Of a rogue man in the American White House

American people’s role in helping Trump ascend to the office of White House, making an anarchist to anything seems like a non-starter as the world has a good laugh, albeit through gritted teeth at President Trump’s incompetence.

by Anwar A. Khan-May 22, 2018

May 22, 2018

( May 21, 2018, Dhaka, Sri Lanka Guardian) International news reports say US President Donald Trump allows no one near to him. He curls up in bed in his private bedroom and he is the first president to sleep alone since Truman and watches cable TVs endlessly while devouring hamburgers. This is clearly a man utterly out of his depth, a man considered even by his own staff to be dimwitted. His day-to-day affairs are chaotic. Staffers have called him a “moron” and “a fool”, while Rupert Murdoch his idol, slammed down a phone after talking to him calling him an idiot.

There is so much more. Trump is experiencing a death of a thousand cuts, as the news reports go by.

Trump’s main policy is destruction, but the whole world must be more than resistance to stop him. Democratic supporters like to believe their politicians are brighter, more truthful, simply more prepared to lead—and Donald Trump is hardly the first right-winger to snatch power while defining him against this smarter-than-thou liberalism.

GW Bush was mocked as a frat boy who basically inherited the White House thanks to his family connections—and then his administration invented the permanent war and gave away so many hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue that the federal government couldn’t function. Ronald Reagan came off as a dopey B-movie actor merely playing the role of commander in chief—and then he set the terms of political debate for a generation. No one should presume that Trump’s cartoonish ignorance will continue to constrain his presidency.

Trump has surrounded himself with people who are as plainly unqualified for their jobs as he is. The disregard for expertise is too much to him. And yet none of this dooms Trump’s agenda, which is fundamentally one of destruction. It is disturbingly easy to break stuff, and incompetence is a powerful tool. That’s especially true now, when so many of the systems that govern American lives—schools, infrastructure, housing, immigration—are already collapsing from neglect. It is hard to imagine they will survive his era intact; some must come into it saved.

Hence, the progressive imperative is not only resistance, but creation in the face of destruction. Not everything Trump wants to destroy needs saving: The free-trade deals and neo-con foreign policy he once decried have made the world poorer and less safe. Americans do well to end both. But on just about everything else, they need to rebuild.

Trump will continue to defy prediction, because he has no strategy beyond compulsive reaction, any goals beyond self-aggrandizement. But one thing is sure. His administration’s incompetence has already broken fragile systems. So, the Americans have both an obligation and an opportunity to build better ones.

He is a dangerous, selfish, bigoted racist and one may surmise that the majority of USA wishes that he is not the president of their country. But the worst stupidity is that they have him their president.

The European leaders, I mean America’s vassal states – Britain, France, Germany… are discussing drawing up a new arrangement to convince the US president from axing the 2015 deal as it does not prevent Iran’s ballistic missile programme. In fact, they are good for nothing and most observers believe that they will finally serve the interests of their master Donald Trump, the trouble-monger or the war-monger. It is now most clear that Trump’s un-civilised behaviour will spark dangerous chaos across the Middle East, the Korean peninsula and elsewhere of the world.

American people’s role in helping Trump ascend to the office of White House, making an anarchist to anything seems like a non-starter as the world has a good laugh, albeit through gritted teeth at President Trump’s incompetence. This also indicates that incompetence people elected an incompetent president for them.

Trump, as he has stood now, is against humanity. Trumpism, is of course, part of a larger phenomenon of authoritarian populism. This is a backlash against the values responsible for the progress that anyone can enjoy. It is a kind of counter-enlightenment ideology that Trumpism promotes. Namely, instead of universal human wellbeing, it focusses on the glory of the nation; it assumes that nations are in zero-sum competition against each other as opposed to cooperating globally. It ignores the institutions of democracy which are specifically implemented to avoid a charismatic authoritarian leader from wielding power, but subjects him to the restraints of a governed system with checks and balances, which Donald Trump seems to think is rather a nuisance to his own ability to voice the greatness of the people directly. So, in many ways all of the enlightenment forces American people have enjoyed, are being pushed back by Trump. But this is a tension that has been in play for a couple of hundred years. No sooner did the enlightenment happen that a counter-enlightenment grew up to oppose it, and every once in a while it does make reappearances.

It is just a simple matter of arithmetic. You can’t look at how much there is right now and say that it is increasing or decreasing until you compare it with how much took place in the past. When you look at how much took place in the past you realise how much worse things were in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. We don’t appreciate it now when we concentrate on the remaining horrors, but there were horrific wars such as the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the war in Vietnam, the partition of India, the Bangladesh war of independence, the Korean War…which killed far more people. And if we focus on the present, we ought to be aware of the suffering that continues to exist, but we can’t take that as evidence that things have got worse unless we remember what happened in the past. So, we must stop war and prevent it from re-occurring in the days to come. We want peace everywhere in the world.

If you are a gang member, know this: you think you are targeting us. Well, people are targeting you. They will find you. They will devastate your networks. They will starve your revenue sources, deplete your ranks, and seize your profits. They will not concede a single block or single street corner to illegal gangs anywhere in the world.

In short, the world is witnessing the most dangerous man in the American White House. Donald Trump is trying to create bedlam, destructions and deaths in many places of the world, but no people of the world should permit him to do so.

-The End –

The writer is a most ordinary senior citizen of Bangladesh