On the 20th of January 2021, a political era came to an end. After four years in charge, Donald Trump refused to shake the new president’s hand and attend his inauguration ceremony, ignoring unwritten rules of respect between political adversaries. All the complaints, lawsuits and appeals carried forth in several battleground states by his campaign’s lawyers in the hope of overturning the election results have amounted to nothing. The end of this political era in the United States seems set in stone. But transforming the cultural context underpinning Trump’s election in November 2016 and his subsequent presidency will be a longer, more delicate, complex and circuitous process. 

Donald Trump’s four years in office have been marked by endless taboos being broken, and this process of disruption continuously being legitimised. The White House disputed the need to combat climate change, legitimising the US’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Doubt was cast on all evidence about global warming and its anthropogenic causes, expounded by scientists for decades.

Trump’s White House forcefully stopped migrants from crossing borders. It legitimised arresting them and keeping them in cages. Tearing families apart, inhumanely separating children from their parents is legitimate, it said.

Trump’s White House legitimised the economic principle of mors tua vita mea (your death, my life), an isolationist and protectionist outlook taking the form of import tariffs, trade wars and an “us against them” mentality. The old neoliberal tactic of tax cuts for the rich made a comeback. So too did the never-proven “trickle-down” effect whereby if the rich can invest, do business and produce more easily, sooner or later the less-advantaged will also reap the benefits.

Trump’s White House legitimised the idea that international UN bodies can essentially be boycotted if they don’t accept the American way of doing things. This happened with UNESCO, with the finalisation of a rupture whose seeds were planted in the Obama years, albeit for different reasons. It happened with the World Health Organisation, accused of spreading lies about the coronavirus, in an attempt to cover up Washington’s own political and administrative failures in managing the pandemic. It happened with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. These were all attempts to destroy multilateralism: political thought and action driven by egotism and arrogance.

Trump’s White House, essentially, legitimised “Trumpism”. An expression of those parts of the country that are still entirely inward-looking, swayed by the false myth of the American dream, dripping with individualism and warped patriotism. Still invested in an ever-more-questionable idea of American exceptionalism. These are the real problems that Joe Biden will have to confront. The challenge is to start a cultural transition, not just a political one, by appealing directly to the over 74 million people who voted for Trumpism.

2017 – Year one

During his first twelve months in charge, Trump’s approach proved to be vastly different from that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, a Democrat. On the 1st of June 2017, he announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, resolutely confirming his stance as a climate change sceptic. The process for the full withdrawal took over three years, ending – probably by coincidence – on election day 2020.

In practice, however, at all the UN climate conferences that took place throughout the Republican’s presidency, the United States blatantly tried to slow down the ecological transition required to save the world from global warming.

Support for fossil fuels

In his first year in office, Trump pushed Congress to revoke an Obama-era ban on hunting bears and wolves. He then announced that oil exploration would resume in the Arctic Ocean and drastically reduced the size of two protected areas in Utah. Trump also revived two major oil pipeline projects: Keystone XL and Dakota Access. Additionally, he abolished the Clean Power Plan, a piece of legislation that required power stations to reduce their CO2 emissions by 32 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels.

The leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was assigned to a fossil-fuel proponent, Scott Pruitt. On the 20th of April 2018, Pruitt was replaced by Andrew R. Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, who still holds the position today. On the 24th of August 2017, Trump signed a recommendation aimed at increasing mining exploration.

A hard line on migrants and the LGBTQ+ community

The Republican president also made headlines with his migration policy. Trump imposed the so-called “Muslim Ban”, permanently prohibiting entry into the United States for the citizens of seven countries labelled as “hostile”. He also withdrew the US from the UN Global Compact on Migration. Subsequently, the Trump administration set to work on dismantling so-called Obamacare healthcare reforms initiated by his predecessor. The White House website’s page on LGBTQ+ rights was also removed.

On the 20th of June 2018, the US President had to backtrack on the forced separation of children from their parents at migrant detention facilities near the US-Mexico border. Widespread outrage from around the world led Trump to sign an order that partially addressed the problem. The provision, however, still permitted the separation of adults, and it had no effect on families (including children) who were separated before it was signed.

Israel, Iran and UNESCO: a policy of disruption

In foreign policy terms, Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, transferring the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City, caused a major stir, especially in Palestine. The president then refused to ratify the Iran nuclear deal, one of Obama’s major foreign policy legacies. The US also left the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) calling it “an anti-Israel body”.

2018 – Year two

Over the course of his second year as President, Trump’s approach remained combative. Those who had been expecting a more diplomatic political strategy were disappointed.

Tax reform, tariffs, protectionism

Towards the end of 2017, the Senate approved a tax reform bill that drastically reduced taxes for many US citizens starting the following year. This 1.4-trillion-dollar cut over ten years overwhelmingly benefited the super-rich. It has been calculated that the 1 per cent of citizens with an income above 500,000 dollars saved 60 billion dollars in taxes in 2019. This same amount of savings was spread across the 54 per cent of Americans who earn between 20,000 and 100,000 dollars a year.

Over the course of 2018, Trump also embraced a protectionist approach to foreign trade. In January,