Unprecedented and unpredictable: this is how US President Donald Trump's administration has repeatedly been labelled during its first term. Beyond the frequent tweets and bombastic rhetoric, however, lie a more conventional four years, as the United States navigated an ever-evolving international reality, compounded by a global pandemic and one of the deepest economic recessions in over a century.
US President Donald Trump’s migration discourse has been put to a tough test, that of a global pandemic. But the “build-a-wall” rhetoric has emerged more resilient than one would have imagined. Even while the United States face a healthcare emergency, an economic crisis, and protests are sweeping across the country, Trump has managed to not put aside his focus on curbing migration; quite the contrary.
From the moment he first declared his candidacy for the presidency of the United States on a strongly nationalist platform promising to “make America great again,” Donald Trump has been dogged by accusations that he is too cozy with explicitly racist, fringe-right figures and movements. Periodically, critics have seized on phrases or images in Trump’s communications that they argue send subtle messages of encouragement or solidarity to Nazis and white supremacists.
“We will win this war”. In March of 2020, Donald Trump began referring to himself as a “wartime president”. After months of downplaying the threat of Covid-19 in the United States, he declared war against an invisible enemy: a so-called “China virus”.
Donald Trump’s decisions on May 30th regarding the G7 summit are remarkable. As a bundle of separate decisions, they do not reflect a strategy nor are they consistent or even coherent.
First, attempting to hold a live G7 summit with all the thousands of officials and media involved uncovers his attempt to use the summit as evidence of America open for business, which is premature at best, and highly manipulative, at worst.
The 2020 G7, the fourth of the Trump era, has been postponed to September. It is no coincidence: in the US, the novel coronavirus continues to take its toll (with over 110,000 deaths as of June 9th), unemployment has more than quadrupled from 3% to 13%, and George Floyd’s death two weeks ago has sparked racial and social protests that continue to this day. Hosting a G7 summit under these circumstances would have been extremely risky. Yet, paradoxically, Trump hoped to be able to pull it off until just a few days ago.
The 2020 U.S. election campaign will be the most bitter, acrimonious ever. Whether Trump is re-elected or not, America will emerge from the election even more divided, resentful, and changed.
Con la prima serie di audizioni pubbliche alla Commissione Intelligence della Camera dei Rappresentanti, è entrato nel vivo l’iter che porterà ad autorizzare la procedura d’impeachment del Presidente Trump. Il passaggio successivo sarà il dibattito al Senato e, salvo cataclismi non immaginabili, la successiva archiviazione, perché alla maggioranza di 67 senatori su 100 necessaria per “condannare” il presidente non si arriva oggi nemmeno vicino.
Campaigning on a nationalist vision of the United States as a country being misused by other countries, Donald Trump promised to bring upon significant changes to the international order. His primary tool for achieving this has been an abandonment of multilateral arrangements. Under Trump’s leadership, the US withdrew from the Universal Postal Union, the UNESCO, and has effectively blocked the dispute resolution mechanism of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Is Donald Trump right to impose tariffs on Beijing for lack of trading reciprocity? Is it true that tariffs have boosted the US economy? And what are the consequences of American tariffs for the European Union, Italy in particular? Against the backdrop of a stalemate in the US-China negotiations, ISPI analyses the motivations and reasons behind Trump’s tariffs, their effects and their most controversial aspects.
