One year later, it’s clear Donald Trump is the most consequential president of our lifetime |
David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.
There are dates when it is possible to pinpoint when the world changed:
July 4, 1776: The signing of the Declaration of Independence, a signal moment in the history of colonialism and democracy. June 28, 1914: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting in motion the First World War. Nov. 7, 1917: the Russian Revolution that created the first Communist state, with reverberations throughout the 20th century. Oct. 24, 1929: “Black Thursday,” the stock-market crash leading to the Great Depression.
Jan. 30, 1933: The formal appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. Sept. 1, 1939: Germany’s invasion of Poland, the start of the Second World War. Aug. 6, 1945: The atomic-bomb attack on Hiroshima, representing the beginning of the nuclear age. Nov. 9, 1989: The fall of the Berlin Wall. Sept. 11, 2001: The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
To this list, we can add one more: Jan. 20, 2025. The day Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States.
It is impossible to minimize the significance of the day the 47th President took the ancient oath of office. What has occurred in the year since has left wreckage on every continent, reshaped economies, shattered strategic trade partnerships, endangered alliances, shifted migration patterns, and smashed long-established conventions and customs of political behaviour.
There’s more. Definitions of “presidential” rhetoric were overhauled. The course of festering rivalries and wars in the Middle East and Europe were altered. Expectations of the truth in public life were upended. The markets for houses, steel, automobiles, summertime Maine seashore rentals, California wine, artillery shells, addictive narcotics, Canadian passports, and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts tickets were disrupted.
Debra Thompson: Year one of Trump's second term has been catastrophic for American democracy
The most stable republic in the history of humankind has been shaken to its roots, its institutions reshaped, its Constitutional counterbalance disrupted. And in the course of all this, perceptions of the United States – the sinews of its founding document visible in the constitutions and institutions of scores of countries, and of democratic values themselves, once in the ascendancy across the globe – have been transformed.
One date. One man. One political earthquake that rumbled across the globe, the aftershocks still being felt a year later.
“We are living in an unprecedented world, totally unrelated to history,” said Mark A. Peterson, a political scientist at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. “So much has been disrupted, and a great share of the population doesn’t know a world that is different from what they are experiencing now. It is hard to imagine what the eventual equilibrium is going to be.”
The American socialist and journalist John Reed is remembered for writing Ten Days That Shook the World, his 1919 account of the Russian........