Trump, a walking dichotomy

I’ve followed the destinies of all post-war presidents, although my memory of Truman is compromised by my age at the time. That’s 12 presidents all together.

On the basis of that survey sample, I can state with absolute confidence that not a single one of them has divided opinions as much as Donald Trump.

The emotional pitch reached by those who love him is only matched in intensity by the febrile fervour of Trump haters. No middle ground is anywhere in evidence, which forms a vacuum famously abhorred by nature.

Acting on nature’s behalf, my feelings about Trump touch neither extreme of love or hate. Instead they cover a narrower range, demarcated by squeamish revulsion at one end and grudging appreciation at the other.

The first end covers Trump’s personality; the second, many of his policies. And the past few days have bolstered both ends.

First, the president confirmed yet again my general assessment of his character. As an admirer of our civilisation, I’m saddened to see a man so spectacularly untouched by it.

Trump is ignorant, vulgar, rude, bombastic, narcissistic, impulsive, loud-mouthed and generally savage. Such qualities aren’t rare among the first generation of wealth in an American family.

However, the scions of chaps who clawed their way to riches (such as Trump) tend to acquire gentlemanly manners, decent education, refined or at least grammatical speech and sometimes even culture.

Trump bucks this trend like a demented mustang. At times he displays unconscionable vulgarity accompanied by grotesque ignorance.

On Monday, for example, he declared that he could order individual states to end the lockdown when he saw fit. “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump explained.

Eh, not quite. Replace ‘the United States’ with ‘Russia’ or ‘Zimbabwe’, and the statement would be unassailable. In the US, however, there exists this minor matter of the Constitution, which Trump undertook to “preserve, protect and defend”.

Its Tenth Amendment specifies that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Nowhere does it say that the president has total authority to end lockdowns.

In response to some governors’ demurring, Trump displayed the breadth of his cultural references: “Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain.”

He’d do better drawing his inspiration from the Federalist papers than from a Hollywood concoction. However, he got even that modest reference wrong: the mutineers of the Bounty put their captain in a lifeboat and set him adrift. Or perhaps, rather than getting the film wrong, Trump revealed his fear of suffering a similar fate after the November election.

Then, at a press briefing, a CBS correspondent challenged Trump’s self-serving boast that he had saved lives by restricting travel from China. She pointed out, not unreasonably, that it had taken him a month and a half to recommend social distancing.

Trump’s response was in character: “You’re so disgraceful, it’s so disgraceful the way you say that… You’re a fake. Your whole network is a fake.”

Though it’s hard to argue against his general assessment of CBS, civilised people don’t respond to substantive criticism that way. Barbarians do, and that’s exactly what Trump is.

However, and here we reach the other end of my feelings about the president, he’s the kind of barbarian who gets many of his policies right. Thus one has to applaud his decision to withdraw US funding from the WHO.

That organisation was complicit with China in suppressing the early data on the deadly effect of Covid-19. That’s hardly surprising because Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, comes from Ethiopia, China’s client state.

Even though US contributions to the WHO were 10 times the size of China’s, Tedros never breaks his labio-gluteal contact with China and follows its lead with unswerving devotion.

That’s why he ignored the data provided by Taiwan’s government as early as in December. In an e-mailed letter based on in situ research by Taiwanese scientists, Taiwan informed the WHO that an unknown virus was causing atypical pneumonia.

However, as far as China (and therefore Tedros) is concerned, Taiwan is a non-country, and therefore anything it says must be ignored. When the pandemic spread, Tedros even lied that no such letter had been received, forcing Taiwan’s government to produce the e-mail with its date.

China and the WHO are thus accomplices in a crime. Their shenanigans caused a deadly delay in other countries’ response to coronavirus and cost thousands of lives. I don’t know what Trump’s response to China will be, but his suspension of WHO funding was justified and, well, presidential.

There you have it, a dichotomy in the flesh. On balance, if I still voted in US elections, I’d pinch my nostrils and opt for Trump, what with the alternative being unimaginable. But I wouldn’t feel good about myself in the morning.