Only four years?

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Whilst much of what Trump said and did yesterday was alarming to some of us, no-one can say that it was really unexpected. But in a strange way, the bit that probably alarmed me most was his talk of putting Americans, complete with their flag, on the surface of Mars. It’s not that I’m opposed to manned space exploration: I’m reasonably confident that humans will travel to Mars in the future (although I’m even more confident that Mars will prove to be the furthest that humans will ever venture, what with the laws of physics being as they are and the dangers inherent in the endeavour). It’s more about timescales.

Everything we know about Trump says that he’s focussed on the short term, and even more so on himself, his role in that short term, and his ability to monetize that for his own benefit. Most of what he had to say yesterday fits that picture – his programme is one which is likely to make billionaires richer at the expense of everyone else, and to achieve that within his term of office. He clearly doesn’t understand some things very well, but he has a keen eye for the monetary benefits. Tariffs is one obvious example – he seems to think that they are paid by the companies and citizens of the country exporting to the US, rather than inflating the prices of the goods imported. They do, however, by switching taxation from individuals’ income to their expenditure, disproportionately benefit the richest. Many of the executive orders he signed yesterday are fairly easily reversible. At a cost, obviously, not just in terms of money but also in terms of the disruption caused. It might mean waiting four years, and whilst opinions vary on how much damage will be caused during that four years, it is only four years, and that’s a short time in the scale of human history. For some people, of course, that damage will be enormous, life-shortening, or maybe even terminal in the case of, for example, those denied medical aid by budget cuts or those deported back to the places from which they took so many risks to escape.

But will it really be only four years before he’s gone? And that’s the bit about his Mars spiel that concerns me. There is no way that anyone is going to get to Mars within the next four years. Even the eternal over-promiser Musk has said that it won’t be until at least 2029. Most people would regard that as being hopelessly optimistic, and NASA has talked vaguely about sometime in the 1930s. That in turn is almost certainly an over-optimistic assessment in order to get their hands on federal funding. Literally no-one who knows anything about space exploration seriously expects that it will happen during Trump’s current term in the White House, and it’s highly unlikely during the term of his immediate successor either. However, that assumes that his term will end on January 20, 2029 as it is supposed to. There are people – and there have been presidents of the USA – who would be quite happy to be seen as having laid the groundwork for a triumph celebrated by one or other of their successors. Trump isn’t one of them. If he can’t claim 100% of the credit, and isn’t personally making money from it, then there’s nothing in it for him.

To say that he was ‘reluctant’ to leave office last time around would be something of an understatement. He’s already dropped hints that a compliant congress should change the rule about a two-term limit, and he famously told Christians during last year’s campaign that they needed to vote, and if they did so, then they would never need to do so again. Is his Mars proposal another early indication that he is already thinking about ways of carrying on after 2029?