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Trump's first 12 months: The global response to a year of ‘America First’
Donald Trump was sworn in a year ago this week. Seven JC correspondents consider his policies
January 19, 2018 15:37
By JC Reporter
7 min read
Donald Trump was sworn in a year ago this week. Seven JC correspondents consider his policies
January 19, 2018 15:37By JC Reporter
It has been a full year since US President Donald Trump took the oath office and became the 45th president of the United States.
In this special interactive report JC correspondents from around the world assess his impact on their region.
On November 8, 2016, barely one in four American Jews voted for Donald Trump. Little that has occurred since the President took office one year ago will have convinced the vast majority who rejected him that they made the wrong call.
The Jewish community has historically leaned heavily to the Democrats, but Mr Trump committed a series of offensive blunders throughout the campaign — including telling a meeting of Jewish Republicans “you are not going to support me because I don’t want your money” — which shored up backers for Hillary Clinton.
The presence of a number of Jews in high-profile positions in the administration, including Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who serve as presidential advisers, has not deterred them.
Mr Trump had, for instance, been in office for less than a month when the White House issued a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day which failed to mention Jews.
Weeks later, the President responded angrily to questions from a Jewish reporter about his tardy response to a series of antisemitic incidents, proclaiming himself “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life”.
However, it was probably Mr Trump’s suggestion last August that some of the neo-Nazis who marched through Charlottesville were “very fine people”, which confirmed a pattern of behaviour that appeared to go beyond mere insensitivity. As his approval ratings have tumbled, the President seems ever more determined to maintain the backing of his far-right base. Of course, not all of Mr Trump’s supporters are antisemites, but most antisemites appear to be Trump fans.
Thus, despite warnings from the Anti-Defamation League that his campaign slogan “America First” carried “undercurrents of antisemitism and bigotry” thanks to its use by pre-war Nazi sympathisers, Mr Trump steadfastly refused to drop it.
When it comes to a choice between his own interests and those of the Jewish community, as in all other matters, this president’s guiding principle is Trump First.
Last month, Donald Trump was resolute that he was not “taking a position of any final-status issues”, despite recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Now, he has infuriated the Palestinians by declaring the city “off the table”.
With this, he is shutting doors that he need not have closed. There was nothing to stop him earmarking the city’s east as capital of a future Palestinian state and it is an option that he could have left open.
There might be a Trump master-plan around that uses leverage to leave everyone receptive to his planned “ultimate deal”, or he may just be throwing his weight around with a vague notion that strong leadership will work.
It is too early to know which, or whether the truth is somewhere between these two possibilities. Given the present Palestinian fury, it is also too early to say whether he has given the kiss of death to the peace process or might yet surprise everyone with a US-Saudi peace plan.
I predict that the Palestinians will, after expressing much more anger and making many more threats, once again sit around a table with the Americans and the Israelis.
But the most important thing for Israelis about Mr Trump’s first year has actually been his unsettling actions on Syria.
Over the past three months, the Trump administration has thrashed out details to broaden Syrian ceasefire arrangements to apply in the border area near Israel. It may rein in militant activity on Israel’s doorstep but it is likely such activity will continue very close by. The ceasefire could give the illusion of a solved problem while allowing Iran-backed militias to create a long “corridor” of land where it has leverage, running from Iran to the Israeli border.
Mr Trump’s ceasefire could potentially make Israelis, especially those near the northern border, far less safe. It would certainly knock the issue of whether the US embassy is in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv off the agenda.
The Trump White House has broken with campaign rhetoric on Iran and Saudi Arabia and further damaged US relations with Turkey, a key Nato ally.
Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani mocked Mr Trump just this weekend for not delivering on his election promise to scrap the 2015 deal brokered under President Barrack Obama, which lifted sanctions on Iran in return for restrictions on its nuclear programme.
“It’s been one year since Trump has been trying to kill [the deal] and hasn’t been successful” Mr Rouhani declared, saying the US “has failed to disrupt international obligations”.
Mr Trump chose this weekend to waive sanctions on Tehran despite threats to withdraw from the deal.
Ending the agreement — which Mr Trump previously criticised as “the worst deal I think I’ve ever seen negotiated” — was a major part of the Republican Middle East platform.
His administration also moved away from tough election talk on regional ally Saudi Arabia. He made a warm visit to the kingdom on his first trip abroad despite previously slamming it for its human rights record and calling for “reimbursement” in return for continued US support.
But analysts say Riyadh and Washington share strategic interests and an anti-Iranian stance.
Elsewhere, US support for Kurdish militants against Isis in Syria has further soured already tense ties with Nato partner Turkey. The Trump White House continued Mr Obama’s policy of supplying arms, despite Ankara’s concerns about links to the PKK, a Kurdish militant group that Turkey and the US consider a terrorist group.
Former Colombian president Ernesto Samper Pizano summed up the Latin American mood with the words: “The White House does not have a policy towards the region. What it does have is a policy against the region.”
On January 25 2017, just days after assuming power, Mr Trump signed an executive order to build a wall along the 2,000-mile US border with Mexico to reduce immigration.
He also announced he would roll back the agreement with Cuba signed by Barack Obama and the island’s leader, Raúl Castro, which had ended a diplomatic rift lasting almost 60 years.
But both countries still maintain embassies in each other’s countries despite mysterious “attacks” that inflicted hearing loss and headaches on US Embassy staff in Havana.
The Trump administration did not contradict Cuba’s claim that it had nothing to do with the incidents and Cuba even permitted the FBI to investigate.
The third major Latin American target of White House wrath was Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, which Mr Trump regards as a brutal dictatorship. The Trump administration imposed sanctions and travel bans on a score of Venezuelan officials and barred its government from raising funds in the United States.
Even moderate Latin American leaders were horrified when Mr Trump suggested last August that he was considering a “military option”.
But President Trump reserved his most unpleasant verbal insults for the days leading up to his presidency’s first anniversary, when he described Haiti and El Salvador as “sh*thole countries”.
Haitians, still reeling from a devastating earthquake in 2010, were outraged. The ill-disguised lack of respect was seen by many in Latin America as setting the tone for his general contempt for the people of the region.
Attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe are still strongly on the socially conservative side and Mr Trump’s disdain for political correctness has found a receptive public here.
Last year, Mihail Neamtu, a Romanian politician from the opposition National Liberal Party, published a book called “The Trump phenomenon and the profound America”.
Derided in liberal circles as fawning and crude, the book represents a strong strand of public opinion that does not necessarily agree with Mr Trump on all issues but sees him as an alternative to a European Union view dominated by what they see as an increasingly alien liberalism.
As such, former Soviet bloc countries have shown little inclination to criticise Donald Trump in the same way as some in the West.
Last month, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania all abstained in a UN General Assembly vote on a resolution denouncing Mr Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Czech President Milos Zeman, now running for re-election, went even further by showing a willingness to move his country’s embassy to Jerusalem. He also attacked the European Union as “cowards” for criticising the US president’s attitude.
The leader of Romania’s ruling party Liviu Dragnea, who is also the speaker of parliament, also mentioned the possibility of his country moving its embassy to Jerusalem, although President Klaus Iohannis later poured cold water on the thought for now.
While Mr Trump’s latest alleged comments about immigration from “sh*thole” countries have raised howls of protest all over the world, the same former communist countries in Europe have been rather quiet on the matter.
Many politicians and indeed ordinary people in these countries share the same reticence about immigration.
States like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been reprimanded by the EU for refusing to share the burden of taking in refugees, mainly from Muslim countries in the Middle East.
By Henry Benjamin and Michael Daventry
Australia’s relationship with the new White House got off to a rocky start from the first phone call in January between Donald Trump and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
A transcript of the conversation leaked later that year showed Mr Trump’s anger at having to inherit a refugee exchange agreement that was struck between Mr Turnbull and Barack Obama.
Mr Trump used words like “ridiculous”, “rotten”, and “stupid”, and said Mr Turnbull, on immigration policy, was “worse than I am”.
Relations between the two countries has improved since then, but for some Jews in Australia the rise of antisemitism in the United States has become a significant concern since Mr Trump took office.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s president, Anton Block, told the JC: ”[We] enthusiastically welcomed the president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the nuanced statement that accompanied the announcement.
“However, one cannot appraise the Trump presidency without also acknowledging the dangerous rise of white supremacism and far-right antisemitism in the US that either contributed to or merely capitalised on the momentum with which President Trump came to power.
“We have detected a similar rise in far-right antisemitism in Australia.”
