The current President of the United States may differ from his predecessor in many ways, but the most significant, and perhaps the one with the most repercussions, is the short-sighted nature of his decision-making. While President Obama was known and sometimes admonished for embracing Nobel Prize winner psychologist Daniel Kahneman's 'slow thinking' approach, the current President is reactive and impulsive, quick to throw punches with little regard for lasting consequences. While this has existed throughout Mr. Trump's electoral campaign, it is the groundwork he has begun to lay with not yet a fifth day in office. Strongly criticizing President Obama for having signed executive orders during his time in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has begun his own term doing much the same and at a near hyperbolic rate.
An executive order to advance the Keystone and Dakota pipelines promises a quick fix for more American jobs, but these jobs are short-term, finished in the two to three years it will take to build the pipelines, with little to no personnel needed for oversight. Instead there emerge grave and lasting repercussions to the environment and to tribal lands, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Greenpeace, among others. As of yet, no federal agency has conducted an environmental impact assessment of the entire pipeline, and with Mr. Trump declaring that "environmentalism is out of control," expecting an impartial and comprehensive review seems a stretch.
On the anniversary of the landmark abortion ruling Roe v Wade, Mr. Trump re-instated the Mexico City protocol: a global gag rule on abortion, preventing any organization worldwide receiving American funds to perform or mention abortion as a family planning method for women. While every Republican president since 1984 has enforced this protocol and every Democratic president has had it reinstated, we now live in an era where America stands alone in the developed Western world in restricting funding for abortion and repealing women's reproductive rights. A quick pleaser to the Republican right, preventing abortion has the opposite effect than intended: it ensures women will continue to access unsafe abortions, currently at 21.6 million globally per year. Women who do not have the means for more children will be further impoverished and unable to access their economic rights. Women will be prevented from choosing how to live their lives, empower their livelihoods and will be at the mercy of their partners, especially in countries where women also have little to no access to birth control or sexual health education. Women will die because of this rule. In an era where women's rights have been directly linked to economic and social development, where women's reproductive rights are understood as fundamental human rights by the UN, both short and longterm effects are abysmal.
In his inauguration speech, Mr. Trump articulated the fraught statement that now will be an era of "America first, America first." Such an isolationist view began in the 1940's, when groups of traditionalist Americans engaged in language and activity to dissuade the United States from entering the Second World War. The statements were heavily anti-semitic, and it is with some shock that Mr. Trump continues to use the same language today (although it may be that he has neither the knowledge or concern for this history). International co-operation has been fuelled by the end of the Second World War, when America assumed the role of international peacekeeper. Although Mr. Trump has chosen to portray the current state of his country in dark and pessimistic terms, the years since 1949 can widely be seen as an era of great American growth. An 'America first' trade plan ignores America's own history, when closed borders in the early 1900's caused an American 'glut', as mass production in farming and industry led to an overflow of goods that Americans could not consume. While there is much to be said, possibly in a future piece, about keeping enough jobs in-country to put a society to work (especially given Mr. Trump's incessant attacks on China), international trade also breeds co-operation and trust, hallmarks of a peaceful global arena. Isolationism, although attractively packaged with patriotic slogans, leads to fear and uncertainty in an international arena that is increasingly struggling with the negative effects of globalization and capitalism. Historically, the more fear and uncertainty, the more conflict.
