Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
Um ginecologista francês foi probido de exercer medicina durante um mês por ter recusado atender um homem. Acusação: transfobia. Mas o que vai um homem fazer ao ginecologista?
29 de Agosto de 2023, no consultório do ginecologista francês Victor Acharian apresenta-se um casal. A mulher tem 26 anos e marcou consulta através duma aplicação. Não conhece o médico. Mas este ao ser informado pela sua assistente que a próxima paciente é uma mulher trans declara-se incompetente para fazer a consulta: a ginecologia trata do aparelho reprodutivo feminino e a jovem que estava no seu consultório podia parecer uma mulher, vestir-se como mulher, apresentar-se com um nome feminino, tomar medicamentos há três anos para feminizar o seu corpo mas biologicamente falando continuava a ser um homem: “Eu sou ginecologista e trato mulheres verdadeiras. Não tenho qualquer competência para tratar homens, mesmo que eles tenham eliminado a barba e digam à minha secretária que se tornaram mulheres.” — escreveu Victor Acharian numa resposta ao comentário negativo feito pelo casal ao seu não atendimento.
PUB • CONTINUE A LER A SEGUIR
Rapidamente entraram em cena várias associações que fazem de Victor Acharian uma espécie de saco de pancada. Foi apresentada uma queixa na Ordem dos Médicos franceses. Entretanto o ginecologista insistia: “Eu podia ter atendido essa pessoa, cobrar-lhe 80 euros pela consulta para lhe dizer que sou completamente incompetente no seu caso: é isto que ela queria? Estas pessoas estão sob tratamentos hormonais, prescritos por serviços especializados. É deles o cuidado do acompanhamento.”
A penalização surge agora: Victor Acharian foi proibido de exercer medicina durante um mês.
Mas o que este caso revela é muito mais grave que essa penalização e remete-nos para a ditadura do pensamento instituída em nome das liberdades e da igualdade e que tem o seu melhor exemplo no ginecologista a ser penalizado por dizer o óbvio: os ginecologistas tratam mulheres. Um homem pode mudar de género masculino para feminino tal como uma mulher pode mudar de género feminino para masculino mas de sexo não se muda. Como é que dizer isto se tornou uma ofensa? Insulto? Heresia?
24 de Dezembro de 2023. No Victoria Hospital, na Escócia, a enfermeira Sandie Peggie discute no vestuário feminino com a médica Beth Upton ou mais propriamente com o homem que se passara a identificar como mulher e que por isso usava os vestuários destinados às mulheres. A enfermeira Sandie Peggie foi suspensa e o caso que chega agora a tribunal ganhou novos contornos pois os advogados de Beth Upton pretendem que Sandie Peggie se refira à médica como mulher o que a acontecer tornaria absurda as discussões que teve com Upton a propósito da sua presença no vestuário das mulheres, discussões essas que levaram à suspensão da enfermeira. É uma espécie de círculo vicioso constituído em armadilha: Sandi é suspensa do trabalho por ter discutido com um homem transgénero mas no julgamento tem de se referir ao transgénero como se ele não fosse homem…
Setembro 2024. “Olhem para o guarda-redes deles. O número 10 deles é obviamente um homem” — Observações como esta valeram a suspensão por vários jogos a duas futebolistas britânicas e a obrigatoriedade, pelo menos para uma delas, de frequentar um curso para se reeducar nesta matéria. Ou seja as mulheres estão a ser claramente prejudicadas por causa da participação de homens que se dizem mulheres, vestem como mulheres e se sentem mulheres em diversas modalidades mas depois não se pode referir que eles são transgénero.
Não duvido que um dia destes veremos vários líderes políticos a terem com o tema dos transgénero o mesmo volte-face que estão agora a protagonizar com a imigração ou com a segurança. E numa espécie de movimento reflexo as autoridades de saúde, desporto, as ordens profissionais… qual exército em manobras prontamente terão entendimentos em tudo contrários ao que defendem agora. E nesse momento várias pessoas que até agora se mantêm em silêncio aparecerão a dar conta da sua discordância que dirão de sempre apesar de nunca se lhes ter ouvido uma palavra sobre o assunto. Quanto aos outros, os estridentes defensores destas causas e aquela legião burocrática que a impõe, nem por um segundo se deterão a avaliar as consequências do que fizeram. Com a inimputabilidade de sempre e a arrogância de quem se considera dono do futuro, prontamente trocarão os transgéneros por outros quaisquer grupos ou temas que lhes apareçam como instrumentais.
Não me admira que o façam porque é isso que sempre têm feito. O que cada vez me cansa mais é que aceitemos tudo isso como natural. Uma espécie de destino por assim dizer.
We should all feel scared to our bones about the persecution of the SAS, soldiers harried through the courts for jobs they did many decades ago. It’s not that the SAS should be allowed to behave like trigger-happy psychos, but as Paul Wood wrote in this magazine before Christmas, Special Forces are now being hounded and punished for simply following orders and conducting operations.And what will we soft sofa-sitters do when no one wants to be a soldier any more?
Wood described in particular the plight of 12 soldiers of a Specialist Military Unit (SMU) deployed in Ireland in February 1992 to apprehend a gang of IRA terrorists – the East Tyrone brigade of the Provisional IRA (PIRA). The Tyrone PIRA had procured a socking great Russian machine gun and planned to use it to attack a police station. The SAS got their men and retrieved the gun, and as a reward they’ve been subjected to decades of interrogation and now an inquest into the deaths of the terrorists shot during the operation.
When Wood wrote his piece, Justice Michael Humphreys, presiding over the inquest, had not yet reached a verdict or released his report. Well, now he has. He has decided that the use of lethal force was not justified and referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
I spent the weekend reading Justice Humphreys’s report, expecting to find at least some evidence of SAS wrongdoing – some reason to put the soldiers through so many gruelling years of investigation. But what I found is much weirder than that. The SAS unit seems to me to have behaved bravely in tricky circumstances, and certainly just as it had been trained to do. What’s bizarre is the picture painted by Mr Justice Humphreys of how he thinks the SAS should have behaved. It’s a glimpse into life lived by the light of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and it’s both scary and surreal.
All accounts agree that the moon was full and bright in County Tyrone on the night of 16 February 1992, which was not great for soldiers lying low. The intelligence had been that the PIRA would meet at St Patrick’s in Clonoe before the attack, and the original plan was to apprehend them there, so the men of the SMU hunkered down behind a patchy hedge to wait. Even Justice Humphreys agrees that the hedge provided inadequate cover. But the PIRA didn’t stop by St Patrick’s Church. They drove their gun straight to the Royal Ulster Constabulary station and shot it up with 60 rounds of armour-piercing bullets. Only after that did they drive to St Patrick’s, whooping and shooting, intending to dismantle the gun and escape with the other members of their brigade, 20 IRA in all.
When the truck arrived at St Patrick’s Church, the SMU was waiting. But as the headlights swept towards him, the soldier in charge of the unit – Soldier A, the inquest calls him – judged it likely, given the scrappy cover, that he and his men would be spotted. He describes seeing PIRA members in the back of the truck, one of whom was holding a rifle in the air. So Soldier A opened fire. His men engaged and four IRA men wound up dead.
Article 2 of the ECHR states that everyone has a right to life and cannot be intentionally killed. The ‘Yellow Card’ instructions for opening fire in Northern Ireland insist that a ‘challenge’ must be given before opening fire, but also that a soldier may disregard this if he has reason to believe that announcing his presence to make an arrest would endanger his life, or the life of his men. Hard as I try, I can’t think of a more certain way for a soldier to endanger the lives of his men than by cheerily announcing their presence to 20 IRA terrorists with a burning hatred of the British Army and a heavy machine gun. What choice did Soldier A have?
But here’s how Justice Humphreys thinks things should have played out. In his summary of the events of 16 February, he’s remarkably breezy about the PIRA attack: ‘Some 60 rounds were fired but no one was injured’ – as if it was a naughty jaunt, no harm done.
What the soldiers should have done, insists Humphreys, is to calmly wait in their inadequate hiding place in the bright moonlight for the moment at which the PIRA boys began to unbolt their machine gun from the tailgate of the truck. Then, with every man occupied, it would have been a cinch to saunter up and lawfully arrest the lot of them, in accordance with Yellow Card protocol, no violation of the ECHR.
I long to see inside Justice Humphreys’s mind, the picture he has of this perfect and compliant operation: all 20 IRA men caught unawares and unable to shoot because their hands are full of spanners. Perhaps it stars himself as a sort of Justice James Bond. ‘Rats!’ the PIRA ringleader, Kevin Barry O’Donnell, might say, ‘you’ve outsmarted us with your spanner trick.’
Kevin Barry O’Donnell had, by the by, been acquitted a few years previously of bombing an army barracks. ‘I come from a devout Catholic family and do not support the taking of life,’ he said in court.
But the lesson of the Clonoe inquest, and the miserable decision to refer the case for possible prosecution, isn’t just that Justice Humphreys is delusional. It’s that attempts to ensure that military operations, especially Special Forces operations, comply with ECHR law often leads to terrible injustice and punishes the very people we rely on most. No one who didn’t secretly have it in for our country could think otherwise.
I only know three young people who’ve chosen to join the armed forces in recent years and they’re three of the brightest and most moral twentysomethings I’ve met. The idea that, for acting in our country interests, they might one day be hounded through the courts fills me with despair.
Hold your wine glass steady: the BBC has news for you. This week it splashed the news that train drivers in the UK are ‘overwhelmingly middle-aged white men’. The story was accompanied by a picture of a black woman driving a train – under the supervision of a white man, it might be noted – as though to signal that this glass ceiling too can be smashed.
Personally I would expect train drivers to be overwhelmingly middle-aged, white and indeed male. Most of the UK is white and half of the UK is male. And the male half of the species tends to be more train-oriented. You don’t see many single women standing at the end of Reading station noting down train numbers in a little book. There may be hardwired reasons for this. So I would put the BBC’s train-driver story into the same ‘breaking news’ list as ‘most kindergarten teachers are women’ and ‘most people who run successful corner shops are immigrants’. In other words: not a story.
But of course it’s not really about news. It is another example that tells us something deeper about the age.
Until recently, the only professions in which people obsessed about ‘representation’ were the more high-status ones. One of the madnesses that came out of the #MeToo movement was the idea that if an actress in Hollywood is paid eight million bucks and her male co-star is paid ten million for the same movie then we should all take to the streets to protest this appalling inequality and indeed oppression. Pity the stunning multi-millionaire actress, everyone; we are all Angelina Jolie now, etc.
Company boards were another focus – as though most of the public were regularly bothered by the question of which company boards to sit on. It was decided at some point in the past decade that any company whose board had too many men on it must be ‘diversified’. Which means it’s been a boom time for any potential ethnic–minority board members, while some of the cannier gays spotted a useful ladder. And then there were women, of course. California passed legislation a few years ago insisting that all companies registered in the state must have a quota of people from a list of minorities. That list was itself pretty interesting. It included trans people, obviously.Because if you are after diversity of thinking, it is always good to have input from somebody whose body is being pumped full of oestrogen or testosterone.
The Californian list also included Pacific Islanders. I did the maths and worked out that given the demand for trans and Pacific Island board members vs the relative supply in the state, if you were a trans person or a Pacific Islander living in California, you should clear your diary for the 2020s, because you’ll be shuttling from board meeting to board meeting with never an hour for yourself.
Personally, I had expected this diversity obsession to remain fixed on high-status professions. Because it was noticeable that, for example, while the vast preponderance of road-layers who mix the tarmac to sometimes fill in the nation’s potholes are men, there is yet to be an outcry along the lines of ‘none of us are free until women are made to lay more tarmac’. Now it seems that the age is indeed even madder than I thought.
This is why we now have the idea that even train driving must be diversified. Take the words of Zoey Hudson, who is the head of talent, diversity and inclusion at Southern Railway. You may not have known that such a role existed, but it does, and Zoey is able to spout the usual verbiage that comes with her line of work. As she told the BBC, diversity ‘freshens’ the rail network. ‘It’s really important that we have diversity of thinking within the railway, which is as important as diversity of ethnicity. It brings creativity.’
For my part, I’m not sure I want much creativity in my train drivers. In fact I prefer them to be slightly plodding, uncreative types. Loyal, punctual, good in a crisis: these are the sort of qualities that I look for before boarding the 7.48 to Totnes. But creativity?
Happily for their own career prospects, a diversity officer’s work is never done. Because only one in ten British train drivers is a woman, it seems that Zoey and her colleagues are also on a mission to push more women into the railways. It’s something to do, I suppose, but there is a rather glorious perversity in the idea of persuading women to qualify for a profession that is about to go fully automated. And what will all those creative female train drivers do then, desperate as they will remain for the thrill of the railway while their profession goes driverless?
Let me show my own cards: I don’t believe any of this. I think the whole thing is bunk. This desire to concentrate on stories where middle-aged white men can be cast as blocking the way for everyone else seems a deliberate policy not just of highlighting but of demeaning and demoralising anyone who belongs to what in Britain is still the majority. There is nothing wrong with being white and male. And in a country which is still predominantly white, you would indeed expect white people to be the majority in many industries, as they are in the general population. If you go to India you will find an awful lot of Indian people, and China is strikingly Chinese. But none of these countries have their majority populations addressed as though their very existence is some sort of affront to minorities.
The latest phrase to wheedle its way into the corporate world is ‘global majority’. While job advertisements in Britain used to ask for people from ethnic minorities to step forward, this has been flipped. ‘Ethnic minority’ has become ‘global majority’. If you think that has a slightly menacing air to it, you’d be right – that’s the point. As I have often said, none of this is about justice, equality or letting talent fly.
Donald Trump is joined by female athletes as he signs the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order (Getty images)
I thought Donald Trump was a woman-hater? The Guardian told us he’s a ‘far-right misogynist’ whose return to the White House would strike ‘visceral horror’ into the hearts of women everywhere. He’s the ‘misogynist in chief’, said CNN. Perhaps someone could explain, then, why he just signed an executive order in favour of women’s rights while surrounded by a joyous throng of beaming girls?
The scenes in the White House yesterday were extraordinary. Trump signed an order titled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’. It commands every educational institution and athletic association that receives federal funding to keep blokes, however they identify, away from female sports. A swarm of sportswomen and giddy schoolgirls watched as Trump put pen to paper. They whooped and cheered. Their glee was infectious.
The order is searingly feminist. It’s a manifesto against misogyny. Allowing biological males to compete against women is ‘demeaning, unfair and dangerous’, it says. It robs women and girls of the ‘equal opportunity’ to ‘excel in competitive sports’. This madness ends right now, Trump decreed. No longer will the women and girls of America suffer such ‘endangerment, humiliation and silencing’.
If I had a bra I’d burn it in solidarity with this momentous blow for women’s liberty. Everyone with a moral conscience – or just a GCSE in biology – knows it is nuts to let men box women and sprint against women and even use women’s changing rooms. Yet all of that happened in the holy name of transgenderism. Born males punched women, stole their gold medals and swanned about in their changing rooms, and we were all expected to say: ‘Yay! Trans rights!’
America is liberating itself from such lunacy. Courtesy of the ‘misogynist in chief’, female sports are now for females only. Their locker-rooms, too: Trump’s order insists that ‘all-female locker-rooms’ be ‘affirmatively protected’ from the presence of men, thus ensuring ‘privacy’ for women and girls. No wonder those girls in the White House looked so sunny and elated: no longer will they suffer the indignity of sharing their sports fields and changing areas with hulking teenage boys.
It feels like we are witnessing the restoration of reason. Where the previous administration sang the praises of a male TikToker for ‘living authentically’ as a ‘girl’ – I’m not making this up – the new administration fights for the right of real girls to enjoy dude-free sports and spaces. Yet we’re meant to believe Joe Biden’s government was lovely and liberal while Trump’s is borderline fascist.Sorry, we’re not buying it anymore.
America is marching from the left’s dark age of cranky moral relativism into the blinking sunshine of rationality. We will no longer overlook the ‘fundamental biological truth’ of sex, says Trump’s order. America, it says, will rebuild ‘fairness [and] dignity’ for women and girls and stand up for ‘truth’ itself. It’s a mini-enlightenment, the euphoric knocking down of the post-truth, post-sex mania of identity politics that spread like a contagion through the ruling classes of the Western world.
Of course, some still cling to their neo-religious convictions. Behold the BBC headline accusing Trump of ‘banning transgender women from female sports’. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral distortion. Trump is not attacking ‘trans women’ – he’s defending women. Imagine how much of the Kool-Aid you’d need to have swigged to think it’s a bad thing to state biological facts and do right by womankind. Dressing up a defence of women’s liberty as an assault on ‘trans rights’ is precisely how we got into this mess in the first place.
It is a testament to the madness of our historic moment that it feels revolutionary to hear a world leader say ‘boys and girls are different’ – a truth even our benighted ancestors of the Stone Age knew. But here we are. Of course, Trump did not arrive at his pro-woman position all by himself. Heroic figures like the American swimmer Riley Gaines, our very own Sharron Davies, tennis legend Martina Navratilova, organisations like Fair Play for Women and many others have been beating the drum for women’s sports for years. They were defamed as bigots, fools and phobes, yet they persevered, motored by a belief that girls deserve a fair shot at sport. Their tenacity paid off. Things are changing.
But Trump said ‘Grab ’em by the pussy!’, some will cry. I don’t care. I really don’t. I prefer to judge leaders by their actions in the here and now rather than by some secretly recorded crap they spouted literally 19 years ago. Yesterday, Trump did more for women with one swipe of his pen than many of his pussy-hatted critics have ever done. To see what it means, just look at the faces of those girls who surrounded him.
On Wednesday evening, a man threw a fragmentation grenade into a café in Grenoble, leaving 15 people injured.
The following day, an Afghan shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ drove his car into a crowd in Munich and injured more than two dozen.
The previous week in Brussels, two men strolled through a metro station firing bursts from Kalashnikovs – one of several shootings that day in the Belgian capital, which wounded three people.
It is believed that Wednesday’s attack in Grenoble was the latest in the drugs war being fought across the country by rival cartels from North Africa. Last year, I described Grenoble as ‘one of the most dangerous places in France’, although there are other contenders.
Marseille, for example, where in the past two years scores of people have been killed by the cartels. Or Paris, where last month a 14-year-old boy was murdered for his phone.
Initially, some media reported that Elias had been stabbed with a knife after refusing to hand over his telephone to a 17-year-old. This week, his family issued a statement accusing the press agency that broke the story of misinformation. Their ‘terrified’ son had handed over his phone, but the mugger killed him anyway – not with a knife, but with a machete. ‘The real difficulty is to understand the society in which we now live,’ said the parents. ‘It is totally beyond our grasp.’
The steady disintegration of European society this century is beyond the grasp of most people. A minority remain in a state of denial, jabbering ad nauseam that diversity is Europe’s great strength.
Really? Tell that to the four people who were stabbed by an Egyptian in the Italian city of Rimini on New Year’s Eve, or the young women who were assaulted in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo on the same day. One of the women told reporters that the 40-strong mob of non-European men shouted ‘vaffanculo Italia’ (‘fuck off, Italy’) as they encircled their victims.
It is not just Italy that these people hate – it is the West in general. They are westernophobes.
Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls in Southport last year and boasted to the police who arrested him that he was ‘so glad those kids are dead … it makes me happy.’
We are told that Rudakubana wasn’t an Islamist, and nor was Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the Saudi who drove his car into a throng of Christmas shoppers in Magdeburg last December, killing six and injuring 300. In a message posted online prior to the attack, al-Abdulmohsen declared: ‘If Germany wants a war, we will fight it… If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride.’
It appears that he killed because he hated Germany, its people and their way of life.
The ISIS terror cell that massacred 130 Parisians in 2015 did so because they lived – in the words of the statement released by ISIS after the atrocity – in ‘the capital of abominations and perversion’. They targeted bars and a rock concert because they regarded them as emblems of Western decadence.
A month after the Paris attack, in Cologne, scores of women celebrating the new year were assaulted by men who had recently arrived in Germany after Angela Merkel’s open invitation.
For some of these men, German women were worthless – an attitude shared by the Pakistani men in England who for decades have raped and abused white girls and women because they considered them ‘trash’.
In response to this week’s attack in Munich, Alice Weidel, leader of the AfD, asked: ‘Will this go on forever?’
There is certainly an air of resignation among some European leaders. In one bloody week in October 2023, an Islamist murdered a French school teacher in Arras, and another gunned down two Swedes in Brussels. Emmanuel Macron responded by declaring: ‘All European states are vulnerable … It’s the vulnerability that goes with democracies, states governed by the rule of law, where you have individuals who, at some point, may decide to commit the worst.’
But hasn’t this vulnerability been exacerbated dramatically by a continent that has given up controlling its borders?
It was certainly a defeatist message – one which echoed that of Manuel Valls in 2016, when he was Prime Minister of France. ‘Times have changed,’ he said, shortly after an Islamist had slaughtered 86 people in Nice. ‘France should learn to live with terrorism.’
Why have times changed? It took an American, JD Vance, to explain why in his speech to the Munich Security Conference. Having first offered his thoughts and prayers to those injured in the attack in the city 24 hours earlier, Vance noted that this wasn’t the first attack of its kind in Europe. ‘How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?’ said Vance. ‘No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.’
So why are they here? Because, said Vance, ‘of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent.’
Europe is faced with a choice. It can follow Vance’s advice and change course, or it can carry on doing nothing, as Valls proposed, and learn to live with terrorism. This will require stoicism and a little luck – that next time a man drives a car into a crowd, you are not among them, and that the café you frequent is not a target of a drugs cartel.
One eyewitness to the attack in Grenoble remarked to reporters: ‘Guns, trafficking – Grenoble isn’t a good place to live.’ But where is, in Europe, these days?
Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, every new US administration has been judged on its first hundred days, but it is in the first 24 hours, with a flurry of executive orders and memorandums, that a president sets the tone for the coming four years. The first 24 hours hint at nine themes that will define Donald Trump’s second administration.
Trump is determined to settle scores
Theme one: Trump II will see ‘America First’ placed at the heart of White House policy even more so than during Trump I.
Among the memorandums issued from the Oval Office after noon on Monday was one outlining an ‘America First trade policy’, a revival of Trump I positions linking trade and national security, emphasising the interests of American workers and manufacturers, and interrogating Chinese trade practices and infringement of US intellectual property. Similarly, there was a memorandum revoking US participation in the OECD’s global tax deal, which Trump’s people regard as an infringement on US sovereignty and economically harmful to American enterprise.
‘America First’ will not be about trade alone. One executive order undertook to ‘put the interests of the United States and the American people first’ in negotiating international agreements on climate change, which ‘must not unduly or unfairly burden the United States’. This order re-withdraws the US from the Paris climate agreement, Trump having taken America out during his first term and Biden having taken it back in. It also revokes American assent and funding to all accords under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Foreign policy, too, will be anchored in what Trump perceives to be US national priorities. An executive order instructed the Secretary of State to ‘champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first’ in foreign policy. Another executive order paused all foreign assistance for ninety days, instructed reviews into current spending commitments and stated that only those ‘fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States’ would be restored.
Theme two: Trump intends to enforce America’s borders and reverse the tide of illegal immigration.
Among the pile of immigration-related missives fired out from behind the Resolute desk was a proclamation recognising mass illegal entry via the US-Mexico border as an ‘invasion’, and another proclamation barring entry into the United States by anyone involved in this incursion. In addition, there was an executive order providing for the building of a wall along the border, prevention of illegal entry into the country, and the detention and deportation of unlawful aliens. A further executive order undertook to ‘faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens, particularly those aliens who threaten the safety or security of the American people’. This will be done by hiring more enforcement officers, identifying and deporting illegal aliens, denying government benefits to illegals and refusing federal funds for sanctuary cities.
To underscore how seriously Trump takes the issue, he penned an executive order commanding the US Armed Forces to ‘prioritise the protection of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the United States along our national borders’. This reframes illegal immigration as a national defence issue and not only a border control issue. This was girded by an executive order denying citizenship documents or recognition to anyone born in the United States to a mother who was in the country temporarily or unlawfully. This addresses right-wing concerns about ‘anchor babies’, children whose parents entered the US illegally to give birth and gain for their offspring and themselves the benefits of American citizenship.
Theme three: National security, public safety and refugee screening will be leading priorities.
Trump has always been a law-and-order guy and he clearly intends to step this up over the next four years. He drew up a memorandum reorganising the National Security Council and signed an executive order designatingMexican drug cartels and criminal gangs including MS-13 as foreign terrorist organisations, allow for tougher measures to be taken in countering them.
The threat to public safety from dangerous people who enter the country as refugees was addressed by an executive order suspending the US Refugee Admissions Programme, meaning no further refugees will be admitted except on a case-by-case basis if jointly agreed to by the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security. Every 90 days, the suspension will be reconsidered to see if Homeland Security is confident that the programme can be resumed in a manner that prioritises public safety and national security, will admit ‘only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate’, and would preserve resources for US citizens.
In a similar vein, there was an executive order pledging to protect US citizens from ‘aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes’. This will mostly take the form of enhancing visa vetting and screening of refugees. Trump is an ardent believer in capital punishment and so it was unsurprising to see an executive order restoring the federal death penalty. Thirteen federal prisoners were given a lethal injection during Trump I but the Biden administration paused further executions. The order instructs the Attorney General during Trump II to pursue capital punishment in more cases and to seek federal jurisdiction in state crimes that involve the murder of a law enforcement officer or in which the offender is an illegal alien.
‘America First’ will not be about trade alone
Theme four: The second Trump administration is committed to undoing Joe Biden’s legacy in the White House.
Biden used executive powers to wipe the slate clean of Trumpism when he took over and now Trump will return the favour. He signed an executive order rescinding dozens of Biden-era executive orders, including those relating to racial equity, gender identity, climate change, immigration, refugee resettlement, pandemic response, and Biden’s sanctions against Israelis living in Judea and Samaria. Among the initiatives to fall foul of Trump’s slashing pen are the White House Gender Policy Council, the Climate Change Support Office, and the President’s Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement.
A major theme of Trump’s election campaign was blaming the cost of living crisis on Biden’s tax and spend policies, which Trump deemed inflationary. As such, he inked a memorandum directing the federal government to provide price relief, including by reducing the cost of housing, increasing supply, scrapping ‘unnecessary’ healthcare expenses, encouraging the unemployed into the workforce and doing away with climate policies that drive up gasoline and grocery costs.
The frequency with which political control of the executive branch changes means there is a see-sawing quality to US policy. Trump lodged an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organisation. (He originally withdrew in 2020 in response to its handling of the Covid pandemic and the undue influence of China over the organisation, but Biden reversed that move.) More controversially, even among otherwise sympathetic right-wingers, was an executive order pausing enforcement of Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the legislation which effectively bans TikTok in the United States. Trump’s team have signalled scepticism towards concerns that the video and music app is harmful to the United States to the advantage of Communist China. Many who generally praise Trump’s national security believe he is perilously wrong on this one.
Theme five: Understanding how the issue motivates his base and pries away moderate voters from Democrats, Trump will push back against ‘woke’.
No one is about to mistake Donald Trump for a radical feminist, yet his executive order making it US government policy to ‘recognise two sexes, male and female’ affirms a fundamental principle of gender-critical feminism. The directive requires federal agencies to ‘enforce laws governing sex-based rights, protections, opportunities, and accommodations to protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes’, putting down in black and white that women’s single-sex spaces should be safeguarded. Another executive order revoked diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and racial preferences in the federal government, while an additional executive order promised to protect freedom of expression and enjoined the federal government from participating in any abridgement of speech rights.
A little further down the hierarchy of culture war battlefronts, Trump set out an executive order instructing federal agencies to ‘honour the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans in our nation’s rich past’ when naming natural landmarks and works of art. The order reverses Barack Obama’s 2015 directive which renamed Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in the United States, ‘Denali’, the name traditionally assigned to the peak by local indigenous people. But the order will garner most attention for its announcement that the United States will now refer to the Gulf of Mexico as ‘the Gulf of America’. Meanwhile, there was also a memorandum ordering federal officials to ensure that all new public buildings ‘respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States’. This is one area where classical conservatives and the very online MAGA movement are in agreement.
Theme six: Energy security will be a key area of action for Trump II.
Monday saw an executive order declaring a national energy emergency and directing federal agencies to expedite exploration and production of domestic oil and gas resources. There as also an executive order encouraging ‘energy exploration and production’; safeguarding ‘economic and national security and military preparedness’ by ensuring ‘an abundant supply of reliable energy’; cancelling Biden’s electric vehicle mandate; reviewing any agency action or policy that might impede energy security; speeding up oil and gas permits; and withdrawing funding for the Green New Deal. That represents a veritable bonfire of Biden administration policies and could also be designed to inflict the maximum pain and anxiety among climate-alarmed liberls. To make matters worse for them, there was an executive order allowing gas exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, something environmentalists have fought against for decades. Trump also sent out a memorandum suspending any further permits for wind farms on the US outer continental shelf and another one ordering that water reserves be directed to southern California rather than to the protection of marine life.
Theme seven: Having learned the lessons of his first term, Trump is putting his people in key positions for his second term.
There were the usual memorandums appointing acting Cabinet secretaries, nominating full-term Cabinet secretaries, nominating sub-Cabinet appointees, and designating chairmen of various federal commissions. Such things are run of the mill for every incoming administration. But there was also a memorandum decreeing that the process of security-clearing Trump appointees to sensitive roles within the President’s executive office must take no more than six months. The memo blames ‘a backlog created by the Biden Administration’ and a ‘broken security clearance process’ for Trump appointees not having received access to the White House to take up their new posts. Allied to this was an executive order strengthening accountability for federal employees in policy-influencing positions, reflecting Trump’s grievances about senior agency staff attempting to resist the MAGA agenda during his first term.
Theme eight: Trump plans not only to stack government with MAGA people but to reform the size and structure of government.
As expected, there was an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and a memorandum implementing a hiring freeze, which will prevent federal departments and agencies from filling vacancies or creating new positions. (Defence, immigration, national security and public safety agencies are exempt.) Reflecting the innovation-minded thinking of Trump’s inner circle, another memorandum instructedthat no further regulations be created unless approved by the Trump administration. This was accompanied by a memorandum rescinding any arrangements allowing federal employees to work from home, an executive order reforming the federal hiring process so that it prioritises merit, ability and commitment to government efficiency over immutable characteristics, and a memorandum shaking up the organisation and performance of senior federal staff.
Theme nine: Trump is determined to settle scores.
Donald Trump is one of life’s great grudge-bearers and his initial executive actions reflected this trait. There was a proclamation pardoning or commuting the sentences of those involved in the January 6 insurrection and an executive order directing that the US flag always be flown at full-staff on inauguration day. (Old Glory was flying half-staff on the morning of Trump’s inauguration in honour of the late Jimmy Carter.)
These were joined by an executive order mandating an investigation of the Biden administration for a ‘systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents’, including by setting law enforcement and intelligence agencies on them. This reflects Trump’s belief that investigations and prosecutions brought against him and his associates were a form of political warfare waged by the previous White House and its ideological fellow travellers.
The biggest score Trump wants to settle is one he believes played a role in shifting public opinion ahead of the 2020 president election. He issued an executive order addressing the political misuse of US intelligence services, which revokes the security clearances of former officials who signed a letter during the 2020 election dismissing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. It also withdraws clearance from John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, for a 2019 book ‘rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government’.
Donald Trump didn’t get much done in his first term, but he appears to mean business this time. His first day back in the Oval Office proves it, and he has another 1,460 days to put his agenda into effect.
