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.
The EU’s biggest banks have spent years quietly creating a new way to pay that could finally allow customers to ditch their Visa Inc and Mastercard Inc cards — the latest sign that the region is looking to dislodge two of the most valuable financial firms on the planet. Wero, as the project is known, is now rolling out across much of western Europe. Backed by 16 major banks and payment processors including BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG and Worldline SA, the platform would eventually allow a German customer to instantly settle up with, say, a hotel in France
On August 6, Ukraine crossed its northeastern border and invaded the Russian region of Kursk. After spending more than two years seeking to oust Russian forces from its own territory, Kiev turned the tables on Moscow. Vladimir Putin seemed thrown off guard. In a televised meeting about the incursion, Putin came across as patently not in control of events. The reasons for the Ukrainian offensive remain unclear. It could be an attempt to wear away at the morale of both Russia’s military and its populace, and to boost morale in Ukraine; to undermine popular and elite confidence in Putin’s rule; to
A traffic accident in Taichung — a city bus on Sept. 22 hit two Tunghai University students on a pedestrian crossing, killing one and injuring the other — has once again brought up the issue of Taiwan being a “living hell for pedestrians” and large vehicle safety to public attention. A deadly traffic accident in Taichung on Dec. 27, 2022, when a city bus hit a foreign national, his Taiwanese wife and their one-year-old son in a stroller on a pedestrian crossing, killing the wife and son, had shocked the public, leading to discussions and traffic law amendments. However, just after the
The international community was shocked when Israel was accused of launching an attack on Lebanon by rigging pagers to explode. Most media reports in Taiwan focused on whether the pagers were produced locally, arousing public concern. However, Taiwanese should also look at the matter from a security and national defense perspective. Lebanon has eschewed technology, partly because of concerns that countries would penetrate its telecommunications networks to steal confidential information or launch cyberattacks. It has largely abandoned smartphones and modern telecommunications systems, replacing them with older and relatively basic communications equipment. However, the incident shows that using older technology alone cannot
RSS