‘Don’t worry, Donald Trump the candidate won’t be like Donald Trump the President’, they said. Well, so far, as far as we can tell, President Trump seems to be pretty much the same as Republican presidential nominee Trump. It’s as though Donald Trump is taking the cue for his presidency from an ‘evil villain starter kit’ meme.
In less than a week Trump has signed executive orders cutting funding for organisations offering abortions around the world, pulling out of a huge trade deal (the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)), laying the ground work for the rollback of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, moving forward on the controversial and contested Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelinesand changed the look of the Whitehouse website by removing LGBT and gender equality pages. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, has also announced to the world that Trump really does believe that he only lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because ‘millions of people voted illegally in the US election’, despite there being no evidence for this. It is expected that he will defiantly announce his policy cornerstone Great American Wall today, as well as ‘extreme’ vetting for people who enter the US from predominately Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa.
The reason why everyone was hoping Donald Trump would somehow change once he entered the Oval Office, metamorphosing from slithering politically incorrect larvae into a not-totally-terrifying albeit Republican butterfly, is because his campaign pledges were not only bombastic (and racist, and sexist and xenophobic) but potentially disruptive on a global scale.
On Friday Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, will sit down with Trump in the Oval Office and attempt to talk trade (among other things). May has queue jumped, wasted no time in bagging one of the first meeting slots with the new President and who could blame her? As if the fact that Trump is a raging misogynist wasn’t enough for May to navigate, there’s a lot riding on this meeting because of our old friend Brexit.
Donald Trump might say he thinks Brexit will ‘be great’ through his reality TV smile. He might croon that he wants to work with Britain and pose for photo opps in gold elevators with our self-appointed leader of the opposition, Nigel Farage, but, at the end of the day, Trump has made himself very clear: he’s just not that into free trade. He made a point of reaffirming this in his ‘America First’ inauguration speech when he vowed to protect America ‘from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs’. As far as he’s concerned ‘protection will lead to great prosperity and strength’.
Because we are leaving the European single market, the pressure really is on to secure a decent deal with Trump’s America. Theresa May says she’s not afraid to call the President out when he says or does something ‘unacceptable’but, somehow, she must balance that with keeping her place at the front of the trade queue despite Trump’s ‘America First’ mentality.
Theresa May must be bold but she’d be wrong to expect that Britain is going to get what we want, let alone what we need out of this meeting with Donald Trump. Indeed, Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, has already met with Trump in an attempt to convince him how great free trade is. Trump has since announced that he wanted out of the TPP and Abe can only hope to change his mind.
If there’s a ray of light breaking through this Trump shaped cloud, perhaps it’s that Hillary Clinton is very definitely not in jail. In fact, President Trump seemed pretty happy to see her at his inauguration. Then again, that’s the thing about Donald Trump, he wants to be liked. By everyone. He will say what he has to curry favour, charming former opponents, mouthing ‘great job’ at them in front of the world but, ultimately, when it comes down to business he only cares about one thing and that’s Donald Trump. So far he is, at least, consistent in that respect.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.