Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• The heavy price America has paid for Jeff Bezos’s ambition• The US is becoming impossible to live in• I told Trump over dinner he didn’t have my loyalty – it sealed my fate• This is how the world will look after Trump• I’ve seen what ICE has done to Minnesota. Farage wants to import that to the UK• The men who want to stop women voting• Trump isn’t damaging America. He’s reinventing it’
Just over a decade ago, the Republican Party’s leading presidential candidates gathered for a primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, trying in various ways to claim the mantle of the revered former US leader. However, one candidate made clear on that stage that his future foreign policy would have little in common with that of the former US leader, who believed in promoting democracy abroad. Donald Trump has no such belief.
Reagan’s thinking on international politics was centred on a belief in the virtues of democracy over dictatorship, a conviction shaped by the Cold War struggle between the free world and communism. In a speech before the British parliament in 1982, he spoke of the need to foster “the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means”.
