TOI CORRESPONDENT FROM WASHINGTON: Amid a cascade of executive orders that he signed on first entering the White House Oval Office on Monday, US President Donald Trump warned that he would impose 100% tariff on Brics nations, which includes India, if they do not balance trade with the United States on a reciprocal basis.
“Brics is six, seven nations…looking to do a number on us… if they do it won’t be nice for them,” Donald Trump told reporters, bluntly asserting “We will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” while maintaining other countries had long enriched themselves at US expense.
In holding out the threat, Trump also mistakenly included Spain in the trade-centric bloc, which has only five members, and in which S stands for South Africa. Brazil, Russia, India, and China are the other members.
In between chatting with the media, Trump also signed a range of executive orders and actions that withdrew the US from the Paris Accord and the World Health Organisation, declared a “border emergency” to stop illegal crossings into the US, renamed the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America, dismantled government diversity and inclusion programs, and announced he is ending birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the US Constitution.
Political pundits said the signing of more than 100 such executive actions was mostly showmanship aimed at impressing his MAGA base. Many such orders and actions are likely to face legal challenges while others are the domain of the legislative branch, where Republicans do have a majority.
(Republican-run Florida jumped straight into the changeover, its governor Ron DeSantis referring to “Gulf of America” in a storm warning issued by his office. Naming water bodies in the domain of the International Hydrographic Organization, which works to ensure all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. Both US and Mexico are members of the IHO. It is not unusual for countries refer to the same body of water by different names in their own documentation. Mexico currently refers to the gulf by its Spanish name: El Golfo de México.)
Indeed, the order ending birthright citizenship — which grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States regardless of the parents’ status, and which is embedded in the US Constitution and endorsed by the Supreme Court — was challenged even as the ink from the giant sharpie marker Trump used to sign it was drying.
It was a triumphant comeback for Trump, who said it was a “great feeling” to return to the White House, after losing an election in 2020 which he believes was stolen from him after he had served one term.
So chuffed was he to return to the Oval Office that he did not even read the parting letter his predecessor Joe Biden had left for him in the drawer of the Resolute Desk, fishing it out and holding it up only when reporters reminded him of the tradition.
Instead, he engaged in a completely unscripted, freewheeling media interaction in which pool reporters got an unvarnished insight into his thinking with from off-the-cuff answers to questions on foreign policy and domestic issues.
A recurring theme in his remarks was that he wanted to be seen as a “unifier” and “peacemaker” — but it has to be on US terms. The US will not fight wars but would strive to achieve peace through strength, building the greatest military in history.
At the same time, he asserted that the US would “take back” the Panama Canal, maintaining that China was now in control of the gateway. He also suggested that Denmark would fold and allow US to take over Greenland.
Reminded that he had claimed he would end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office, Trump quipped, “This is only half a day. I have another half a day left.”
On a more serious note, he appeared to criticise Putin, saying “not doing so well” in the war against Ukraine, and he’s tanking the Russian economy by “not making a deal.” He also alarmed South Korea by referring to North Korea as a nuclear power; Seoul does not want it such a designation to be formalized.
Source Homevior.in
