Trashing the US presidency ‘brand’

Just when one might be forgiven for thinking it can’t get any worse, or that the end must surely come soon, the rolling freak show that is the Donald Trump presidency has taken the US and, by extension, the world to new levels of incredulity. There have been so many personal boasts, so many gross exaggerations, so many inept Tweets, so many mis-steps, wrong moves, divisiveness, fired staff, personal scandals and possibly cover-up, and yet the old bull still thrashes about, seemingly entirely unaware that he is indeed in a political china shop.

The US remains a critically important country, in political, economic and strategic terms. It is still a driver of trade, innovation and, ironically, much intellectualism. But the relative decline of the US from its singular superpower status of the 1990s is no better illustrated than by the substance, and perhaps the style, of the Trump presidency.

Abrogating world leadership, the US’ Brexit-like impulse reeks of insularity and insecurity, manifested by Trump’s infantile Tweets.     

German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted last July that Europe could no longer rely on the US under a Trump presidency while French President Emmanuel Macron shunned, and then ‘out-shook’, the US leader. President Putin has supported or derided Trump depending on how it advantages Russia, and the UN voted overwhelmingly to oppose Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, thus ending its role as Israel-Palestine mediator.

Despite the ‘fake’ rationale, abandoning his official visit to open a new US embassy in London was one of Trump’s more wise decisions, given the controversy and possibly confrontation his mere presence would have created.

Trump’s personal life, too, is rarely far from the headlines, now with an alleged payment of US$130,000 hush money to an ‘adult film’ star. And then there’s the inconvenience of that continuing FBI investigation into the extent of links between Russia and the Trump election campaign.         

Yet what seems to have most shocked Americans, and others, are Trump’s comments about the quality of some of the countries from which the US receives immigrants. Some countries in the world are, indeed, not happy or pleasant places and, to some extent, have been responsible for their own miseries.

But it is also impossible to ignore the extent of US influence in supporting the criminal regime of Haiti’s Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier. Also singled out by Trump, El Salvador is very much a product of US interference, from the 1930s and throughout its civil war between 1979 and 1992.

The US made and financed Salvadorean governments, trained El Salvador’s murderous military and helped create its emblematic ‘death squads’. And then there was US support for some of the most corrupt and savage regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, from which those countries continue to be enmeshed in interrelated cycles of violence and poverty.

Yet such ignorance or ineptitude is irrelevant to a man who, according to the recently released book ‘Fire and Fury’, did not actually want to become president. The internal disconnectedness of conventional US politics just resonated in a largely unanticipated wave of pro-Trump support.

For any conventional leader, political death would have already occurred. Whether Trump survives as president will now probably more reflect whether nervous Republicans believe they will lose the US mid-term elections in November and sufficient of them then invoke the beginnings of an impeachment process.

Trump’s current approval rating of just under 40 per cent represents locked in support by those voters who either don’t care or who actually approve of his political style. More tellingly, however, is the 54.5 per cent who actively disapprove of Trump as president, and the consequent potential for electoral backlash against the Republican Party that he nominally represents.

Republicans could hang on to the Senate in November, but the House of Representatives looks vulnerable to a Democrat victory. The only questions about Trump’s future, then, are whether American voters will link their self-regard, and well-being, to perceptions of their president, and whether that comes at, or before, the next presidential election.