My way or the highway
With few dissenters in his camp, the US President will be hard to stop, says Sky’s Martha Kelner
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- Martha Kelner
Martha Kelner co-hosts the Trump 100 podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or your preferred podcast platform.
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Donald Trump is talking so much that White House stenographers are said to be struggling to keep pace. Journalists are struggling to keep up, too. It’s been a dizzying first few weeks of Trump 2.0, with the President pardoning Capitol rioters, starting – then stopping – a trade war, and announcing the US will take over Gaza. And that’s just a tiny slice of what he’s has been up to.
Together with my Sky News colleagues James Matthews and Mark Stone, I’m daily podcasting the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, reporting on the ground across the USA. But there’s such an avalanche of news that we’ll often be halfway through recording an episode when the stroke of a president’s pen and a new executive order will change the direction of the day.
Take the day before Trump was sworn in. My team and I were on a plane to Chicago, the site of what we thought would be the first of Trump’s mass deportation raids. But in the skies above Nebraska we learned those raids had been postponed. We jumped on a plane to Mexico instead, where we saw devastated migrants whose asylum applications had been cancelled.
But the new regime really hit home on the grassy banks of the Potomac River, the scene of a plane crash in Washington DC which quickly turned political. The black boxes were yet to be found and divers were still breaking through ice to recover human remains from the wreckage of the US’s worst aviation disaster for more than two decades, but a few miles away, in the warmth of the West Wing, the President was busy predetermining the cause of the crash.
Into unimaginable grief he inserted his war on the woke agenda
After a brief pause to acknowledge an “hour of anguish” for the nation, he was back on more familiar terrain, making political hay from that distress. Not only was the accident the fault of Democratic administrations past, the President said, it was specifically caused by diversity, equity and inclusion hires. Without foundation, Trump implied that should the pilots or the air traffic controller be anything but white, straight and male, then they were to blame.
Where a president might usually focus on comforting the victims’ friends and family, this commander in chief was throwing around baseless slurs. Into unimaginable grief he inserted his war on the woke agenda.
The family of Rebecca Lobach, the helicopter co-pilot, initially withheld her identity from the public, a decision perhaps informed by the President’s word. Another pilot, Jo Ellis, who is transgender and unconnected to the tragedy, felt compelled to make a “proof of life” video after she was wrongly named as one of the pilots and faced a barrage of abuse online.
Sky reporter and Trump 100 co-host Martha Kelner. SKY
Aside from being grossly insensitive, the President’s assertion that government employees might have climbed above their station without merit, could be viewed as hypocritical. He nominated a string of men for his cabinet, some of whom are utterly unqualified for their positions. Robert Kennedy Jr, his pick for health secretary, has spent much of his adult life spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines. Pete Hegseth, a former national guard soldier turned Fox News host, is the least experienced defence secretary in the history of the republic.
But Trump’s most coveted quality in his inner circle is loyalty, and the lack of any dissension in the ranks is the reason the second Trump administration can press forward with his increasingly autocratic agenda.
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It’s also the reason journalists in the US will be so busy over the next four years. Of course, some of his orders, like a halt to foreign aid, have been walked back following a backlash, and an attempt to abolish birthright citizenship will be held up by the courts. But it’s clear the second Trump administration, with few guardrails in place and Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, will be more ambitious and more effective than the first.
Authors
Martha Kelner
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