A US President-Made in Russia!

Donald J Trump sworn in as the 45th. President of the world’s most powerful nation, United States of America on January 20. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll Trump will be the least popular US President in at last four decades taking oath. The poll results were published on January 17. On the day of inauguration different groups have brought out protest rallies across US including in Washington DC. 50 Democrat Senators have boycotted the ceremony. Never in the US history have an Inauguration to induct a new President have been mired in so much controversies. Days after Donald Trump was elected to the office of the US Presidency words went around saying that Trump win was made possible by the Russians who hacked the Democratic National Committee and the private email of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, with the intention of helping Trump.

The US intelligence community agreed that the Russian hacking did take place. If not for the Russians it would have been difficult for Donald Trump, an absolute obscure presidential candidate to win the election. However under the US electoral system anything is possible. The popular vote may select one candidate, as it was in the case of Hillary Clinton, but the system declares the other candidate the winner. Hillary Clinton received about three million more votes than Trump but lost the election. For an outsider, including many Americans the US presidential election is complicated and difficult to understand.

Not only Trump was an obscure figure in US politics, he is also branded as a racist, vulgar, sexist, anti immigrant, anti Muslim and even before he entered the White House he managed to kick lots of dust by taking aboard as his team members persons for running his government whom the average, educated and sensible Americans love to hate. He announced his daughter and his son in law will hold important positions in the administration. According to another published report in the Washington Post ‘In national exit polling, 91 percent of black voters had an unfavorable view of Trump, while 83 percent regarded Clinton favorably. In the vote preference, the exit polling found that black voters favored Clinton over Trump by a margin of 89 percent to 8 percent.’ Analyst think under Trump US will be a divided nation. Nevertheless Donald Trump has already taken the oath as the 45th. American president, a position earlier held by great statesman like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D Roosevelt. However though Roosevelt held the position for record four successive terms (1933-45) he is accused of unnecessarily dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Though the rest of the world have their eyes glued to US presidential election, held every four year last November’s election gave the people little to be optimistic about. The choice was between Democrat candidate and one time First Lady in the White House and the immediate past President Barrack Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a former Realty Show anchor and business tycoon Donald Trump. Political analyst thought if Clinton got elected whatever left of the global peace will be vanished while if the Trump is elected peace in America’s backyard will become illusive. Julian Assange the Australian computer programmer, publisher, journalist and the founder of WikeLeakes termed the election as a choice between Syphilis and Gonorrhea. Which one the Americans chose will be known in days to come but according commentator Steven Erlanger writing for the New York Times on January 16, ‘As Trump Era Arrives, a Sense of Uncertainty Grips the World.’

Uncertainty it is. Even before Trump took his oath he managed not only to create uproar in his own country but also drew flak from leaders around the world, except Vladimir V. Putin the Russian President. He termed Putin as a good friend and is ready to do deals with him declaring that his first foreign trip would be to Russia. Trump infuriated China by announcing that he recognizes Taiwan as a separate entity discarding China’s one China policy. In an interview published in the Wall Street Journal on January 13, Trumps questioned China’s long standing One China policy. A day later China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Jua Chunying, said that anyone trying to use the status of Taiwan for negotiations would be “smashing their feet by lifting a rock”. She added that “not everything in the world can be bargained or traded off.” The English–language China Daily accused Mr. Trump on last Monday of “playing with fire,” saying that if Taiwan became up for negotiation, as Mr. Trump suggested to the Wall Street Journal, “Beijing will have no choice but to take off the gloves.”

Trump promised to bring back jobs from China back to US which may trigger a trade war that may have losers on both sides. Currently most of the consumer and industrial goods of American brands are made or assembled in China. Trump said in a newspaper interviews published on January 15, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had made a “catastrophic mistake” with a policy that let wave of more than million migrants (refugees) into her country.” He also angered the European Union (EU) saying it has become “a vehicle for Germany” and predicted that more EU member states would vote to leave the bloc as Britain did last June (The Times). Trump refuses to realize that most of these refugees are Muslims fleeing the war zone in the Middle East deliberately created by United States and its allies during the rule of George Bush Jr., and Barrack Obama. Merkel and the Germans were praised earlier by the global community for the humanitarian gestures shown to these wretched refugees. Incidentally Russian officials quickly praised Trumps remarks about EU, Merkel and NATO. But Ms. Merkel and French President Francois Hollande showed their frustration to reporters, commenting that the EU does not need Washington’s support or advice to succeed. “We Europeans have our destiny in our own hands,” Ms. Merkel told reporters in Berlin, arguing that the vast majority of Syrians taken in by Germany in recent years were not terrorists but refugees fleeing their country’s brutal civil war.

Notes: The writer is the Chairman of University Grants Commission of Bangladesh and a former Vice-Chancellor, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh.