On Thursday, I listened to the alleged leader of the free world (spouting a torrent of half-truths and lies) kick the long-negotiated historic Paris climate accord – approved by more than 190 countries – to the global curb, leaving the U.S. crouched on the sidelines with Nicaragua and Syria watching the rest of the globe organize for the future of the planet.
This after he junked the long-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership on the spurious grounds that it was a giveaway to China, which in fact was deliberately not a part of it. And after coming very close to sabotaging the historic Iran pact that has set back the Iranians’ path to a nuclear weapon by a decade and is, by all accounts, working.
It’s not even five months into his presidency, and Donald Trump has – almost single-handedly – wrecked the United States’ hard-won position of preeminent global leadership and demonstrated to all that the word of the United States can no longer be trusted.
Congrats, Donald! You’ve exceeded everyone’s lowest expectations!
And as I listened to the farce play itself out in real time, I couldn’t help but think about Prince Regent Luitpold, the ruler of the German state of Bavaria just after the turn of the last century. If only he’d taken pity on poor Friedrich!
It was in 1904 that Friedrich Trump (né Drumpf) – who came to America in 1885 as a 16-year-old from Bavaria who’d fled Germany to avoid mandatory conscription and made a bundle running what they perhaps euphemistically called hotels and eateries in the Northwest and Canada – returned to his old Bavarian hometown with a new young homesick German bride who didn’t really like America.
He settled into his life in Bavaria, intending to spend the remaining years there. But Germans didn’t want him – that draft-dodging thing, you see – and ordered him expelled despite his downright obsequious letter begging our “adored, noble, wise and just sovereign lord, our exalted ruler” Bavarian Regent Prince Luitpold to grant his “most subservient request” to stay.
Despite the piteous tone of his begging letter, though, Friedrich (describing himself, despite the American citizenship he won in 1892, as a “loyal German”) could not resist telling his “Royal Highness” – in truly prophetic Trumpian fashion – that in his time in America “I got rich.”
And so rich Friedrich and his young family returned to New York. Today – thanks to Prince Luitpold’s shortsighted decision – his grandson, Donald, occupies the White House.
One would think that said grandson would be grateful to the Germans. One would be wrong.
For years, it’s worth noting, Trump claimed to be of Swedish, not German, descent, and maybe there is a reason. Turns out Trump seems to hate Germany and, by extension, the European democracies – the same nations that have proven, over the last 70 or so years, America’s best allies in global affairs.
It was, after all, NATO and the European Union that first came to the side of the United States following the Sept. 11 attacks on our nation – the same NATO and EU that Trump today repeatedly denigrates. The same NATO formed from the rubble of Europe to provide a common defense and to guard against the same poisonous nationalism that plunged the globe into not just one but two world wars.
He treats all European leaders with disdain bordering on contempt, but he seems to save most of his ample animus for Angela Merkel, the long-serving chancellor of Germany.
In fact, Trump’s visible contempt for Merkel has even drawn the condemnation of her strongest political rival, Martin Schulz, who said that “the chancellor represents all of us at summits like these, and I reject with outrage the way this man takes it upon himself to treat the head of our country’s government.”
Of course, Merkel is hardly Trump’s kind of woman. For one thing, she’s old! Albeit still eight years younger than he. She’s a bit dowdy (another way of saying she doesn’t mind looking her age), favoring neatly tailored dresses and suits and thoroughly sensible shoes.
She is also a greatly respected global leader who is in the process of replacing the president of the United States as the world’s greatest political and moral advocate for freedom, justice and compassion.
That’s just pathetic.
So while Trump is slighting our best allies – not only in Europe but further afield, alienating the leaders of Australia, Canada and Mexico as well – who does earn his praise?
Autocrats, of course! And dictators!
Look only to his warm words for Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took power in a coup and is brutally stomping out the fledgling democracy movement by, among other things, mass arrests, trials and executions. And for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who’s happily wiping out democracy in that sad country.
Or his invitation to the White House to Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte, who counts extrajudicial murder as a weapon in fighting drug problems. He even said he’d “be honored” to sit down with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a ruthless dictator who executed his own uncle and even murdered his half-brother!
Almost in a class by itself is Trump’s passion for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who invades his neighbors, jails or murders dissidents and meddles almost openly in other nations’ elections – including, of course, ours. In fact, the Trump campaign’s apparent relationship with Russia is just plain weird.
But not weirder than Trump’s reaction to Saudi Arabia’s dictators, the Saudi royal family. If our scowling president hectored and lectured the democratically elected leaders of Europe, he positively fawned over the royals, grinning his way through sword dances and assuring them, at least, that he would not lecture them.
He looked as if he would burst with glee when the Saudis – the same folks who won’t even let women drive – gave him a huge and gaudy gold medal and chain. Swag! Glittery swag! For me!
Has anyone told him that it is the Saudi royals and their hangers-on who are busily exporting to the rest of the world Wahhabism, a particularly conservative and harsh off-shoot of Islam – one which can lead to the “radical Islamic terrorism” against which he so rails? Does he not remember? Or not care? As long as he gets a shiny gold bauble?
We used to have presidents who were leaders. But our current president is a man who has for years regularly portrayed himself as a victim.
And now he is determined to portray the United States – the most powerful nation on the globe and one of its most voracious consumers of natural resource and one of its largest emitters of carbon pollutants as well – as weak and powerless, just another victim. A loser.
Sad. Just sad.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)