Remember how much we hoped that President Donald Trump would walk the talk and not the other way round?
At the halfway-mark of Mr. President’s first term it is time to acknowledge the huge impact he’s already had — and wonder how much more could come. In his first two years in office, US President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the landmark international nuclear arms agreement with Iran, out of the signature global climate accord and out of the historic trade pact with Asia, the so called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
He launched a bruising trade war with China, slapped tariffs on America’s European allies and ordered a speedy withdrawal of all US forces from Syria.
He signed into law one of the largest tax overhauls in recent history, instituted a sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants and triggered the longest government shutdown in US history.
And he is in the process of remaking US courts by appointing more federal judges to the bench than any of his recent predecessors at the same time.
These are only some of the most striking examples of the tangible impact Trump has had. And it is important to note that all of these moves, while often rolled out erratically, should not have come as a surprise to anyone as all of them were campaign promises made by then-candidate Trump.
Taken together they have already changed how the US is viewed abroad.
“I think Trump has had a very negative effect on American foreign policy and certainly on American soft power around the world,” said Joseph Nye, the eminent Harvard University international relations scholar who coined the term soft power.
Because of its potential long-term negative consequences for international efforts to combat global warming, Nye ranks the US withdrawal from the Paris climate compact among Trump’s most damaging political decisions yet.
Meanwhile Washington’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal, which has poisoned relations with America’s European allies, and the Trump administration’s increasingly tough stance versus Teheran are among the most pernicious short-term decisions so far, said Nye.
Add to Trump’s controversial policy decisions his mercurial style and his penchant for speaking falsehoods and he truly is a president in a league of his own, said Nye.
“We have had dangerous and difficult presidents — there is Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson. But nobody who has been as unpredictable or as untruthful as Trump.”
Trump’s first two years in office have proven that he really is an outlier among American presidents, concurred Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“I would just say he is the unprecedented president. He is completely off the grid,” she said. “He is not like anything we have ever seen.”
While the US has seen its share of demagogues, noted Perry, they never made it into the White House, but were prevented to rise to the highest office through the help of the US electoral system, which by design is not a direct democracy.
