About one month after his second inauguration, American president Donald Trump addressed the two houses of the US parliament, the Congress. It is well worth watching the whole speech. Clocking in at one hour and forty minutes, Trump’s address was unusually long, the longest of its kind in American history, according to some observers.

Trump claims to have been extraordinarily dynamic during his first weeks in office, and that claim is true: As a rough indicator, “in an explosion of executive action,” the total of his “executive orders, memoranda, and substantial declarations” issued – a metric applied by the American Presidency Project at the University of California – has far outpaced the early-term output not only of his immediate forerunner Joe Biden, but also such giants as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, not to speak of Trump in his own first term. In fact, Trump 2.0 has produced already “more presidential directives than almost all recent presidents” in their full first 100 days, that is, more than double the time Trump had been in office again.

The 100-day standard – or now even less maybe – for measuring presidential performance is, of course, arbitrary, a product, originally, of FDR’s savvy propaganda tactics that never went away again, and it may even be “ridiculous.” But it is part of US political culture such as it is, and Trump is fully aware of the sheer political shock-and-awe effect of his Battle-of-the-Somme-like opening barrage, or, as US commentators put it with the inevitable sports metaphor, of “flooding the zone.”

Numbers, in any case, are not everything: The substance of Trump’s first salvo is at least as impressive – for better or worse, that’s another question – as the bare figures. Highlights include: Starting a détente with Russia and a great American-European split, both long overdue. The dismantling – de facto, at least – of NATO has begun was well. And good riddance to that Cold War zombie, too: Say hello to the Warsaw Pact when you meet in history dustbin hell. Then there also are a few trade wars that have shaken the stock markets globally.

Meanwhile, a blitzkrieg in the great American culture wars over pronouns, bathrooms, and genital modification has pummeled everything that US conservatives consider “woke”: from gender definitions (from now on only two, can you imagine?) to no longer letting biologically male athletes beat up women or allowing adults to rely on children’s “own” “judgement” when it comes to doing away with their sex organs.

And yes, Mexico has lost its Gulf – as far as Americans are concerned, anyhow; Panama may well lose its canal; Denmark – Greenland (“one way or the other,” in Trumpese) and Canada – Canada.

Say what........

© RT.com