
Many in the Fredericton community filled the classroom for a “post-mortem” discussion held by seven professors at St. Thomas University on Jan. 16.
The roundtable was organized by Shaun Narine, the chair of STU’s political science department.
Notable topics of discussion included how the Trump administration will impact U.S. international relations and human rights, as well as how the Democrats campaign failed.
Narine said the U.S. is built on a foundation of a “coterie,” a group of countries that are relatively rich and powerful who are a part of the country’s “imperial structure.”
He added that America has been hesitant to abuse countries within this coterie in the past, but he’s expecting that to change relatively quickly.
“The difference with Trump is that he wants to bully and abuse everybody, including the countries that have been inside the club,” he said. “Many American leaders, as well as political and foreign specialists, see this as a fundamental mistake.”
“[Foreign Specialists] recognize that American domination of the world is much more easy to carry out — and much more durable — if the United States has a reliable group of self interested followers,” said Narine.

Despite not officially being in office until Jan. 20, we have already seen Trump make aggressive threats towards Canada, Greenland and Panama.
Other participants in the roundtable included political science professors Tom Bateman, Laura Levick and Conor Barry, as well as coordinator of communications and public policy department, Jamie Gillies and human rights professor Shannonbrooke Murphy.
Murphy said she looked to identify the top three things that worry her the most about the dawn of a new Trump administration for her part of the discussion, where she said she was “spoiled for choice” to pick just three options.
The first two things she outlined had to do with his ‘commitments’ from his reported 100-day plan.
First of which being what Trump has called the largest mass deportation program in American history “that might potentially target as many as 11 million undocumented people,” said Murphy.
She is also concerned about his promise to commence pardons for those who were arrested, charged and convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Building in 2021.
Her final concern was the “phenomenon” that American voters have come to think Trump will vindicate the working poor.
“I think the Trump outcome is proof of our failure to effectively communicate the nature, content and purpose of human rights,” said Murphy. “We need to confront the reality that the economically disaffected have come to believe that human rights do not serve them.”
Murphy believes part of this issue is that no one is taking economic and social rights seriously, which she defined as “the right to an adequate standard of living.”
She listed these rights as good quality housing, food, water, education, employment, childcare and healthcare.
“Increasingly, working class people don’t have access to all of those things … I think that this is their right, even if the powers that be across the political spectrum don’t treat it that way,” said Murphy.
Gillies focused his part of the discussion on what the Democratic party did wrong in their campaign for re-election, namely that President Joe Biden “missed his ramp” to jump out of the democrats’ campaign.
He said the perfect exit point would have been at the State of the Union in February 2023.
“That would have given the democrats enough time to have a full presidential campaign and convention to select somebody with lead time to challenge Trump.”
The democrats have also had struggles pushing their own agenda according to Gillies, saying they didn’t have a “very good communicator.”
“Joe Biden just didn’t have the right people around him,” he said. “By the time Biden was ready for reelection, he was one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history.”
The discussion concluded with questions from the audience raising further debate amongst the members of the roundtable.
Murphy was overly pleased with the discussion, from topics introduced by each faculty member to the questions raised by attendees.
“It was a really excellent example of decency, humanity, dialogue and diversity of opinion. I would like that to be a model for future events,” said Murphy.