Opinion | Donald Trump, a threat at home and abroad

Augustus K. Yeung

2021.10.23 18:19

President Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021 in Washington. The President is traveling to Texas. (AP Photo)

By Augustus K. Yeung

Introduction

Does Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, understand the cost of the distrust he's fostering at home and abroad?

For years, Mr. Trump, who wielded Twitter as a rhetorical weapon during his presidency, has battled tech giants at home, whom he argues have wrongfully censored him.

The free-speech fight escalated when Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and the rest of the world's dominant social media platforms banned him--as a punishment for stirring up the mob that ransacked the Capitol or the Congress, probably until now the zenith of his crime against his own country.

The riveting story about Donald Trump and his clique (headed by Mike Pence, the vice-president, Elliott Broidy, Trump fundraiser,) whose story of lies, theory of conspiracies, etc. have never ceased to amaze his countrymen, so much so that so many America's journalists are writing about him, so many Americans are talking behind his back, so many angry people—male and female--are publishing memoirs to record and publicize his sins, and so many American lawmakers are seriously trying hard to sue him, to indict him, to impeach him and, above all, to stop him from running in the 2024 US presidency.

What did Donald Trump do abroad to anger so many foreign administrations and their people?

For Europe, Trump was the Threat

Like much of the world, the European Union was struggling to decipher a President Trump who seems every day to be picking a fight with a new nation, whether friend or foe.

He has insulted or humiliated Mexico, Britain, Germany and Iraq; engaged in a war of words with China and Iran; and turned a routine phone call with the prime minister of Australia, a staunch US ally, into a minor crisis.

With NATO as the exception, where he has softened his tone, Mr. Trump has expressed disdain for other multilateral institutions such as the European Union. His praise has been reserved for populists and strongmen, like President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and of course, his admired or feared President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

E.U. leaders faced a struggle with how to proceed under Donald Trump. (New York Times, February 4-5, 2017

Pence's Anti-China Speech Sparked State Media's Fury

As the rhetoric intensified in the widening strategic conflict between Washing and Beijing, US Vice-president Mike Pence delivered a scathing speech against China at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, targeting China for its foreign policy, trade practices and claims about meddling in US elections--without giving specifics.

"The Vice-president's speech also included floating a proposal for Beijing to buy four US Gerald R Ford-class aircraft carriers to help close China's trade surplus with the United States, 'If one piece is priced at US$15 billion and the US sells four to China, we can immediately narrow the trade gap by US$60 billion,'" he said, reported the Post. (South China Morning Post, October 13, 2018)

"China's state media rolled out a slew of combative opinion pieces in response to Mike Pence's speech, which sounded a bit odd, though trade-oriented and business-like. A signed commentary from People's Daily, China's official newspaper, attacked Pence for the remarks he made. The nearly 5,400 words screed by Zhong Xuanli sought to refute the vice-president's speech.

Official news agency Xinhua also ran at least eight nationalistic opinion pieces, penned by authors from academia, business and government, that took an indignant tone, with headlines reading: 'Mr. Pence must be tired' 'Uncle Sam should not have amnesia' and 'China's development did not come from other people's charity or favors.'"

Besides "unfair trade practices", Pence's speech accused China of "ramped-up propaganda efforts abroad, aggression in the South China Sea, imprisonment of its Muslim Uygur population and debt diplomacy through the Belt and Road Initiative."

This speech was unimaginably strange: Why would the Vice-President talk about selling prized American "aircraft carriers" to China, turning deadly weapons into economic commodities? Did the Trump administration regard China as America's friend and business partner?

Why did the president put Russia first?

"Officially, the U.S. calls Russia an adversary, but Trump isn't hearing that." Based on U.S. intelligence, that Russia was most likely paying a bounty for the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan has evoked "a strange silence from President Trump and his top national security officials on the question of what to do about the Kremlin's wave of aggression." ("With Putin on the offensive, Washington lacks a reply," New York Times, July 4-5, 2020).

"Mr. Trump insisted he never saw the intelligence, though it was part of the President's Daily Brief just days before a peace deal was signed with the Taliban in February. The White House said it was not even appropriate for him to be briefed, because the president sees only 'verified' intelligence.

But it doesn't require a top-secret clearance and access to the government's most classified information to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War."

Trump's Racist Remarks Pained CNN's Lisa Ling

"The anti-Chinese racism inflamed by Donald Trump pained CNN's Lisa Ling, an American journalist. It led her to join protests against it and use her platform This Is Life to explore its dark history." (Source: Tribune News Service, "This time it's personal." Circulated by the South China Morning Post, October 17, 2021.)

A television journalist in the public eye for more than 20 years, Lisa Ling, a Chinese American was horrified by remarks she saw last year when the U.S. was shut down by the pandemic.

"The day after Donald Trump called Covid-19 the 'China virus' I got two messages on social media that told me my people were responsible for it." Ling, 48, says, "I saved the tweet: 'I hope you and your kids die from the Wuhan virus.'"

The words hurt Ling, who is Chinese American and grew up in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento in California and now lives in Los Angeles. When she saw how similar rhetoric led to a surge in the number of attacks on Asian-Americans in cities across the United States, she was shocked into action of documenting the past cases of violence against the people of "her kinds" in Chinatown.

In the premiere episode of the eighth season of Ling's CNN documentary series This Is Life, she took an intensely personal look at the long and tortuous history of prejudice against the Chinese community in the U.S…

Conclusion

There is a Chinese proverb: When a tiger perishes, the fur is what remains; when a person passes away, what remains is the legacy. Mr. Donald Trump is still alive and kicking. But when he dies one day, will he be remembered as a persistent businessman who would never take failure for an answer, or a pugnacious self-styled "world leader" who is known for being punitive, and fond of forcing on other counties his "America First" policy?

In general, the former U.S. president is seen as "undemocratic" and "corrupt" and even "subversive" by many fellow Americans, some with Republican and many with Democratic political inclinations.

Among many upset American journalists, Mr. Trump's legacy remains in U.S. history an "ethically challenged presidency," one daredevil puts it.

The author is a freelance writer; formerly Adjunct Lecturer, taught MBA Philosophy of Management, and International Strategy, and online columnist of 3-D Corner (HKU SPACE), University of Hong Kong.

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