As Donald Trump inches towards the proverbial first 100 days’ benchmark of his presidency, the scale of the disaster that has befallen America is becoming clear. He has the lowest popularity rating in modern US history of any of his predecessors and there are unpleasant surprises nearly every day. At the same time, Mr Trump is the most entertaining of Presidents fulminating against the media behind his addiction to Twitter. He is also promising to build a wall on the Mexican border, abandoning the post-World War II policy of helping Europe stand on its feet by encouraging the break-up of the European Union, barely acknowledging the North Atlanic Treaty Organisation, which he called obsolete, and emphasising the 1920s’ slogan of “America First”. Building a new wall has unfortunate connotations for much of the world because of the historic nature of demolishing the Berlin Wall. And here comes a US President promising to build a new wall and charging Mexicans for it. In metaphorical terms, it is an expression of Mr Trump’s philosophy of America First, with its isolationist overtones and make-believe world abandoned long ago.
One promise he was able to fulfil was to end the major architecture of economic policy in Asia of the Obama administration, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But he has faced humiliation in signing executive orders on restricting the flow of migrants and visitors from seven, then six, Muslim-majority countries, both of them struck down by federal judges. His strong anti-Muslim rhetoric in the election campaign came to haunt him. President Trump’s biggest humiliation was, of course, the withdrawal of a new healthcare bill to replace Obamacare by sections of his own Republican Party. Embarrassingly, he had made getting rid of Obamacare one of his main campaign promises. In its amended form, it would have left some 24 million Americans outside the health insurance net. Mr Trump has his own supporters among white blue-collar workers and other whites protesting against a self-serving elite, and the sum total of his rule thus far has created a heightened racist environment whiplashing Indians, among others.
Mr Trump’s rise is due to a complex set of developments that have left less-educated and technology-deficient men and women on the wrong side of history. In the process, Mr Trump has lost his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, the man to hold the post for the shortest time in US history. And in his budget proposals, he has made big cuts to environment protection, the arts and foreign aid. While substantially cutting the US state department budget, he has hiked military spending. The new US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has thus far performed underwhelmingly. To cap Mr Trump’s cup of woes, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared that it is investigating the Trump team’s connections to Russians during the election campaign. It is Mr Flynn’s silence over his interactions with Russians that lost him his job. There has, in any case, been a widely-shared perception in political America that Russian hacks helped Mr Trump win through their revelations of Democratic Party’s inner working during the campaign. Mr Trump, for his part, has uttered laudatory words for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a gesture that has been reciprocated.
At one stage, President Trump has been a canny operator gaining wide publicity for insulting the media, the supposed purveyors of fake news, while revelling in his addiction to Twitter, receiving guidance for the most part from the right-wing Fox News television channel and shooting from the hip on Twitter even while his officials are in the field for repairing relations with countries. It is no secret that President Trump is ambivalent over environment and climate change issues and has appointed equally sceptical men to take charge of these agencies. In fact, a writer in the New Yorker in a lead article has speculated on his possible impeachment for his inability to take sane decisions comparing it to the second term of Ronald Reagan who had his advisers worried about his ability to take rational decisions. Together with Mr Trump, the Republican Party is in a crisis. The inability to pass the new health bill was due to the opposition from sections of Republicans: the ideologues who said it did not go far enough in abolishing Obamacare and the moderates who were fearful of losing support from people who would fall outside the health insurance net. Ideologically, Americans look askance at government role is areas they believe should be left to private enterprise.
In America, a new industry has grown on analysing Mr Trump’s make-up. There is his exaggerated mane of blond hair, his narcissism, his fondness for pretty women (his locker-room talk revealed during the campaign further proves the point), his impulsiveness and his self-belief that he is the best negotiator in the world on the strength of business deals he had been to strike in his days as a realty tycoon. Meanwhile, the world waits for the outcome of the Trump phenomenon with bated breath. There was a forlorn hope at one point that once he assumed office, he would behave differently. We had a brief glimpse of it during his address to the two Houses, but he reverted to form immediately afterwards in his familiar role of hurling insults and fretting over insignificant mattes. Imagine a President publicly taking issue with reports that his inauguration did not attract as big crowds as former President Obama’s, despite proof to the contrary. Many Americans are finding solace in the democratic institutions they have built in the illustrious history of the United States of America, particularly after the Civil War. The federal judges who stayed President Trump’s executive orders were upholding the equality of men and women before the law, irrespective of their religious beliefs. And in pushing ahead with a possible Russian role in, if not collusion with, the Trump team’s interactions, the institution has disregarded the administration’s frowns.
