A state of emergency on the border with Mexico and ‘millions’ of promised deportations, withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, pardons for hundreds of Capitol Hill attackers... Barely inaugurated as President of the United States, Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders on Monday to mark his return to power.
However, some of these spectacular measures are likely to be difficult to implement, and promise to be hotly contested in the courts. Some even appear to violate the US Constitution.
Donald Trump's promised vast anti-immigration offensive took shape in his midday inauguration speech.
‘All illegal entries will be stopped immediately and we will begin sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to where they came from,’ the Republican president hammered home. ‘I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.’
In the evening, from the White House, he signed the decree declaring a state of emergency on the border with Mexico.
Donald Trump also intends to attack the right to asylum and the right to land.
The first concrete effect came on Monday, when the asylum application platform launched by the Biden administration stopped working. ‘Existing appointments have been cancelled’, says the service on its website.
The withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement is underway: Donald Trump put it on stage by making it one of his first signed decrees, on a desk set up on the very stage of the great hall in Washington where some 20,000 of his supporters were gathered.
This measure, coming from the world's second biggest polluter behind China, jeopardises global efforts to combat climate change. It should take effect in a year's time.
The United States had already briefly left the international agreement under the American billionaire's first term in office, before Joe Biden announced its return.
Donald Trump, a notorious climate sceptic, has also signed an executive order declaring a ‘state of energy emergency’ to boost oil and gas production in the United States.
‘We're going to drill like crazy‘, he repeated, a phrase that has become one of his campaign slogans (’We will drill, baby, drill").
Another surprise decree: the withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organisation.
‘We will take back’ the Panama Canal, said the new president.
Built by the United States, control of the canal was transferred to Panama in 1999, following an agreement signed in 1977. ‘A senseless gift’, Donald Trump castigated.
‘The purpose of our agreement and the spirit of our treaty have been totally violated’, he said. ‘American ships are severely overtaxed (...) And most importantly, China operates the Panama Canal, and we didn't give it to China.’
‘The canal belongs and will continue to belong to Panama’, replied Panamanian President José Raul Mulino.
On the other territorial issue of the moment, Greenland, which he wants to take control of, the American president said he was ‘sure that Denmark will get used to the idea’ that the United States ‘needs it for international security’.
More than 1,500 participants in the assault on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 were pardoned as soon as the man who had whipped them into a frenzy by claiming that Joe Biden's election had been ‘rigged’ returned to power. For the fourteen other people convicted, their sentences will be commuted to time already served.
‘We hope that they will be released tonight’, declared Donald Trump. The charges still pending against several hundred people have also been dropped.
An ‘insult to the American judicial system’, said the former Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.
‘We will impose tariffs and taxes on foreign countries to make our citizens richer’, promised the 47th President of the United States in his inaugural speech.
From the Oval Office in the evening, he went on to say that he envisaged ‘tariffs of the order of 25% on Mexico and Canada’. From when? ‘February 1’, he estimated.
The United States' closest neighbours are theoretically protected by a free trade agreement signed during his first term in office.
‘Putting an end to transgender delusion’ was another of his campaign pledges.
‘From now on, the official policy of the United States government will be to say that there are only two sexes, male and female’, defined at birth, Donald Trump asserted on Monday.
Federal support for diversity programmes is also being targeted.
With AFP.
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