Trump’s first week — the politics of vengeance and baksheesh

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Whew. For anyone interested in global politics, and particularly the role of the US within it, this last week has been drinking-from-a-firehose territory. From Trump’s inasuguration address to his executive orders, appointments, speeches, interviews, tweets and off-the-cuff remarks, there has been enough to fill a year’s worth of headlines. It appears absolutely nothing that Trump did in his first week was bland, businesslike or quietly efficient. It was just one startling, noisy thing after another, which is clearly the way he likes it.

So, our problem here is what interesting nugget of Trump news to cover in this sudden cornucopia of curious and clamouring matter.

One might imagine that Trump and his apparatchiks planned this strategy carefully — spray executive actions, edicts and orders so fast, so far and wide, that no-one gets to fully understand the impact of each — there is simply too much to digest. So, I will choose only a few; they give a whiff of what happened in seven days.

Let’s dispense with the inauguration speech. What I heard seems incontrovertibly at odds with what other people heard, including some people I greatly respect. I heard dark threats, resentments and revenge narratives. Others heard a soaring and inspiring re-affirmation of America’s core values. This belongs to the “there-are-two-sorts-of-people” category, so let’s be generous and say we all filtered that speech through our different lenses and we can move on.

Let’s take immigration, for instance. Trump’s promises to his political base on immigration were not bluster. One of his executive orders last week was to deny the granting of citizenship to the children of migrants who are either in the US illegally or on temporary visas. This birthright is clearly enshrined in the constitution but Trump has been advised that the wording of the 14 thAmendment is imprecise enough to be challenged in the courts, and especially in the Supreme Court, where his three appointments Kavanaugh, Barrett and Gorsuch have not disappointed him during their short tenures.

This order has already been scathingly swept aside by a District Court judge but, no matter, it is such an important matter that it will surely end up at SCOTUS. It is also a profoundly emotional matter. If the challenge is successful in the courts it will end one of the major incentives behind illegal immigration — the chance to bring children into the world who are legal US citizens, guaranteed to be safe from whatever misery was left behind. But it will cause distress and pain as thousands of innocent people will be deported, mostly in the glare of the public eye. (As I write this, the deportation of illegal immigrants has already begun, documented with photos of glum young men in handcuffs being led onto military aircraft.)

One can argue both sides here. The cruelty of forced deportation may be justified as the price to pay for stemming the flow of illegal immigrants, which no one on any side of the political spectrum likes. Birthright citizenship is also not a covenant between man and God. Only 33 countries have similar laws to the US, including Canada, Mexico and Brazil; 15 more have restrictive conditions on it. The rest of the world does not have any such right enshrined in law. It is the irony of being a successful country — you attract everybody who lives elsewhere in straitened circumstances (or worse) who wants a better life for their family, something denied them by the arbitrary luck of history, politics or geography. Of course, Trump has cynically amplified the narrative of drug mules and rapists and the like, but he has tapped into a larger zeitgeist. Many people, all over the world, object actively or secretly to ‘l’autre’ coming over their borders, at least, not without rare skills and experience to offer. That is a reasonable position to take. But mass deportations seem a vicious and extreme response.

Then there is the odd matter of Ross Ulbricht. In 2011 Ulbricht started an online market called Silk Road on the dark web. You could buy stuff and pay with Bitcoin. At first it was legit, selling unremarkable stuff but, within a very short time (like a heartbeat), it became a haven for illicit merchandise — heavy drugs, guns, explosives and even human trafficking. The anonymity of the dark web and crypto payment was a honeypot for criminals and it became the premier rogue’s market. Ulbricht was aware but chose not to interfere — his view was that Silk Road was simply a market platform and was merchandise agnostic. In 2013 he was arrested and in 2015 he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment (at least 5 deaths have been attributed to Silk Road sales).

Libertarians and anti-regulation right-wingers have clamoured for Ulbricht’s release ever since, turning him into something of a folk hero. Trump has rewarded them with an Ulbricht pardon, which seems a little odd given the relative unimportance of the entire matter in the grand scheme of things. It may be understood basically as baksheesh to this constituency for supporting him, and a middle finger to his detractors.

But there was more than transactional gratuities going on last week, there was naked revenge. For instance, his withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords and the WHO. His nominating a couple of unashamedly bad (but loyal) eggs to important positions, like Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, who is an awful choice by any measure. Withdrawing FBI protection from perceived enemies like Pompeo and Fauci, individuals whose lives and whose families have been consistently threatened. His pardoning of 1600 January 6 thparticipants, some of whom, like the (genuinely scary and violent) leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, are now considering running for high office, including the governorship of their states. Their status as heroes pardoned by Trump gives them a real shot at election. That’s some baksheesh.

The surprises continued all week. Trump revoked the security clearances of perceived enemies in the FBI. He got rid of multiple career technocrats, hollowing out institutional memory at the DOJ in the process. He threatened putative allies with punitive tariffs. He threatened to annex foreign territories. He changed the names of seas, for God’s sake. He is considering legal action against people like Liz Cheney, who voted for impeachment last January, and has supported the establishment of a new alternative Republican committee to investigate January 6 th. He has appointed evolution-denying religious fundamentalists and Stop-the-Stealers in key government positions. He has paused all foreign aid, a catastrophe for development programs everywhere. He has banned nearly all travel at government health departments including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (one researcher told the Washington Post “This is like a meteor just crashed into all our cancer centres…”. And, just in the last 24 hours, he has (possibly illegally) fired 15 inspector generals who have a critical oversight role in government. Clearly, this administration wants to work without any.

I could go on, but you get the gist. There are literally hundreds of other explosive announcements and orders, many tinged with retribution or wink-and-nod transactional payback, some of which have not even made the news because there is simply no more space for another OMG-look-what-he-did article. By the time anyone gets around to objecting to or resisting any of them, it will be too late. It will already be set in concrete as part of the Trump canon.

We are living through a radical rewiring of the political landscape, partially informed by policy objectives but coloured by revenge. It is not clear where this leads us, but governance-by-score-settling has a dark and unsettling history.

Trump is shrewd, canny, dismissive of the curbs of precedent, and unconstrained by protocol. He is confident and imperious and doesn’t give a shit about re-election. One could argue that these traits are exactly what is needed to solve some of the world’s more intractable problems. I am prepared to accept that Trump has a better chance than the previous admin of shifting things in the Middle East, Ukraine/Russia and other geopolitical hotspots (after all, world leaders fear him; none of them feared Biden). I also applaud the principles of DOGE and the relaxing of irrational anti-crypto regulations.

As for the rest of the Trump agenda (and Project 2025, now clearly in play), I can only see a good deal of risk and a whole lot of human misery ahead.

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large for Daily Maverick. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now. Copy edited by Bryony Mortimer

Originally published at https://stevenboykeysidley.substack.com.