During the 2016 US presidential election, the Huffington Post’s US site carried the following editor’s note at the end of every story about the US Republican nominee: “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the US.”
Shortly before 6am on that long election night — in between Trump winning Iowa and being declared the victor in Pennsylvania — the Washington bureau chief announced that the note would be removed, “in respect for the office,” and that it was time for a “clean slate.”
A year before his election, Fiona Hill, who would become one of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s joint chiefs of staff, said on Twitter: “Donald Trump is a chump #trumpisachump.”
Six months later, Nicholas Timothy, who would become May’s other joint chief, wrote: “As a Tory I don’t want any ‘reaching out’ to Trump.”
However, once Trump was elected, May could not reach out fast or far enough — the first foreign leader to meet the US president, just one week after his inauguration.
During the primaries, former Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said on Twitter: “If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement.”
Almost two years later, Romney decided to run for the Utah senate seat and Trump endorsed him.
“Thank you Mr President for the support,” Romney said.
According to Tim Shipman’s account in Fall Out, a month before the US election British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Boris Johnson told a friend: “This is an election that is going to expose America’s primal pysche as never before. If it is Trump, it will be a victory of really base daytime TV redneck America.”
Last month there was Johnson, on breakfast TV — Fox & Friends — insisting that Trump could be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, as he unsuccessfully pleaded with the president, via one of his favorite TV shows, not to abandon the Iran nuclear deal.
POWERFUL TEST
Power can apply a soothing balm to a raging conscience. In its absence, all kinds of moral positions can be staked out in bold, vivid rhetoric.
However, it is only in the presence of power that these values are tested, for it is only then that there is a price to pay. In those moments it can be seen whether the lines people have drawn have been carved in stone, so they can stand by them, or etched in sand, ensuring no permanent trace.
So it has been with Trump’s elevation. Once his candidacy proved viable there was a broad consensus that it should not be normalized.
This was not simply a politician with whom some had policy disagreements; here was a man who practiced a style of politics that could not be indulged.
He advocated violence at his own rallies, branded journalists scum, brazenly invented facts, employed unvarnished racism, xenophobia and misogyny on the stump and refused to accept the result if he lost.
To treat him like any other candidate would be not only to legitimize such political behavior, but reward it.
That is why it will be important to demonstrate during his visit to the UK next month, to make clear to the world, that British have clear moral lines and the man who is ostensibly their main ally has crossed them many times.
This was no partisan beef — initially, mainstream conservatives, on both sides of the Atlantic, said they wanted nothing to do with him.
Then he won.
Those on the right, trading principle for pragmatism and the certainty of aggravation for the possibility of access, accommodated, adapted and soon fell in line as though the line was their idea.
“What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president,” US Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN in November last year.
Graham apparently forgot what he had told Fox a year earlier: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.”
Some liberals became fixated on the legality of the election itself on account of accusations of Russian interference — a matter that will, initially at least, be settled in the courts.
Yet more just became worn out. The daily barrage of venality, mendacity, tantrums and tweets has worn down many and turned off more.
Either way, at least where the electorate is concerned, the US seems to have reached a new normal.
NOT NORMAL
Polls have shown that 38 percent of Americans think the country is moving in the right direction — that is significantly higher than at the same stage in both of former US president Barack Obama’s terms.
Trump’s approval ratings have climbed into the low 40s. That is still low, but heading in the right direction.
Republicans are intensely loyal to him — indeed, with the exception of former US president George W. Bush after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, no other president has commanded this level of support from their party since World War II.
He is, it is true, loathed intensely, too. Four of the five biggest marches in US history have taken place since his inauguration — none of them supported his agenda.
However, the certainty that this resistance would lead to a US Democratic victory in November’s midterms is evaporating.
Six months ago, Democrats consistently held a double-digit advantage over Republicans in generic polling — over the past few weeks their lead has been as low as one point.
It is not difficult to fathom why this should be. While Trump is busy throwing all sorts of red meat to his supporters — steel tariffs, racial slights to football players or sideswipes at the media — Democrats have yet to formulate a coherent response to this moment beyond that they are not Trump.
As the Reverend Al Sharpton told Guardian journalists on Wednesday last week, waiting for Trump to self-destruct “is not a political strategy.”
Over the past two weeks Trump has launched a trade war with his allies; held an iftar dinner to mark the holy month of Ramadan, which Muslim groups boycotted; attacked his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation over a conflict of interest; disinvited Super Bowl winners the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House reception, because he had heard several were not going to show up; and claimed he has the right to pardon himself.
The remarkable thing about this period is that — compared with his behavior in other weeks — it is not that remarkable.
The political situation in the US is many things: It is exhausting, exasperating, terrifying, volatile, vulgar, unsustainable and unhinged. The one thing it is not, is normal.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs