Monday 30 January 2017

Herr Trump

Thank you, people of the USA for dumping Trump on the world.

He's been in office for just over a week and he has even managed to exceed our expectancies.

During the inauguration, he demonstrated what a boor he is in the way he treated his wife. Does the man have no manners, no gentlemanly traits? And apart from being downright rude to the woman, he clearly said something to her that turned her pretend smile into a very real look of fear.

His first week has been marked by lies, "alternative facts" (lies, in other words), numerous decrees, and what must have been a big disappointment for him during the first official visit of a foreign head of state.

Trump lied blatantly about the size of the crowd that attended his inauguration and found the subject so important, that he even had a enlargement made of a photograph showing the sparsely attended area in front of the White House and now has it hanging in that building (perhaps he thought that enlarging the photo would enlarge the number of people. He then lied about the vastly greater turnout for the Womens March, that took place not only in Washington, but around the world. Perhaps Trolland Dump has his own size issues…

So during his first ominous week he started or put in place processes with the following aims:

  • to end the semblance of decent health insurance that the people of the USA so desperately need;
  • to actually build his ridiculous Mexican wall and to insult that country's people by insisting that it will be built at their expense;
  • he has opened up the possibility of building huge nature-destroying pipelines across the USA (pipelines that will cross homelands of Native Americans, who really should build their own walls to stop the pipelines);
  • to prevent nationals of various foreign states from obtaining visa to enter the USA;
  • to suggest that Christians be allowed to enter the USA, but not Muslims (I'm an atheist, so where do I stand?)
  • to indicate that he is in favour of torture and, in particular, waterboarding.
The first foreign head of state to visit Dumpy Trumpy was the UK's Theresa May. Old Donald must have got himself very excited at the prospect of meeting her, as the White House had been tweeting and sending out memos informing about the upcoming visit between Trump and, as they called her, Teresa May (note the missing "h" in the given name). If Trump had Googled this, he'd have come up with someone looking like this:


For Teresa May is a soft porn star and "glamour" model.

Instead, he got this:


Now, all this lying, pontificating, and getting rather important details wrong may seem jolly amusing and I have come across a number of television and radio programmes that have a good old laugh at it all.

But there's a serious side to it, too.

If Trump can treat his wife the way he does, if Trump finds it important to lie about small matters, if Trumps advisors are incapable of getting the name of a visiting head of state right… then there is something deeply, deeply worrying about the presidency of the USA.

And, as if that were not enough, if the president of the USA is capable of such inhumanity, such disrespect of nature, such clear religious discrimination… then there is something deeply, deeply worrying about that man.

Not only worrying, but quite frightening.

Not since the 1930s and the lead-up to the Second World War, when a little man named Adolph Hitler stirred the German people into a frenzy of nationalism, xenophobia, and religious fanaticism, has a more dangerous person held such an important position.

Please, please, if you have a blog, if you have a newsletter, if you are on social media, then help fight the hate that Trump is fermenting. Write something.

Please.


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