Opinion

Termagant Trump

November 02, 2018

NEXT week in their mid-term elections, US voters will have a chance to show what they really think of their termagant President Donald Trump. On the stump on Florida, Trump launched his latest attack on the American media asserting that a third of it constituted “an enemy of the people”.

The president was particularly stung by what he claimed was a refusal of editors to report that he had forcefully condemned hatred and bigotry. In the wake of the murderous weekend attack on a Pennsylvania synagogue, in which 11 Jewish worshippers were killed by a white racist gunman, much of the media actually blamed Trump for encouraging such outrages.

The fact that good-buddy Rednecks are among the president’s most devoted supporters was used by many media outlets as a cudgel with which to beat him. In particular, much of the coverage given to angry protests against Trump’s solemn visit to the scene of the massacre could be deemed to have been unbalanced and undignified. Instead of respecting the fact that the enormity of this crime was being condemned in person by the President of the United States, the media and demonstrators alike made the event personal. It must be wondered how many of the victims of this assault might have shared this disrespectful attack on the office of the President.

Trump has many faults. Many in the Muslim Ummah were deeply disturbed by his apparently Islamophobic comments during his White House campaign. His unbridled support for Zionist ambitions in Israel has created widespread alarm, not simply in the Arab world. His often intemperate and seemingly ill-considered remarks on social media are generally confrontational. This is a President who does not do subtle.

And the Washington political establishment and members of the largely liberal media, long been accustomed to privileged access to the corridors of power which they are now denied, have been flummoxed by this president. Like a young mongoose circling its first cobra, the liberal elite has yet to work out the best way to strike. The louder it protests against Trump, the stronger he has seemed to become, branding each and every criticism as “fake news”.

Trump’s Republican party currently controls both houses of Congress. The Democrats think that next week they can at least win control of the House of Representatives and thus block or certainly delay the president’s controversial plans on the likes of immigration, environmental controls and even the resumption of the arms race with Moscow. The media is reporting positive polling signs for the Democrats. Yet no one seems to be editorializing the fact that Trump won the White House very much because he was an outsider who appealed to voters utterly fed up with the paralysis of a deeply polarized Congress. If they return a Democrat legislative majority then they will be voting for more of same old, same old, with the added destabilization of legislators whose hatred of Donald Trump borders on the demented. They may however choose to reinforce their original mandate for this most unusual of Presidents. If that happens, America’s already splenetic liberal elite must cease what are, in reality, deeply damaging attacks on the American constitution and the Office of the President. Alternatively they may need to check themselves into an asylum for the remaining two years of Trump’s term.


November 02, 2018
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