Skip to main content

The Old Lunatic

By



The last stop on Trump's really big trip through Asia saw him in Manila for the ASEAN summit hosted by the Philippines.  For a guy who said "ixnay" to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP as it was called, it is easy to see why he was at great pains to participate in the group handshake among Southeast Asian leaders.

It was a rough trip for the Donald, thirteen days all together, putting him in contact with a number of world leaders he probably had no idea existed before.  He was even forced to visit Vietnam, which he went out of his way to avoid as a young man.  Yet, here he was getting a hero's welcome.  God knows why Vietnamese should be so enthralled with Trump.  Maybe they are big Apprentice fans?

Elsewhere, Trump is not so popular.  Only 17 per cent of South Koreans expressed confidence in his world leadership, as opposed to 88 per cent who were confident with Obama.  This is largely due to his handling of North Korea.  He was astonishingly quiet in Seoul.  I guess he didn't want to give away his GPS location to the "Rocket Man," while in his missile range.

Trump got a very warm welcome in China.  He was so impressed by President Xi  that he blamed his Oval Office predecessors for the trade deficit, being the bad negotiators that they were.  Who wouldn't take advantage of bad deals like that?  Later, Tillerson tried to clarify the president's comments, saying he was just making light of the situation.

In Vietnam, Trump could no longer hold himself in on Kim Jong Un.   He didn't take kindly to being called an "old lunatic" while in South Korea, but that is exactly how he appeared on this trip.  He used Vietnam as an opportunity to briefly meet with Putin, and accepted the Russian leader's claim that his country played no role in the 2016 US election hackings, referring to the ongoing investigation as a "Democratic hit job." 

This, of course, led to a flurry of condemnation among Republicans and Democrats alike, leading Trump to rephrase his comments in Manila.  He now said that he thought Putin genuinely believed his government played no role in the hacking, but that he still supported his intelligence community.  "Fake News" wasn't buying it though, leading many pundits to speculate as to what Putin holds in his hand to make Trump so acquiescent anytime these two meet.

It seems all these foreign leaders have learned that flattery is the best policy when confronting Donald Trump, except Kim Jong Un of course.  For his part, Rodrigo Duterte  sang him a song uring a lavish dinner, apparently at the President's request.  Trump has shown a lot of admiration for Manila's strongman and other Asian autocrats, no doubt wishing he had that kind of authority in America.  Instead, he has to deal with a pesky Congress that continues to question his leadership.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more