likely to work together to tame Trump’s present idealism and absolutism illusions.