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A divisive Trump in Lincoln's unifying America

Published : Sunday, 22 January, 2017 at 1:19 AM  Count : 465
Syed Badrul Ahsan
On the eve of his inauguration as President of the United States, a divisive Donald Trump was at the memorial that honours the unifying sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln. A day before his inauguration as the 45th President of the United States, Trump had little difficulty in demonstrating to his country the contradictions and the ironies which have characterized his politics since the day he announced his improbable candidacy for the White House.
The improbable comes in knowing that never before has there been a man so ill-prepared to take charge of a country so influential on the global stage. Never a student of politics, unschooled in foreign policy, all his life a businessman and a reality star on television, Trump made a good show of elbowing his way to the Republican Party nomination for the presidency by shouting down his opponents and by his simplistic slogan of 'Make America Great Again'. He then went on the campaign trail against the better prepared and more richly experienced Hillary Clinton with a barrage of insults and innuendo and ended up, in however questionable a manner, as the successor to the sophisticated and cerebral Barack Obama.
The ironies are aplenty, considering the modern history of the American presidency. There have been all those factors that ought to have eliminated Trump from the contest for the White House. That has not happened, which can only point to a deepening worry: America has changed in ways that no one could ever imagine. It has gone inward. It has embraced insularity. A majority of Americans have chosen to turn their backs on the values which have so long ensured that the presidency rests in the hands of an individual who will reassure Americans and the world beyond America's frontiers of sober, purposeful leadership. In Trump, it is an erratic future Americans are guaranteed over the next four years. It is an uncertain destiny the world faces with Donald Trump in charge in Washington.
In an earlier, more conscience-driven era, Trump would be laughed out of a presidential campaign. The media would make certain that he did not even come close to his party's nomination and then make it to the presidency. Far better men, more qualified than he, have fallen by the wayside because of their blunders and peccadilloes in the past. Men aspiring to be President have risen and fallen, to be forgotten. Presidents who have not measured up to the calling of office have paid a price.
Go back to a study of a politically vibrant America that has vanished with the arrival of Donald Trump.
In 1972, Edmund Muskie, who appeared to be on his way to winning the Democratic Party nomination for President against Richard Nixon, saw his campaign melt in the snows of New Hampshire when he appeared to weep over the media's treatment of his wife Jane. Emotional men could not expect to be President.
In 1988, Democratic Party frontrunner for the presidency Gary Hart was caught canoodling with a young woman named Donna Rice on a boat named, ironically, Monkey Business. His presidential aspirations went up in smoke. America was not prepared for a President who was fond of having pretty young women sit on his lap.
In the 1960s, for all his repeated attempts to win the Republican Party nomination for President, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller could not make it. A reason, among many reasons, given out was his divorce from his first wife and going for a second one. Americans did not like a man wishing to be President to ditch his wife in such cavalier manner and go for a replacement.
In 1968, George Romney, the Governor of Michigan and at that point the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, went on a trip to Vietnam, where he was seemingly impressed by the resolve of American soldiers to defeat the Vietcong. When he came back home, he made the discovery that he had been brainwashed by the generals into believing that America's soldiers had the Communists on the run when in fact that was not the case at all. He complained to Americans in public. His ratings plummeted, for Americans were not ready for a President who could so easily be misled by his military. Romney never made it to presidential office.
In the 1990s, the priapic exploits of Bill Clinton nearly brought his presidency to a crashing end. The Monica Lewinsky affair led the Senate into initiating impeachment proceedings against him. He survived, but that taint of illicit relationships with women across the board never quite has been forgotten and indeed has prevented his years in the White House from being regarded as being among the more illustrious demonstrations of presidential authority.
Richard Nixon, to his intense embarrassment and to public indignation, discovered only months into his landslide second term victory as President in the 1970s that the occupant of the White House could resort to lies and subterfuge at risk to his reputation and power. Threatened with impeachment over Watergate, he became the first American President to resign. Americans were not willing to tolerate the presence in the White House of a leader who undermined truth and seemed ready to violate the Constitution.
Jimmy Carter has always been a decent man. Even so, his candid remarks in a Playboy magazine interview about the adultery he had committed in his heart in relation to his fantasies of women led to a dip in public support for his candidacy in 1976. He survived and went on to beat Gerald Ford at the election. Never again would Carter, the born-again Christian that he was, make that kind of gaffe. He had learnt his lesson.
But America has changed, perhaps beyond recognition. It now has entrusted its future in the hands of a President who has been doing and saying everything civilized men and women have consistently militated against.
Donald Trump has gone after the media with a vengeance. One wonders how his presidential press conferences will turn out in the White House.
He was relentless, for years, in a campaign trying to prove that President Barack Obama was not an American citizen.
In the course of the campaign, he felt no qualms of conscience denigrating such Republican aspirants for the White House as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. He then spent the entire period of the contest against Hillary Clinton insulting her and encouraging his rabid supporters into raising slogans of 'Lock Her Up'. He lost all three presidential debates with Clinton, but that did not prevent him from going ahead with his indecencies. At one of the debates, he had three of the women previously linked sexually to Bill Clinton come in, to embarrass his rival and her family.
He has spoken of grabbing women by the pussy, feeling no contrition at all when the tape was aired on television networks across America.
He has gone to war with his country's intelligence community over the issue of Russian hacking of the election that brought him, in questionable fashion, to power. He has averred that the CIA and other security agencies of the United States have been behaving like the Nazis of old, but he has had not a single harsh word for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He has upset Mexicans on the matter of building a wall to prevent them from entering America illegally and has demanded that they pay for the wall.
His ignorance of geopolitics and foreign policy has already placed him on a collision course with China.
His condemnation of Nato as an obsolete organization has been a display of the intellectual limitations that will underpin the American presidency over the next four years.
He has little idea of the importance of the nuclear deal the West recently reached with Iran and is clearly not aware that an American President simply cannot fling agreements reached on a global scale into the bin.
His poor reading of religion has shut him off from the truth about Islam, from the reality that Islamist terrorists are not representative of the faith Muslims practice all across the world.
He has little understanding of the political acumen of Angela Merkel, which is why he speaks without thinking of her migrant policy. He does not know that ambassadors to America are appointed by their governments, that their appointments are not to be suggested by American presidents.
He has hanging over him, despite his denials, the spectre of his sexual escapades on a trip to Russia in 2013, material that Moscow's ruling circles could make public at a time of their choosing.
At noon in Washington on Friday, it was this man who was sworn into office as President of the United States.
It was a study in contrasts. A scholarly and suave Barack Obama passed on the powers of presidential office to an abusive and abrasive Donald Trump.
At noon on Friday, a devalued presidency took charge in Washington. A less than edifying image of the White House came upon the world.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor, The Daily Observer







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