President Provocateur

India will have to look out for what becomes of Trump’s rhetoric in the White House.

- Pranay Sharma

DONALD J. Trump’s inaugural ceremony on January 20 began and ended on predictable lines. As the 45th President of the United States took oath of office on the steps of Capitol Hill on a rain-soaked Washington morning before a crowd of 250,000 people, massive rallies were held in the US and in cities around the world where over two million people took to the streets to protest against White House’s new occupant—a number that clearly dwarfed the 60,000-strong protest march against Richard Nixon’s second term as president in 1973 during the Vietnam War. More than 1.8 million people had turned up for Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

One of Trump’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order to scale back aspects of the Affordable Health Care Act—a signature healthcare act of his predecessor popularly known as the Obamacare, providing affordable medical services to all Americans. He also came down heavily on the media, chastising them for understating the number of people who turned up for his inauguration. Claiming that the crowd stretched “over a 20-block area” he accused the media of deliberately showing empty stretches where there were hardly any people in order to project a thin attendance for the inaugural ceremony.

Interestingly, on Monday, Trump also issued another executive order to cancel the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the proposed trade agreement on which several US allies in Asia, like Japan, had invested heavy political capital. It was another Obama initiative that was aimed at isolating and putting pressure on China.