Donald Trump has been the American president for just over four months. It is still impossible to predict what his presidency will mean. But it is already a transformative event: Mr Trump has revolutionised our ideas of what the US stands for. We live in the world the US made. Now it is unmaking it. We cannot ignore that grim reality.
Mr Trump’s domestic programme is in accord with the agenda of the Republican party. Its aim is to cut taxes on the rich by lowering spending on the poor.
The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the American Health Care Act, recently passed by the House of Representatives and the replacement of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, is startling. Over the 2017-26 period, the act would reduce tax revenues by $992bn, paid for by a $1.1tn reduction in expenditures on Medicaid and other subsidies. According to the CBO, the number of uninsured might have increased by 23m by 2026.