IN A DANGEROUS PLACE

Nov 09, 2017 Editorial

United States President, Donald Trump is on a 12-day visit to Asia to improve his nation’s relations with its allies in that region, bolster US trade, especially with China, and to seek help from China to get North Korea to end its continuous threats and abandon its nuclear weapons program. However, experts have opined that despite China’s promise to urge North Korea’s leader Kim Jung-un to end his nuclear ambitions, the truth is China would be more accepting of a nuclear North Korea than US dominance of the Korean Peninsula.
It has become clear that President Trump, consciously or unconsciously, has shifted the United States in a dangerous direction since being elected to serve in the highest office. Some of his most ardent supporters, at times of more solemn reflection, have conceded that this is not what they bargained for. They have stated that if the president continues on his present path, none of the objectives they voted for will ever be realised. Even some Republican members of Congress are convinced that the President has placed the United States on a slippery slope that can only spell disaster for the country and the world.
The evidence of this treacherous turn in American politics is very palpable. After almost one year in office, President Trump has failed to have any significant legislation passed in Congress. His promise to repeal and replace President Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, has failed, and his tax reform legislation which is currently before Congress seems to be in jeopardy.
This is largely his own doing, as he has sought to govern by tweets, which he has used more as a tool of division than of unity. While his aim is to gratify his supporters, he is clueless that his actions to replace Obamacare will put the health of millions of Americans, including many who voted for him, at great risk.
He has taken on football players who refuse to stand during the singing of the national anthem and pursued other causes that are pedantic, and which other presidents would have looked at with derision. He has infuriated groups unnecessarily with his intemperate outbursts at public events. He has preoccupied himself with banalities, and in too many instances has brought embarrassment to the office of the presidency and the American people.
His behaviour as President has become more undesirable when one considers that his predecessor, Barack Obama was a measured and temperate person who carefully weighed his public comments so as not to unnecessarily rattle constituents or cause panic.
Obama’s lawyerly and often painstaking approach to issues may have been frustrating to some who wanted him to make prompt decisions, but his approach, compared to Trump’s misunderstanding of the issues and tendency to shoot from the hip, was uplifting. Obama avoided the abrasive and incendiary comments which have become a staple in Trump’s public diet, and which Trump seems to thrive on.
Trump’s unhealthy obsession to erase Obama’s legacy and name from the history books, and to de-legitimise his achievements, are subtle reminders that he obsessively believed, and probably still does, that Obama was not born in the United States, and should not have been president.
He seems trapped in a body of his own narcissism which he has nurtured over several decades. Those who expect him to act presidentially, to be elegant in his expression, to be careful of whom he offends or to bring decorum to the office of the president could as well hope for ice cream to remain solid in the Sahara Desert. America and the world are in a more contentious state than they have been in the past 50 years.
Further, there is no great confidence at this time that President Trump would think twice before triggering a nuclear war. Neither is there confidence that the Republicans in Congress or their leaders would have the ability to stop him. Unfortunately, America is moving from one serious crisis to another, because the ideals of its presidency have been misplaced in the present occupant who has placed it in a dangerous place.

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