The Many Missteps of Donald Trump
by Kenneth Bagnell
A few days ago, on a subway to downtown, I heard two young bright, polished school students, playing a game based on three words, “getting rid of.”: getting rid of advertising commercials, getting rid of personal tensions, then getting rid of politicians. Suddenly an elderly man spoke up saying “No, no, we need politicians.” I was getting up to go to the doorway and laughed as I kidded the younger one: “You must mean getting rid of Trump?” The kids laughed and the elderly man joined in nodding and keeping it up until I got off the subway and we waved a goodwill goodbye. Then I walked down Yonge Street, confessing to myself that, while I laughed, I actually meant it. I had an interview to do, but on my way back I did wonder if, somehow, sometime, somewhere, a door could be opened and Trump would have to leave because somebody promised him sixteen girlfriends.
Three or four days later, I suddenly find Canada in an uproar for justifiable reason: the ignorance of Donald Trump toward one of our finest Prime Ministers, Justin Trudeau. He was not in any confrontation. He was at his home in Ottawa, but all the while the crude and rude Donald Trump was creating insults in a wide open unprecedented verbal assault for absolutely no reason, none whatsoever, other than, of course, exploiting him pragmatically as the target that showed off his toughness to a remote but evil immoral dictator, Kim Jong Un, in North Korea. Hence he took the outrageous path of crude insults, raw ignorance, dreadful rudeness, and all for one reason: they reveal a Trump toughness that might help his goals so that when he goes to show Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, he can reveals his almost semi- fascistic attitude, his egotistical, vain, ugly, deformed misrepresentation of a Prime Minister, while ideally our own PM is a true gentleman. (Just compare Mr. Trudeau with Trump and you know what I mean.) I find on the front page, that Trump’s aides – they must be amoral flunkies – threw dishwater insults at our Prime Minister for an obvious reason: the crude Donald Trump, was trying on this trip to show how tough a bully he is, to one of the world’s cruel dictators, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. If there ever was a fair minded gentleman it’s our Prime Minister in this incident. The morning’s papers lately have reported that when Justin Trudeau was asked about the dreadful and ugly and untrue allegations, he said quietly and mannerly that what “truly matters” is the accomplishments of the G7. What a gentleman.
No wonder that from American newspapers and magazines, there is a will in the majority to present Trump with a very early retirement. For example, Trump was put in the presidency in January, 2017, and in less than a month, Public Policy, a credible survey firm discovered that almost 50 percent of the American public wanted Trump’s impeachment. But this was only a modest inquiry. The most credible of all the inquiry firms is Pew Research, whose staff oversees the inquiries in almost forty nations. The negative attitude is clear, the candid results the firm acquired and the global nature of its research. Nonetheless, there are barriers, and these were political institutes that are biased in Trump’s favor. A well regarded columnist, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, very early in 2017, wrote “What’s striking about Trump is not just the dysfunction of his administration but also the – vigorously denied – allegations that Trump’s team may have cooperated with Vladimir Putin to seal the election. What’s also different is the broad concern that Trump is both: (A) unfit for office and (B) dangerously unstable. One Pro-American leader in a foreign country called me up the other day and skipped the preliminaries, starting with: ‘What the (expletive) is wrong with your country?’” Actually, to me at least, his friend asked a fair and very relevant question: what’s wrong with the USA is that Donald Trump is President? How — seriously in God’s name — did this dreadful mistake happen? Think about it seriously. Consider this basic Pew discovery with these words above it: Low global confidence in Trump leads to low ratings for the U.S. “The sharp decline in how much global public trust the U.S. President has on the world stage is especially pronounced among some of America’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Canada. Across the 37 nations polled, Trump gets higher marks as US President than Obama in only two countries; Russia and Israel.”
From time to time, often in group conversations, the subject of recent Presidential morality and privilege, comes up: Obama with quite modest parenting, Trump with a high privilege family background. Has the privilege been the formation of Trump’s vain and coarse sense of privilege? Is that the reason? A few year ago an apparently young journalist asked him what his motives were, as he thought of seeking the Presidency. His reply: “There’s nobody bigger or better at the military that I am.” Could you imagine Obama saying that? Or Roosevelt? Or Carter? Or Pearson or Diefenbaker? I don’t know whether to think of Trump with distain or with sympathy for his inherent rudeness. A psychologist would tell you he may not be able to help it. Take a moment and imagine what our current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau — a genuine gracious gentleman — would say if a prominent man treated him with the rough verbal attitude. You and I know: He’d smile and quietly change the conversation. I sense he’s that kind of man, a person with very good manners and thereby he puts up with poor manners by others.
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