One battle after another: Trump’s turbulent 21 months

{"text":[[{"start":7.03,"text":"In June last year, Donald Trump ordered thousands of National Guard troops on to the streets of Los Angeles. Washington DC, Portland, Chicago and Memphis were soon to follow."}],[{"start":19.2,"text":"At the time, it seemed like the defining event of his presidency. In the end, it was not even the defining event of the summer."}],[{"start":26.3,"text":"Since Trump returned to the White House, Americans have lived through so much head-spinning turbulence that the appearance of armed troops in US cities now feels like a historical footnote. Within a fortnight, the US was bombing Iran."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":40.81,"text":"As voters cast their ballots in this year’s midterm elections, the nation is taking stock of a frenetic presidency that has upended the basic conventions of American government and politics."}],[{"start":51.634,"text":"Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist from the University of California Berkeley, said Americans who did not vote for Trump were initially “shocked and awed — that is, disoriented and, in essence, disabled”."}],[{"start":64.72,"text":"“But my guess is that’s largely worn off, and ‘never-Trumpers’ will wake up and vote” in the midterms, she said."}],[{"start":70.64,"text":"Longtime observers of the White House have watched the first 21 months of Trump 2.0 with a mixture of horror, bemusement and incredulity."}],[{"start":79.84,"text":"His supporters say he is an iconoclast using radical means to topple a “rigged” system. They praise him for fulfilling his promises to close the US-Mexican border to immigrants, carry out mass deportations of foreigners in the US illegally and dismantle the “woke” green policies of his predecessor Joe Biden."}],[{"start":99.36,"text":"Opponents, alarmed by what they consider government over-reach, have run out of words to express their consternation."}],[{"start":104.41,"text":"“We’ve never had a president before with so little regard for the constitution and laws,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at Cal Berkeley."}],[{"start":115.28,"text":"For Americans weighing up their options ahead of Tuesday’s election, the overriding issues are clear. Polls show deep public anger over a war against Iran that has fuelled a drastic increase in fuel prices and raised the cost of living."}],[{"start":127.864,"text":"But the conflict has tended to obscure events earlier in Trump’s presidency that at the time were just as shocking as the decision to bomb Tehran."}],[{"start":136.264,"text":"On his first day back in office he pardoned the January 6 rioters and issued a barrage of controversial executive orders, including one that sought to abolish birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the US constitution."}],[{"start":151.558,"text":"A few weeks into his second term he said Canada should become the US’s 51st state and laid claim to Greenland. In February he said he would take over Gaza, relocate its Palestinian population and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”."}],[{"start":167.6,"text":"Trump hired Elon Musk to slash the federal government and dismantle USAID, the main government international aid agency. The administration deported hundreds of people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, sparking an intense legal battle over due process."}],[{"start":184.56,"text":"Trump and his vice-president publicly berated Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in a live confrontation that dramatically exposed the breakdown in US-Ukrainian relations."}],[{"start":197.92,"text":"Then April saw “liberation day”, the moment Trump unveiled punishing tariffs on almost all the US’s trading partners, tearing up a global system of trade that had existed for decades."}],[{"start":208.56,"text":"The levies triggered a violent rout in US government debt and prompted warnings from financiers including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon — and foreshadowed more market ructions in the months to come, including an abrupt jump in global energy prices fuelled by the Middle East war."}],[{"start":226.88,"text":"Underlying all of Trump’s moves was an attempt to push at the limits of executive power in ways that previous incumbents of the White House have never dared."}],[{"start":234.88,"text":"The blizzard of decrees came in a matter of months, with a speed and intensity unheard of in a political system obsessed with process and deliberation."}],[{"start":246.72,"text":"“It’s this extraordinarily expansive understanding of what a president can do,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University. “That’s really the defining story of the first two years of his presidency.”"}],[{"start":257.68,"text":"The impression created was of a White House intent on dismantling a status quo it said no longer served the interests of the American people. Some of the country’s most venerable institutions, its traditional alliances and its most cherished trading relationships all came under attack."}],[{"start":276.686,"text":"Trump moved against elite law firms, the country’s most prestigious universities and its largest media organisations, a kind of executive Blitzkrieg that prompted a counterblast of legal challenges."}],[{"start":289.06,"text":"But his moves on immigration were perhaps the most consequential of all. Soon after he returned to power, masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, started flooding American cities, grabbing and deporting undocumented migrants in a sweep that spread alarm in Latino communities."}],[{"start":307.512,"text":"In Los Angeles, the raids triggered protests and Trump responded by deploying the National Guard and US Marines, citing what he described as a “rebellion” against federal authority."}],[{"start":317.926,"text":"Then, just as Americans were trying to digest the sight of American soldiers on their streets, Trump ordered US planes to drop bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities."}],[{"start":326.899,"text":"Taken individually, such policy moves were troubling enough, said Chemerinsky, but the “whole is even greater than the sum of its parts”. “When you put all the things he’s done together, we’ve never experienced anything like this in this country,” he said. “And it’s not clear what comes next.”"}],[{"start":343.872,"text":"By July 2025 Trump was hailing his signature legislative achievement, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which made his 2017 tax cuts permanent, drastically cut spending on welfare programmes and allocated billions for immigration enforcement and defence."}],[{"start":359.381,"text":"Less than two months later he announced the first in a series of military strikes on boats alleged to be trafficking drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific."}],[{"start":367.68,"text":"Soon after, the East Wing of the White House was demolished to make way for Trump’s new ballroom, his first big planned remodelling project in the capital. That was all in year one."}],[{"start":378,"text":"January 2026 started with the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by US special forces in a dramatic night-time operation in Caracas. Within 24 hours, Maduro was flying in a helicopter over Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty en route to a jail in Brooklyn — an event carried live on TV."}],[{"start":398.144,"text":"Meanwhile, public anger at the ICE crackdown was growing, nowhere more so than in Minneapolis, which by the end of last year had become ground zero for Trump’s ultra-aggressive approach to immigration enforcement."}],[{"start":410.942,"text":"Protests were held across the country when federal agents killed two US citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti."}],[{"start":417.84,"text":"Zelizer said that in normal circumstances, the actions of federal law enforcement in places like Minnesota and the National Guard deployments would have dominated campaigning for the election."}],[{"start":428.08,"text":"“Any of those issues for any given presidency would have been front and centre in a midterm,” he said. “But here there’s so many that some of these things just drop away.”"}],[{"start":437.92,"text":"Uncowed by the anger, Trump launched his biggest gambit yet — a major war against Iran. Eight months in, it has achieved none of its objectives: instead of regime change, Iran has an even more hardline government, it still has its nuclear programme and has turned its control over the Strait of Hormuz into a weapon against the US and its Middle Eastern allies."}],[{"start":459.28,"text":"It has been a hard pill to swallow for Trump’s diehard Maga fans. Trump had promised them he would end America’s “forever wars”. Instead, he has plunged the country into a new military quagmire that has pushed up the price of essential items and exacted a colossal toll in blood and treasure."}],[{"start":478.006,"text":"Arlie Hochschild knows these voters well: her 2024 book Stolen Pride, about the rise of white nationalism, focused on places like eastern Kentucky’s fifth congressional district, which voted for Trump by roughly 80 per cent in the past three elections. They have, she said, fallen silent."}],[{"start":496.326,"text":"“This was a region of loss that . . . succumbed to what I call ‘emotional capture’,” she said. “Now they are dismayed, baffled and many seem to be returning to an inward-turning Appalachian stoicism.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":506.32,"text":"Trump’s legacy is in the eye of the beholder. Daniel Schlozman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, said he would be remembered for his heavy-handed approach to immigration enforcement, his use of the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies and his undermining of Congress, which played no role in the decision to go to war against Iran."}],[{"start":531.64,"text":"But in terms of actual legislative achievements, his record, compared to past presidents, was “really, really thin”, Schlozman said, and the avalanche of executive orders he has issued “a lot more ephemeral” than they first seemed."}],[{"start":543.874,"text":"“His idea of a legacy is not — these are the programmes that I got through, and these are my great foreign policy achievements or whatever,” he said. “It’s the physical transformation of the White House in Washington that seems to be the thing that he’s most obsessed with.”"}],[{"start":560.24,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793695017_9193.mp3"}