FT Person of the Year: Donald Trump. 1/3
Lyndon Hayes/FT
On January 20 2021, Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for what most people assumed was the last time. He was going back to Palm Beach. A fortnight earlier he had helped goad a mob assault on Capitol Hill — the first attack on America’s legislature since it was set on fire by British troops during the war of 1812. (they always start out with the lie)
Few of Trump’s entourage turned up at Andrews Air Force Base to wave him off. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, had just called Trump a “despicable human being”.Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, which had been Trump’s biggest cheerleader,vowed in an internal email to make him a “non-person”.
Much of America and the world agreed with Joe Biden’s contention that Trump’s presidency had been “an aberrant moment”. A handful of loyalists, notably Steve Bannon, Kash Patel, Richard Grenell, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro and Boris Epshteyn stuck with Trump over the following months.In Maga mythology, this was Trump’s wilderness period.
“Mar-a-Lago was like East Berlin,” recalls Bannon, a self-declared nationalist-populist who was Trump’s chief strategist during his first year in office. “We were a band of pirates. Everybody else was writing Trump off.”
Trump’s rebound since then isthe most dramatic comeback in modern US history— and arguably since the republic’s founding. Only once before, with Grover Cleveland in 1892, has a US president been returned to office for non-consecutive terms. The Financial Times made Trump its “Person of the Year” in 2016.This year Trump is again the FT’s pick because of the remarkable nature of his return to power. It is no longer possible to dismiss Trump as a blip.
At home, Trump 2.0 promises a new era of sweeping deregulation and tax cuts. The president’s vow to personify the Maga base’s appetite for retribution against the liberal elites — universities, the mainstream media and “woke” America in general — =heralds a profound shift to the cultural right. Abroad, Trump also vows a new iconoclasm. For the so-called “axis of upheaval” of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Trump’s return could be the opportunity of a generation, although he remains unpredictable. Trump sees the world as a jungle in which the US has been taken for a ride by freeloading allies. The future of Nato is hanging by a thread.==
“We are living in the age of Trump,” says Roger Stone, a longtime Trump political and business collaborator, who has known him since the late 1970s.“Historians will look back on 2024 as a change of era like they have for[the election of] 1932, when Roosevelt’s New Deal came in, or for 1968 when Richard Nixon gave birth to the new right.”
Trump has prepared a flurry of “day one” movesthat would put any previous incoming presidency into the shade. It includes executive orders to start deporting undocumented migrants, mass pardons for the rioters jailed for the January 6 attack, a new era of oil drilling, free speech ordinances on US universities, and so on. Together these would amount to a sea change in how America is governed. Trump has alsovowed a purge of generals at the Pentagonand investigations into those who investigated him.
Though he has already had one bite of the apple, the question of how much more disruptive the next Trump term will be is hard to gauge. “Trump is a classic Gemini,” says Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier who first befriended Trump in the 1990s and who was briefly Trump’s White House communications director. “You could get the genial, joking, golfing Trump, or you could get his evil, vengeful twin. Maybe we’ll see both.”
https://archive.ph/xeSiK#selection-2647.0-2664.0
>>22204184 FT Person of the Year: Donald TrumpPN