photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised the American people a “New Deal,” and President John F. Kennedy declared America stood on the edge of a “New Frontier.” In contrast, the newly inaugurated Donald J. Trump wants to “make America great again,” to go back to the good old days. In a flurry of executive orders and pronouncements, he embraced policy after policy rejected or abandoned years ago.

On the first day of the Trump presidency, the White House website posted a document stating, “the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.” When it comes to foreign policy, the phrase “America First” has a menacing connotation. Before the U.S. entered World War II, the aviator Charles Lindbergh spearheaded the America First Committee, which advocated an isolationist foreign policy that would give German aggression a free hand.

President Roosevelt told his Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau: “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this: I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” The isolationist America First organization is hardly an ideal model for 2025 as war rages in Ukraine, the Middle East seethes and China threatens Taiwan.

In his inauguration address, Trump said, “We will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” Trump is following in the footsteps of President Herbert Hoover, who signed a law raising tariffs on 20,000 imported goods which sparked retaliatory tariffs from American trading partners. U.S. exports to Europe dropped by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932. A poll of economists and historians shows over 80% believe the increase in tariffs worsened the Great Depression.

Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentences of hundreds of insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, both convicted of seditious conspiracy for their role in the attack, have been released from prison. This all brings to mind President Andrew Johnson’s Christmas 1868 “full pardon and amnesty” for all those “who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion.” Included were Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate general. Forrest led the Ku Klux Klan in a post-Civil War campaign of violence and intimidation directed against Black people. Referring to those released by Trump, Harry Litman, former Supreme Court clerk, former U.S. attorney and current law professor, writes, “As for the pardoned horde, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t conclude they now have license, even duty, to intimidate Trump’s opponents anytime they perceive a wink and nod from the boss.”

The administration is prioritizing a “deportation operation” in which the military “will engage in border security, which is national security, and will be deployed to the border to assist existing law enforcement personnel.” This evokes the infamous Executive Order 9066 issued by President Roosevelt in 1942 which allowed to military to round up whoever the appropriate military commander deemed “necessary.” Under the authority granted by this order, about 120,000 persons of Japanese descent, including 70,000 citizens, were placed in detention camps. Forty-six years later, President Ronald Reagan signed an official apology to those incarcerated due to “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Over $1 billion in reparations were paid.

Trump also issued an executive order that would give him the authority to fire tens of thousands of employees without the longstanding protections enjoyed by career civil servants. Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said, “This unprecedented assertion of executive power will create an army of sycophants beholden only to Donald Trump, not the Constitution or the American people.” Again, it is back to the past for the new administration. In the early days of the Republic, the spoils system reigned, where all positions in the federal government were held at the pleasure of the president until 1883 when the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act became law. A quarter-century after passage of the act, almost two-thirds of the U.S. federal workforce gained their appointments through tests and could not be fired arbitrarily by a new president.

When it comes to turning back the clock, though, nothing beats Trump’s executive order undercutting the right to citizenship granted by the 14th Amendment to all children born in the United States. That Amendment, ratified in 1868, states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The essence of Trump’s argument is that a baby born in the U.S. to unauthorized immigrants is not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. The Supreme Court held otherwise in 1898 when it held that all babies born in the U.S. are citizens except for the children of diplomats or those born to noncitizens in “hostile occupation” of part of the U.S.

The attorneys general of over 20 states have sued to overturn this birthright executive order. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a citizen by virtue of his birth on U.S. soil, stated the fight was personal for him: “The 14th Amendment says what it means, and it means what it says — if you are born on American soil, you are an American. Period. Full stop.” Nick Brown, the Washington State attorney general, estimates Trump’s order would deny citizenship to 150,000 newborn children each year.

All this is bad news for Americans. Even with the tremendous challenges facing the country today — aggression overseas, technology, climate change, unequal opportunity, education, pandemic threats and more — Trump is stubbornly focused on refighting the lost battles of the past.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.