Possibly the world’s most recognisable leader, Donald J Trump is still further setting himself apart from the ordinary.
Indeed this extraordinary man will surely be remembered throughout American history, but perhaps for one aspect in particular: his ability, his desire, his unwavering dedication to maintaining election promises.
In the lead-up to the 2016 US election, while most Opposition party leaders were talking up the future prosperity of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, republican Donald J Trump went the other way, maintaining it would be ‘damaging to America’, and vowing to drop it the first chance he had.
Not a month after Trump’s being sworn in as President of the United States of America the US were officially no longer a part of the TPPA which – as well as rendering a few hundred hours of former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key’s time wasted time, spent travelling to and fro, also in talks with, former US president Barack Obama regarding that very agreement – must have been confounding for all those ignorant US (also bandwagon-jumping NZ) protesters who had for months previously been lobbying ‘against the TPP’, before seamlessly transferring their source of malcontent to the result of the US election, only to have the (already fervently contested, demonised and outright vilified) 45th US President make this grand gesture (a move seemingly conducted in unwitting support of the protesters) by scrapping the TPPA meaning the protesters could no longer in any logical way protest, bitch or moan, either about Trump’s election or the TPPA.
He pledged also to step back from the Paris Climate Accord – citing another of his election promises – on the basis that forcing the foot of the world’s second biggest carbon footprint to effectively clean and trim its toenails was on course to ‘negatively affect’ Mr Trump’s intention to generate ‘increased employment opportunities across the States’, which was purportedly an integral part of his overall intention to ‘Make America Great Again’.
The arguably impetuous act to not be a part of this newly orchestrated attempt at managing Climate Change likely has something to do with Mr Trump’s previously publicised opinion that ‘Global Warming is a myth’…
If Trump were to perform some quick research he might discover that in fact the world climate is changing (this much is beyond dispute) and more likely the aspect he meant to discount as mythical was the supposedly scientific stance that Climate Change is occurring entirely as a result of manmade pollution or that the only way it can be rectified is with additional human intervention (even though the main cause of Global Warming is obviously the result of too many warm-bodied people existing and causing too much heat in general), which does sound terribly reminiscent of ‘scare-tactics stemming from years of ridiculously expensive company-funded research’; it also sounds conveniently biased, ignorantly narrow-minded, and just plain silly.
…Yet he has left a number of world leaders somewhat bemused as to, rather than immediately condemning it, why Trump would not just amend the Agreement to the US’s satisfaction but then, as the US – along with the rest of the world – must surely be coming to understand, Donald J Trump doesn’t make concessions, he makes promises; which he apparently keeps.
Inflammatory as his approach may have been so far and certainly, as much adverse publicity as he has garnered during this short term to date, President Donald J Trump genuinely does appear to have the best interests of his country at heart: in his opinion America was ‘falling apart’; the solution as he saw it, ‘get more people off the streets and into jobs’, which to his credit, is exactly what Mr Trump, even if sometimes in his roundabout and classically backhanded fashion, is endeavouring to achieve.
According to President Trump the reason for the US’s faltering economy – also the rise in terrorism – has largely to do with lenient border control hence excessive immigration into the US; so he promptly stepped forward in an attempt to put a stop to that, too.
As promised, Trump became suitably incensed when North Korean Dictator, Kim Jong Un, refused to cease his world-intimidation of test-firing potential nuclear warheads – admittedly harmlessly but indeed worryingly – into the ocean; engaging the portly Asian child in a much less damaging and rather more mature (but still potentially damaging and pretty immature) war of words including the issue of hollow threats, ultimatums, and/or propaganda.
In fact it seems the only major election promise that Trump has yet to put into action is his building of a wall between the US and Mexico – at Mexico’s expense no less – which, at this comparatively early stage in his presidency, no one could rightfully be any in doubt of the man’s intentions to do just that.
The fact that Donald J Trump is a nearsighted bigot is a truth that he seems to embrace rather than hide, yet once citizens of the USA have stopped playing Queens of Melodrama – the role for which they are so widely reputed – and eased the hysteria surrounding signing in of their unorthodox 45th President, they might just come to realise that he is in fact not as self centred or as overcome with megalomania as many have been making out, and nor is he totally intent on destroying the environment or for that matter the entire free world…
(North Korea’s Kim Jong Un appears quite capable of managing that last part all by himself.)
…It would seem that President Donald J Trump, believe it or don’t, is actually in it for the people.
Article by Tim Walker
Edited by Meg Layman-Aya
Photography by Nat Jouster Blue-Hard