A Fiasco of an Administration

As Donald Trump completes three years in the White House, there is a noticeable difference between the success he claims and reality.

Donald Trump completes three years in office just as the Senate opens with the last, decisive phase of the impeachment proceeding. It is a period during which the White House and the way of doing politics in Washington has been branded by only one word: confrontational.

Far from lowering his tone when he took office as the most optimistic predicted, Trump has marked his term with grandiose pronouncements, threats, diplomatic incidents and controversies of all kinds.

But this barely scratches the surface of his much more troubling approach and its more serious repercussions. The president of the United States has polarized his public like no other, and has erased any notion of moderation that might have existed in the Republican Party. He has broken from important commercial treaties, put vital security alliances like NATO in doubt, and in short, has tried to dismantle the system of multilateral cooperation that, with its successes and failures, has striven to maintain peace and prosperity since the end of World War II.

Trump has done all of this by publicly despising any way of conducting politics which he considers too weak, and by ensuring that his successes support this outlook with contempt directed especially at the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and Obama’s multilateral strategy. But in fact, this is not as brilliant as the commander in chief claims. The treaty with China is the fruit of an unnecessary trade war. Iran has resumed its nuclear program with vigor. Washington has publicly lost the confidence of its European allies, the strategy with North Korea is demonstrably ineffective, the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to be unstable and the resolution of the Israeli-Palestine conflict appears to be even further away than before, as decisions taken by Trump have distanced the U.S. from the role of privileged mediator. His anti-immigration policies have not worked to stem the tsunami of people trying to cross the border, the Venezuelan regime continues to resist, and Trump has taken the U.S. out of the fight against climate change.

With this overview, let us turn to the last stretch in the impeachment process, the one he has called a witch hunt, and his campaign for reelection in November. He will probably overcome the first hurdle thanks to the Republican majority in the Senate, but whether he’ll succeed with the next step depends a great deal on the Democratic presidential nominee, and the Democrats’ capacity to convince the public the successful term that Trump claims to have had has not been anything more than a massive fiasco.