In the first hundred days of his previous term, Donald Trump signed 33 executive orders, but in his second term, he has already signed 60 in just the first month. The provisions in these decrees are so dramatic that some of them could have been enacted by any president on their own.
The news cycle is currently dominated by reports of conversations between Russia and Saudi Arabia to end the war in Ukraine, without involving Ukraine or other European nations. Events are unfolding at a dizzying pace, making even the most astonishing proposals – like buying Greenland or appropriating the Panama Canal – seem like yesterday’s news. The provisions for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants have already lost their shock value, and the plan to solve the longstanding conflict in Gaza by building tourist resorts, reminiscent of Disneyland or the Mayan Riviera, is all but forgotten. I won’t even get into the issues with China, tariffs, Iran, and Syria.
Given the sheer volume of news, I won’t delve into internal issues, such as the unconstitutionality of the White House directive to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in press releases, which has been denied to journalists from the Associated Press.
The president’s incredible industriousness is only matched by his ability to antagonize, to put it mildly, with his behavior towards political leaders ranging from Colombia, where he announced the deportation of its nationals, to Ukraine, where he recently stated that President Zelensky “doesn’t know how to negotiate and is incompetent.” This is not to mention his interference in the upcoming German elections via Elon Musk, who has also made accusations against Keir Starmer, or his criticism of the British premier’s energy policy regarding wind turbines in the North Sea. All this is in addition to his traditional confrontations with China and the more recent ones with members of the Atlantic Alliance.
No president has started their legislative mandate with such hyperactivity; in his first hundred days, Biden signed 42 decrees, and Obama signed 19. It appears that Donald Trump is giving credence to those who argue that he has adopted the principles of the 2025 presidential transition project (Project 2025) of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, directed by Paul Dans. The book “Mandate For Leadership: The Conservative Promise” – which Dans signs the preamble for – asserts that “history teaches us that the power of the President to implement his agenda achieves full meaning in the first days of mandate.”
Trump himself has denied this interpretation on multiple occasions, stating that his agenda responds solely to the interest of the American people, not a particular group or trend. However, it is true that his slogan of recovering the nation’s greatness has become a philosophy of mandate, and to achieve this objective, his proposal seems to be to establish a new world order, reorganizing – or perhaps destroying – the existing one.
For Europe, which was hoping for a reissue of a Democratic mandate in its internal jurisdiction, the new way of doing politics has caught it off guard, and it’s now trying to adjust to the rhythm of the new march, albeit with more words than results. It was Obama, not Trump, who first focused on the Asia-Pacific area as a world economic reference, to the detriment of the Atlantic axis. Obama also emphasized the need for greater European contribution to NATO coffers, relieving the economic burden on the United States.
European nations, caught up in their own provincial concerns and positioned in the dissipation of the aristocracy, have chosen to remain blind to the new geopolitical and economic reality that was unfolding. Now, they’re in a hurry. The question is whether they have the ability to remain united and form a common political, economic, military, and social front. Only in this way can the values of liberal democracies that have operated since the end of the 18th century counteract the new world reality where economic and political power go hand in hand – and I mean both China and the United States.
If this doesn’t happen, all Europeans will be left with is the right to complain and dream that, in two years – during the midterm elections in the United States – or within four years, in the presidential elections, there will be a political turn in that nation. Otherwise, the European future as a subject agent in the world scene will continue to be relativized if they do not assume that, beyond the reasons and ravings of the current president, the world of the 21st century is and will be different from the now long-awaited 20th century.
