Who would have thought that none other than the President of the great United States of America would be described as a ‘lunatic’ not by America’s worst enemies but by some of the most respected, staid, elements within his own country and among its closest allies? Is this how 21st century history is being made? If this is a new page in world events, closer to home, a new political script is being written across the Palk Strait in Tamil Nadu with the seeming end of filmstar politics.
Enough mainstream American commentators (not communists or fascists or anarchists or fundamentalists) have begun discussing the mental stability of President Donald Trump that a prominent American psychiatric expert last week warned in his specialist website that to loosely label Trump a ‘madman’ did a disservice to actual mental patients!
And, if such labelling by eminent American commentators was not enough, similar labels are being used across the Atlantic in countries long known as being the US’ strongest cultural friends and political allies. One of Germany’s most respected and most conservative news magazines, Der Spiegel, last week commented that, with the Muslim travel ban, the American President was “outdoing” his own “lunacy”!
The questioning of Donald Trump’s sanity rose to a fever pitch after Thursday’s hurriedly convened media conference at the White House at which the US leader, not even a month into his presidency, spent most of the time not announcing important policies, but boasting about his election victory, attacking the mainstream media present and, getting caught making untruthful claims. Anyone watching that news conference attended by the world’s biggest media groups would have seen the American President, much of the time, gesticulating and pointing fingers at journalists as he kept accusing them of making “fake news”.
Trump even blamed these same news media, none of whom are known fans of Russia (or, the Soviet Union before that), for reporting about him in a way that encouraged Moscow to actually carry out seemingly threatening military manoeuvres this past week (see CNN, BBC et al). As if strategists in the Kremlin are guided solely by the news media of any country! Indeed, one of Trump’s most supportive American TV channels, Fox News, actually criticized the way the president attacked a rival network, CNN.
You and I and news audiences across the world may continue to be entertained by such antics by one who is supposed to be the world’s most powerful individual. But, we all know that ‘entertainment’ is not central to life whereas, human security, governance, productivity, health and many other things are.
Thus, even as many laugh at such childish behaviour by a grown man who continually boasts about his ‘greatness’, those responsible to govern are busy re-assessing the future of their own countries, whole regions and, the whole world, in the light of what President Trump carelessly pronounces and suddenly does.
New US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who was in Bonn, Germany, last Thursday for the annual ‘G20’ (Group of 20 biggest economies from all continents) summit, completely new as he is to his job as his country’s international diplomat, apparently, did try reassuring America’s European allies that the US would not priotize Russia over Europe as his own President had hinted throughout his election campaign. Nevertheless, EU Defence Ministers meeting in Munich a day later, spent most of their time planning for a military future that would begin to rely more on their own capabilities rather than on American power.
American commentators themselves are now demanding that the news media stop highlighting Trump’s many frivolous statements that have entertainment value. They call for more focus on the few pronouncements he makes on serious matters and also on those ‘executive orders’ he has begun issuing, that actually impact on life and the world.
Very serious, geo-politically, was the American President’s pronouncements on the Palestinian problem after Wednesday’s meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu. At the closing media conference, President Trump became the first US leader in over two decades or more to advocate a ‘one-state’ solution for Palestine as against the ‘two-state’ solution currently touted by the international community at large. According to US commentators, even the Israeli leader may not have expected the US President to openly suggest this.
A single, secular, democratic state was originally proposed by the Palestinian leadership in the early post-World War 2 decades. This was after they were forced to acknowledge the harsh reality of a forcible occupation of their homeland by Western-backed European Jewish settlers and their own displacement into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
Thus, the hapless Palestinians proposed a single ‘secular democratic state’ in which Palestinians of all religions (Muslim, Christian, Jewish etc.) as well as the invading European Jewish settlers could all live as equal citizens. Of course, as history has recorded, the Zionist nationalist invaders rejected this and, with Western military help, set about ejecting the Palestinians from their homelands and established a Jewish state of Israel.
Over the last half century of Israeli militarism and geo-political manoeuvres by neighbouring Arab regimes that betrayed the Palestinian cause, Israel has become well established as a strong, somewhat democratic state, whereas, the Palestinian people have been reduced to a series of tiny, impoverished, enclaves with a legally un-recognized statehood. Their tragedy has been compounded by the rise of a desperate militancy that some call ‘terrorism’ and, a narrow religious fundamentalism used to mobilize an insurgency for national survival.
It was in response to the seemingly irreversible inter-ethnic hostility between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims that the international community to put forward a ‘two-state’ solution which the Palestinian leadership adopted, but to which successive Israeli governments have only paid lip service.
Is the new Trump administration now returning to that original ‘secular democratic state’? While the world community is stupefied by this sudden pronouncement, we may wonder whether this may be one of Trump’s truly inspired moments. One wonders how the US President’s young son-in-law, Jared Kushner, (an American Jew) who is named by Trump as ‘chief negotiator for the Middle East’ will take this forward.
Even as the world grapples with a TV entertainer-turned-president in Washington, across the Palk Strait, there is a change of politics away from decades of cinema icon leadership. First, it was M. G. Ramachandran (‘MGR’). Then, for a longer period, there was Jayalalithaa, an equally big star who went on to become ‘Amma’, such was her political success. On her sudden passing away, her long-time associate who flourished under the glamour of Amma, attempted to exploit the fading remnants of that glamour to succeed Jayalalithaa as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu even without a single day’s experience in elected governance whatsoever. But, fate caught up with V. Sasikala and the courts last week sent her to prison for crimes of corruption and abuse of power.
Even if former state Public Works Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami, the new Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is, indeed, the ‘pawn’ of Sasikala, as many commentators say, at least he is a seasoned politician and is not linked to showbiz in any way. How much Sasikala can actually manipulate the new CM and how much the Tamil Nadu electorate will tolerate such proxy rule from Bengaluru prison remains to be seen.