Part 2- Some Initial Thoughts about the Second Trump Presidency

In the previous post, of this series, I made two prediction. Firstly, Trump will use his decisive victory to belittle, humble and even humiliate his “moderate” Republican opposition. This attitude will also extend towards legacy main-stream media outlets and “public intellectuals” aka conmen promoted by the old establishment. My second prediction was that many of Trump’s foreign policy pushes might end up failing or fall far short of their promised goals. I specifically highlighted the Ukraine-Russia war and situation with Iran as two examples of where Trump’s trademark bluster and kneejerk reactions would make the outcome even more humiliating for USA. At this point, it is certain that the Ukraine is going to be thoroughly defeated and wrecked by Russia to the point where the former is no longer a real country- and further American support for Ukraine is only going to a very bad situation that much worse. Iran is now almost certainly going to become a nuclear weapon power, even if some of the “reformers” in its government might not want that outcome. There is also the issue of what happens next in Syria as both the instability and Jihadis there are almost certainly going to spill into neighboring countries. In other words, 2025 will be an exciting year.

So what has transpired between that post and this one. For starters, it appears that almost all of Trump’s initial nominees are going to be approved by the senate. The vast majority of “moderate” Republicans who were posing as opposition to Trump have changed their tune when they saw the large shift in public sentiment towards Trump. Heck.. even Mark Zuckerberg, who spend almost 500 million in 2020 election to help beat Trump, is now busy kissing Trump’s behind and trying to position himself as a pro- free speech CEO- and he is not alone. Similarly, most fortune 500 companies are now pretending they never really believed in DEI and ESG policies. To be fair, large corporations have never believed in anything other than the need to make endlessly increasing profits to benefit a select few at the cost of everybody else- so this is not surprising. On a somewhat brighter note, Trump seems to have put enough pressure on the Israeli government to stop the genocide in Gaza- not because he cared about Palestinians, but to improve his public image and screw over certain Israeli politicians who were insufficiently deferential to him. A good outcome is welcome even if the motivations which led to it were highly questionable.

With that out of the way, let us start with Trump’s recent bluster about incorporating Canada and Greenland into USA. To understand why Trump is dissing Canada, we have to first understand the history between the two parties in Canada’s current ruling coalition and Trump. The very short version is that senior members of the Liberals and NDP have been mocking Trump for the past eight years. Justin Trudeau, who recently was forced to resign as Prime minister, repeatedly trying to position himself as some anti-Trump on the international arena was especially unhelpful. To be fair, other seniors Liberal and NDP leaders were not much better. The funny thing is that these ‘geniuses’ were acting, especially after 2020, as if Trump was never again going to win the Presidency. Well.. things did not work out that way and now they are squarely in the crosshairs of Trump- a person known for being petty and vindictive. A similar fate awaits Keir Starmer and the ruling Labour party in UK. Personally, I never understood why leaders and ruling parties in Canada and UK thought it was a good idea to mock Trump or get involved in American politics- but this is where we are right now.

Moving on to Greenland, a large mostly ice-covered island almost entirely within the Artic circle. So why has Trump repeatedly expressed interest in acquiring it from Denmark? Well.. other than the obvious vanity of putting his name on what would be the only new territorial acquisition by USA in over a century, it would be a decent place for a new military base (or series) around the Artic circle if Trump wanted to maintain military presence around the Artic circle after either exiting NATO or reduce American involvement in that organization. While it is unlikely that USA would actually invade Greenland, it is highly likely that Greenland or Denmark would work out some sort of deal whereby USA can build one more large new military bases in Greenland. While many would see this as an example of a declining power (USA) robbing its supposed friends to maintain relevancy for a bit longer, it would be in line with how Americans think and have acted in the past. The same applies for his bluster about reacquiring the Panama canal from Panama. Ironically the Panama canal is now mostly used to transport Asian goods to the East coast of USA.

Let us now move on to his proposed domestic policies starting with his pledge to reverse illegal immigration. Despite what many Democrats want to imagine, Trump is going to start a major program for deporting illegal immigrants as soon as he is sworn into office. However, I think that such a program will be noticeably smaller than many Republican want to believe. He is most likely to target criminal, recent arrivals (past 3 years) and those who have already received a deportation order. While this would seem like a climbdown from his maximalist position- the numbers of those deported under these much narrower criteria would be somewhere between 5-10 million. Trump will also try to pass a national e-verify standard for employment. Whether he can help pass legislation to reform legal immigration and work visas remains to be seen- though he might be able to work out some agreement with Mexico which is already in NAFTA. He might be able to finally build most of his border wall this time around. It should be noted that a much higher percentage of Americans are in favor of such measures in 2025 than they were in 2017, hence “moderate” republicans have far less power to hinder him this time around. It will be interesting to see how things turn out.

In the next post of this series, I will go into the viability of some of his other plans such as reshoring manufacturing jobs, dismantling the EPA, reforming the FDA and NHS and much more.

What do you think? Comments?