MIUC Students Magazine

A: “To be honest, it will be pretty awful. 53.9% of voters chose a candidate other than Trump, including 48.2% of Secretary Clinton, to Trump’s 46.1% (if this seems strange, just look up Electoral College on the Internet, and you will see that American elections are based on voting majorities divided into specific regions, not an absolute national majority).

Yet Trump and his party will control the White House and both houses of Congress (with a large majority in the House and small majority in the Senate), as well as the federal judiciary once Trump starts making judicial appointments and getting them confirmed, including filling that all-important vacant Supreme Court seat.

For at least the next two years and likely even a longer period, this means almost 54% of Americans who voted will have no real power to check President Trump and his Republican Party from enacting an agenda they very forcefully do not support.

The one real exception to this is the filibuster, a Senate rule that on most issues allows the minority to prevent passage of something that cannot get at least 60 of 100 senators to support it. However, each new Congress can make its own rules, and Republicans will have the power to get rid of the filibuster if they choose to do so which would become increasingly likely if Democrats use it to block Trump’s and the Republicans’ agenda. If this happens the Democrats lose their one way to check Trump independent of any help from Republicans, and, thus, will be powerless if Republicans stay united.

A: Yes, in some ways, the Republican Party has not been this divided since the 1960s. But if one looks closer, this is not the case: while conservative public intellectuals and publications, many former Republicans officials (including both living former Republican presidents), and numbers of important major Republican political donors and fundraisers either privately or publicly oppose Trump, this is a tiny elite within the scope of the party as a whole.

Only a handful of senators and a small portion of Republican representatives in Congress consistently and publicly opposed Trump. Nearly the entire Republican membership of Congress either supported Trump or dared not oppose him. And with the megaphone of the presidency on top of his Twitter-following of nearly 18 million people, Trump will be seeking to loudly intimidate any opposition, whether within his own party or not. And those within his own party will be highly vulnerable to this pressure as Trump can easily use it to rouse his followers. The political stalemate of the last six years will end as one party, led by Trump more than anyone else, will control the highest levels of the entire federal government.

A: A Trump Administration seems poised to either stop actively protecting these groups from abuses with any vigour at the least, or to actively undermine some of the protections and gains they have enjoyed in civil rights that have been made in recent years.

Either way, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions that have been simmering and occasionally exploding into riots and violent attacks over the past few years in America are likely to get dramatically worse under Trump and serious civil unrest is a real possibility. This will especially be the case if Trump keeps acting the way he has been, which is to say, in ways that do nothing to assure groups fearful of a Trump presidency, that they will be respected and their needs and concerns addressed seriously.

A: I would call this out as wishful thinking.  While Trump’s stated positions have shifted so many times it’s been easy to lose count, his rhetoric and his style have stayed fairly consistent. And the overall content of his rhetoric makes it clear that many of his harsher policies are going to be pursued with vigour; any doubt about this should have been erased by his cabinet picks announced thus far.

Even if he ends up enacting a milder form of some of what he has discussed, such policies will still be game-changers and move the country sharply to the right policy-wise.  But as a practical matter, his supporters and, within the Republican Party’s group of elected officials, a strong core of the Republican House members will insist that he carries out his promises, and Trump, ever so needful of admiration and validation, won’t want to disappoint his biggest fans.  So his constituents and counterparts in Congress will make it hard for him to backtrack, even if he wants to, which on most issues he probably does not.

In regard to Trump’s cabinet nominees can you anticipate the upcoming Washington policies?

The best sign that Trump might move into a “governing mode” and power down his “campaign mode” would have been putting moderate people who could unite the country into key positions of power, most notably selecting either Mitt Romney or David Petraeus as Secretary of State.

By picking big-oil CEO Rex Tillerson (a Putin ally) as Secretary of State, but also along with virtually all of his other choices, Trump made it clear he has no intention of, generally, pursuing a more moderate course.  Instead, he has assembled the most extreme and most right-wing cabinet and White House in American presidential history.

A simple look at his choices and their records make this beyond dispute, so there should be no confusion as to what to expect from them.  In several agencies—The Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and the Environmental Protection Agency – Trump even appointed people who don’t believe in the agencies’s core missions or are downright hostile to them.

Others, like Dr. Ben Carson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Nikki Haley for Ambassador to the United Nations are supremely unqualified; still others like Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman are outright extremists.

And those who will be running the economy hail from the billionaire class.  So those who are saying “Let’s wait and see…”are deluding themselves if they mean in any way to imply that a moderate course is a possibility and that moderates and liberals should not jump to conclusions: Trump behavior, actions, and selections are sending a clear message that would be foolish not to acknowledge.

A: Let’s put it this way: should we think Trump would use nuclear weapons for fun or just on a whim?  No.  But the man’s character and temperament are so vastly different from every single president before him and unsuited to the responsibility of the decision to use or not use nuclear weapons, that if a crisis with a major power like China erupted, I would be worried to have Trump as a Commander in Chief.

If one recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis, WWIII and nuclear war were avoided because the cooler heads of both Kennedy and Khrushchev prevailed; the only way the phrase “cooler head” and the word “Trump” can fit into the same sentence is with satire.

So if a truly grave situation did emerge, yes, we should be worried that Trump would be more likely to both threaten and use nuclear weapons than any previous American president in a similar situation. As it is, Trump is already calling for America to expand its nuclear arsenal, and the last thing that is good for the world now is a new nuclear arms race.

A: This, in particular, concerns Iran, and Iran is in a tough position.  Should Iran resume uranium enrichment because Trump follows through on his pledge to end the nuclear agreement from the U.S. side between the great powers and Iran, this would likely cause two things to occur:

1.) an attempt by Saudi Arabia to develop a nuclear programme of its own, and perhaps Turkey, maybe even others, and
2.) an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities that would likely be supported or joined by a Trump Administration, sparking a wider war in the Middle East, likely between the U.S. and Sunni-led powers on one side and Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in one form or another on the other.

Yemen and Bahrain could easily become battlegrounds, and there is reason to consider as a serious possibility Russia joining or at least supporting the Shiite side, as Russia now already has something of an alliance with Iran, Hezbollah, and the Syrian Government through Syria’s Civil War.

A: Trump can definitely end U.S. participation in the agreement and can get Congress re-apply the sanctions that were removed as part of it (these are separate from the current sanctions regarding military and terrorism issues).

Would it be fair if Trump broke the agreement with Iran?  No.  Would it be understandable, even justified, for Iran to resume uranium enrichment under those circumstances?  Of course.  Yet sometimes, what you have the right and ability to do isn’t always the right choice, and the question Iran’s leaders will have to really ask themselves is this: is it really in Iranian interests to do so?

A: Well, the relevant nuclear-related sanctions have been removed by the Obama Administration; other sanctions related to other matters are separate issues. But to whether Iran and the U.S. make better friends than enemies, of course we make better friends.

It just becomes much harder with Trump and the Republican Party running America’s foreign policy, and especially if the sanctions that have been removed by Obama are re-imposed by Trump. Clinton would have been tough, but fair, with Iran: she would have honoured the JCPOA, and have used that a basis to work for breakthroughs with Iran on Syria, Iraq, Israel, and other regional issues.