According to the British Financial Times, US President-elect Donald Trump has been named Person of the Year.
“We are living in the age of Trump. Historians will look back on 2024 as a change of era, like the 1932 [election], when FDR’s New Deal came in, or 1968, when Richard Nixon launched the New Right,” said Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political and business partner.
Donald Trump claimed that he had prepared a series of radical steps for the “first day” of his presidency: orders to begin deporting undocumented migrants, mass pardons for rioters imprisoned for the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a new era of oil drilling, decrees on freedom of speech in US universities, etc. Trump also promised to purge the generals in the Pentagon and investigate those who had studied him.
During his first inauguration in 2017, Trump spoke of an “American slaughter” caused by globalization and China. Then, he threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO because of “unpaid dues” by some of its European members. This time, he is using similar rhetoric but more aggressively. He says he will solve the problem of the Russian-Ukrainian war “within 24 hours” while emphasizing that “America comes first.”
Some politicians and analysts predict that Trump’s new presidency will mean chaos, not a new order and that his return heralds a new gilded age of money in US politics and diplomacy.