Nick Cohen talks to Andrew Gawthorpe - historian, substacker and researcher of the modern and contemporary United States at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands - about Donald Trump's cataclysmic first week in the White House.

The first week of Trump's 2nd presidency is turning out to be an even bigger disaster than anyone feared. With pardons for violent thugs and unprovoked threats against traditional allies, the U.S. is rapidly turning into the world's first banana republic super power!

Trump has issued pardons for a notorious international drug dealer, a man convicted of possessing child pornography and hundreds of violent extremists convicted for the January 6th attack on the Capitol. He has spread chaos and fear throughout the government, firing senior federal officials and even nobbling cancer research, as well as initiating initiated trumped-up investigations into the Biden administration. He has even threatened to abolish the country's federal dIsaster response body, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. Trump has also given officials unprecedented authority to expedite deportations for up to one million immigrants who entered the country with government authorisation through two key Biden-era programmes.

Trump has already threatened allies - notably Denmark over Greenland - and predictably made threatening noises about aid to Ukraine. He has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords and the World Heath Organisation. Monstrously, he has suggested ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians and dumping them in Egypt and Jordan. He's slapped 25% tariffs on Columbia for refusing planeloads of deported illegal immigrants. And all this before the end of his first weekend!

Andrew Gawthorpe @andygawt explains an increasingly bat-shit U.S. to his baffled readers in his highly thought of Substack column America Explained.

Nick Cohen's @NickCohen4 latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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