Trump: the first month
“I can do this every week,” read one of the many hand-made placards on the February 4th London demonstration against Donald Trump. That may be necessary, given the blizzard of announcements from Donald Trump in his first month alone.
It’s easy to laugh at the President, but you don't get through the most rigorous
selection process for political office in the world by being an idiot. The markets love
him. The Republican Party is allowing him free rein, ratifying even the most divisive f his Cabinet appointees.
To sustain and build his base, Trump has to continue to pose as a political outsider, continually frustrated by the Washington bureaucracy and judiciary. Take his executive order banning refugees from seven majority Muslim countries that was stopped by the courts. Trump can see plenty of political capital here: the pictures of happy Syrians making it into the USA feed his narrative that the rest of the world is laughing at the US. So the judiciary that ordered this overturn are “fake judges“, an enemy within. This phoney sense of victimhood helps build a grassroots movement, the key thing still missing from the Trump phenomenon when people compare it to fascism.
