This weekend, Washington Correspondent Keith Duggan reports on the whirlwind first 16 days of the Trump presidency. The last week alone has seen a dizzying blizzard of stories coming out of the White House.
Last weekend, Donald Trump announced that the US would impose punitive 25 per cent tariffs on its two closest neighbours and allies, Canada and Mexico. Three days later, following “friendly” phone calls with the leaders of both countries, and a nervous reaction on Wall Street, the tariffs were suspended for one month, although a new 10 per cent tariff on Chinese goods went ahead.
At the same time, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has been tasked by Trump with slashing federal spending, announced on his own X platform that he was “feeding” USAid, the agency founded more than 60 years ago by president John F Kennedy, “into the woodchipper”, with drastic consequences for health, education and poverty relief programmes in some of the world’s poorest countries. As Martin Wall reports, some of those programmes are run by Irish aid agencies that receive very significant funding from USAid and are now deeply concerned about the future.
By Tuesday evening, following a meeting with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Trump was proposing the relocation of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, which would come under American control and be redveloped, he said, as “the Riviera of the East”.
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The next day he signed an executive order imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court, accusing it of having “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions” targeting the US and its “close ally” Israel.
These actions have sparked anger, dismay and in some cases delight inside the US and across the world. And there have been many other orders, actions and statements which could prove equally consequential in the long term.
Commentators describe the new administration’s “shock and awe” strategy as a deliberate attempt to flood the information zone. The firehose of non-stop announcements makes it difficult to distinguish the outlandish statement designed to shock political opponents from the radical policy shift with real-world consequences. It seems quite possible that the president himself does not always know the difference.
These tactics pose a real challenge for journalists seeking to cover them responsibly and accurately. They are expressly designed to generate blaring headlines, dominate news bulletins and swamp social media. That can have a numbing effect or cause some people to turn away from news altogether. The challenge for us at The Irish Times is to report clearly on what is really happening and why it matters.
The 26th US president, Theodore Roosevelt, described his office as a “bully pulpit”. Roosevelt was using “bully” in its common meaning at the time of “superb” or “wonderful”. The 47th president, Donald Trump, takes a more modern interpretation.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
Five key reads
- Derelict Dublin: 10 empty southside buildings in a city with a housing crisis: In this weekend’s series on vacant buildings in the capital, we profile 10 on the southside of the city, including a 200-year-old College Street building, the site of a Kildare Street hotel and the former home of the City Arts Centre.
- Derelict Dublin: 10 unused northside buildings: And on the northside, our profiles include the former Coláiste Mhuire on Parnell Square, the former Guineys department store on Talbot Street, and a ‘shrine’ to Bram Stoker.
- ‘My five-year-old can now talk fluently in Irish’: Inside the Irish language school in a loyalist heartland. In an area once a bastion of unionism the school has become a symbol of east Belfast’s altered political landscape and demography, writes Seanín Graham.
- How can you buy a home in Ireland on a teacher’s salary? In this week’s Money Matters column, Joanne Hunt looks at the housing-affordability challenge facing teachers.
- ‘Everything was fields when we moved here’: Rosita Boland visits Adamstown, a 20-year-old Dublin town with a diverse population of more than 10,000.
