Paolo Kernahan
AMERICANS and strident critics of legendary reality TV performer Donald Trump will need to pace themselves. If you're among those convulsed by what many interpreted as a double
sieg heil (hail victory) from billionaire and political power broker Elon Musk, you're in for a rough ride.
Outrage is like chemotherapy, a cure as lethal as the disease. This 47th president of the US specialises in generating infinite quantities of outrage. If day one had your blood pressure peaking, you ain't gonna make it.
Still, if there's one thing Trump can't be accused of, it's laziness. He signed 26 executive orders on his first day back; a clear signal that this administration is likely to be one of government by fiat.
It's not about the number of executive orders issued, but their intent and likely impacts that matter. Many of them seem directed at dismantling much of Joe Biden's brickwork.
This isn't unusual for incoming presidents in US politics. Biden revoked the order imposed by Trump in his first term to ban the social media app TikTok. During his administration, Biden eventually signed a new law banning the app anyway because, politics. What matters most are the impacts of those sweeping gestures of wrist and pen.
Trump rescinded an order issued by Biden to lower the cost by half of expensive prescription drugs Americans rely on to sustain health and, indeed, stay alive.
Among those to be hit by this move will be millions who donned MAGA hats and threw their support behind this carefully curated illusion of a "man of the people." This salt-of-the-earth president means to salt the earth in ways his most dogmatic adherents couldn't anticipate.
It will perhaps never dawn on the MAGAlomaniacs that all the executive orders and policies headed their way aren't, in fact, for them.
The conspicuous presence of the tech billionaires' upper 0.1 per cent at the inauguration was a striking visual representation of the ethos of this administration for the next four years. Some interpreted the prominence of the 'tech bro' cabinet as a positive sign that the US is headed into a tech boom.
This is, of course, nonsense. The tech boom has been underway for several years; the extraordinary power of generative AI didn't just crawl out of the sea onto dry land yesterday.
What the appearance of Google's Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg (all of whom control how Americans communicate) demonstrates is the emergence from the shadows of corporate moneyed interests directly into the governance apparatus.
Gone are the days of the Koch brothers pulling the strings from behind the velvet curtain, directing the lives of ordinary Americans by drowning US politics with their money and influence.
Now the billionaires who've paid to play are standing, so to speak, directly behind the chair in the Oval Office. How's that likely to play out on the ground for the peasants working two-three jobs and chasing after extra shifts to make magnetically repellent ends meet?
Elon Mu
