The beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency – also characterized by a series of street protests in the USA and in the world that is unmatched in American history – saw the priorities set out during the election campaign reconfirmed, first of all the revision of immigration policies and health, but the initiative of the newly elected president has found obstacles such as the veto of the judiciary on two executive orders (the so-called Muslim ban or Travel ban) aimed at preventing or limiting the entry into the United States of refugees and citizens from some countries with an Islamic majority, and the lack of support from the Republican Party itself, which forced him to withdraw the health reform that was supposed to replace Obamacare. On the foreign policy front, in contrast to US choices in recent years, Trump has proved reluctant to exercise that role of hegemony over the world that was the political figure of the United States in the presidencies before Obama, showing an attitude of indifference if not of hostility towards the European Union itself and showing the desire to deconstruct multilateral agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP, to then take unexpected interventionist positions in the Middle East conflict, launching a direct and unilateral attack on Syria’s armed forces for the first time in April 2017 following the massacre perpetrated through the use of chemical weapons in the village of Khan Shaikun, and sending a naval assault group to the High Pacific as a response to North Korea’s desire to strengthen its atomic program, which has aroused strong conflicts with Russia, risking destabilizing the geopolitical balance on a global scale. Again on the international level, while in the following months the conflict with North Korea has progressively worsened, in December Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel and start the procedures for the transfer of the State had a huge impact. embassy from Tel Aviv, following the Jerusalem Embassy Act approved by Congress in 1995 but never applied by the presidents who preceded it. In June 2018, the phase of gradual thaw in relations with North Korea opened months earlier by Kim Jong-un made possible the historic meeting that took place between the two heads of state on the island of Sentosa (Singapore), during which they signed a document for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
On the domestic political front, the mid-term elections of November 2018 – considered the test case of Trump’s work and held in a climate of heated tensions and political violence, such as the massacre in the Pittsburgh synagogue by white supremacists – recorded the loss of republican control of the House, whose majority was regained after eight years by the Democrats, while the Gop maintained that of the Senate, thus outlining a picture of clear polarization in which the massive participation in the vote, prompted by the crucial issues of health care and immigration, and the mobilization of heterogeneous forms of dissidence organized primarily by women, African Americans and young voters. In the months following the Coronavirus to which the outgoing president has provided inefficient if not irresponsible answers, losing popularity but still managing to maintain a resistance threshold made up of upper-middle-class voters and fueled by conspiracy theories and the saving myths of QAnon, have registered Trump’s defeat, which Democratic candidate J. Biden took over from January 2021.
J. Biden
The very serious invasion of Capitol Hill during the ratification of Biden’s election, organized a few days after his inauguration by a heterogeneous mass composed of QAnon conspiracists, representatives of the ultra-right, army veterans and supremacists, fomented by the prolonged campaign of The delegitimization of federal institutions undertaken by Trump following the electoral defeat created an exasperatingly tense climate around the Inauguration Day, in which the irremediable rift between the two administrations was iconically represented by the absence of the outgoing president at the inauguration ceremony and, on the political level, by Biden’s urgent desire to get rid of Trump’s work through the immediate issuance of executive decrees aimed at overturning some questionable choices. Notably, among the focuses of the Biden administration are the return of the United States to the Paris agreements to fight climate change and the World Health Organization, the abolition of the Muslim ban, the extension of the block on evictions for the economically weak, facilitations for the reunification of migrant children separated from their families and the interruption of federal executions.
