On becoming the worst president
Trump looks on at the White House: the latest in a long line. Andrew Harrer/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.A bare couple of months after Trump’s inauguration, he is being widely touted as the worst president
in US history. His bombast, splenetic
tweets, unsavoury remarks about women, and scapegoating of minorities provide plenty
of ammunition for opponents to vilify the new leader of the free world.
Moreover he has had the temerity – no other word suffices – to assault the
media for disseminating fake news, a risky activity even for so powerful a
figure as the president.
They have
responded in kind by spearing some of Trump’s outlandish misstatements and,
more significantly, by doing their best to undermine his senior cabinet
nominations and to suggest that either he or his cronies or both are engaging
in covert skulduggery with Russia and its supposedly villainous leader Vladimir
Putin. One of the ironies of this spat
is that while the president’s “alternative
facts" are
easily spotted and readily seized upon as evidence of his flakiness, the long,
continuing and disgraceful
story of media lying passes largely without comment. Where fake news is concerned, Trump is
in diapers compared with mainstream media.
Will Trump prove to be
the disaster that many predict? No one
can yet tell. To date we have mostly his
words on which to pass judgement. However, if he is to surpass his recent
predecessors in deception, brutality and damage to the international standing
of the United States, then he has a way to travel.
Oliver Stone’’s and
Peter Kuznick’s “Untold
History of the United States” furnishes a well-documented account of the
last hundred years of betrayals, duplicity and often dangerous brinkmanship of
US administrations. From it we learn, for example, that Harry Truman reached
the White House thanks to the ugly manipulations of Democratic Party bosses.
The popular choice as Roosevelt’s vice-president in the 1944 election would
have been Henry Wallace who had been vice-president during
Roosevelt’s third term and who is widely
regarded as
one of the most far-sighted and humane men ever to grace high office. Party
bosses – notably its conservative members – considered Wallace too left wing,
too friendly to “labor” and found means to keep him off the ticket. Sounds
familiar? Bernie Sanders’ supporters have good reason to believe that the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) conspired in a similar way to deliver the
2016 candidacy to Hillary Clinton despite her unpopularity and ineptness on the
stump.
Had Wallace been on the
1944 ticket, he would have become president in 1945 when Roosevelt died, and he
would probably not have agreed to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
with the consequent loss of countless innocent lives. According to Stone and Kuznick, Truman exulted over the atomic
atrocity in Japan – claiming it was the happiest day of his life. Not that he
cared much for the fate of people of other races. He professed hatred for Asians, referred to Jews
as “kikes”, Mexicans as “greasers”, and blacks as “niggers”.
Among Truman’s other
felicities was the establishment of the CIA with a mission that included subverting undesirable
governments by any means including assassinations and coup plots. He also
launched the arms race with the Soviet Union – under
the delusion that with the atom bomb the country had acquired permanent
military superiority and could therefore ensure a neat combination of US
hegemony and world peace.
It is with Truman that hysteria
about "the communist threat" and the need for "containment" began. And from there ran a
river of US direct military as well as covert intervention in other countries
that started with the Korean war in 1950 and continues through to the present
day. Vietnam and Iraq are mere saliences in an unbroken tale of US meddling –
often violent meddling – in the affairs of other nations.
After Truman, the fight against
communism became the cloak beneath which
American governments have pursued commercial gain and control of key assets in
foreign countries. His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower initiated the process by
having the CIA – in league with the British – topple the Iranian government
under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh so as to leave the Shah – Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – in power, thereby
ensuring that US oil companies would have a major share of Iran's oil output.
The ploy worked for 25 years – at least for the oil companies – until the Shah
was overthrown, by which time the US had unsurprisingly replaced the British as
enemy number one in the eyes of the Iranian people.
Next on Eisenhower's coup list was
Jacobo Arbenz the democratically-elected
president of Guatemala who had the effrontery to challenge the United Fruit
Company which virtually controlled the country's economy. Egged on by the US
media – the New York Times included – the CIA engineered a coup, replacing Arbenz with a US puppet, Colonel
Carlos Castillo Armas. So began thirty years of murderous rule with the full financial and
political backing of the United States.
Eisenhower’s gunsights
were also focused on post-revolutionary
Cuba and it was under his auspices that the CIA began secretly to train an
invading force of Cuban exiles to “retake” the island. On assuming office,
Kennedy took up the challenge and sanctioned the invasion – an iconic
failure – even though shortly afterwards, he expressed
sympathy for
the Cuban Revolution and regret at US support for the Fulgencio Batista, the
ousted dictator, who had presided over a country riddled with poverty and
corruption.
Another Kennedy
inheritance from Eisenhower was US
intervention in Vietnam whose purpose was to roll back the perceived threat of communism. By
the time of his assassination in November 1963, there were 16,000 US military
advisers in South Vietnam. Kennedy’s’ successor, Lyndon Johnson, took up the cudgels with
enthusiasm,
sending combat troops and launching a program of bombing raids – Operation
Rolling Thunder – that began what was to become a failed but brutal long-term assault
on the country and its people.
In 1964, Johnson had
the CIA organise the overthrow of João Goulart,
Brazil’s reformist president and his replacement by a military regime which
acted as it was supposed to by launching a vicious campaign of repression,
incarceration, and torture against anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies.
Victims included Dilma Rousseff who went on years later to be elected president
of the country only to be “removed” in what was effectively a soft,
right-wing coup. Indonesia also figured
on Johnson’s list of countries with
regimes deserving of overthrow. When
President Sukarno was ousted in 1965 and replaced by General Suharto, the US
watched happily on as hundreds of thousands of “communists” were massacred by the
new regime, and the US embassy in Jakarta reportedly provided the Indonesian army with
lists of communist party members to be eliminated.
When we come to Richard
Nixon and his sidekick Henry Kissinger, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the
ugliness of their activities and the responsibility they shared for the
slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian
citizens as well as the destruction of their crops, livestock, forests and
wildlife. The US-backed
coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973 is no less an example
of the ruthless disregard for other countries political systems displayed by
the Nixon government. No need here to comment on the Watergate scandal and
Nixon's ignominious resignation as US president, except to add that, like
Truman, Eisenhower and Johnson before him, he was anything but transparent about
activities of which the public might disapprove.
Of Trump’s immediate
predecessors, Ronald Reagan was arguably the most inept and least well-informed
of all US presidents. His administration was also among the most thuggish. On
Reagan’s watch, death squads began operating in El Salvador, right-wing
paramilitaries in Nicaragua received covert US funding in what became known as
the Iran-Contra
scandal, US
troops invaded the little Caribbean island of
Grenada, and both sides in the Iran – Iraq war of the early 1980s received
money and arms. In the case of Iraq,
deliveries of US ordnance included chemical weapons of the kind Saddam
would employ not only against Iran but also notoriously against Halabja. Faced with uncomfortable questions
about some of these activities, Reagan would claim either that he knew nothing
about them or couldn’t recall the details. He was perhaps the only president of
whom such declarations of innocence might be judged credible because he often
showed little comprehension of key issues and had a disarming tendency to nod off
during important meetings. I remember watching a live interview with Reagan in which he met an
interviewer’s question with blanket silence and a rather foolish grin, as if
his frontal lobe had gone for a nap. One columnist wrote of the “task of
watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears…”. He was the Teflon president –
responsible for nothing that might prove inconvenient.
Perhaps the most egregiously
deceitful of recent US administrations was that of George W. Bush. Bush team fabrications began with
expressions of astonishment at the 9/11 atrocity about which they claimed to know nothing, despite repeated
briefings on
the threat from the CIA and from the US Commission
on National Security. Subsequently, the president
and his cronies – Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle – cooked up
reasons to launch invasions of two countries: first Afghanistan then Iraq.
Both actions led to years of chaotic
violence and slaughter that continue to this day. Who of those who witnessed it
could forget Secretary of State Colin Powell's embarrassing presentation to the
UN about Saddam's weapons programmes, or the fallacious story of Saddam’s
malign nuclear intentions fashioned by Dick Cheney, then picked up and
regurgitated by Tony Blair in one of the most meretricious
speeches ever delivered to the UK House of Commons? All the key arguments made
by the US and UK governments in support of the Iraq war were fraudulent – some
of them astonishingly brazen such as Bush's statement to Congress in January
2003 that a report from the British Government confirmed Saddam’s acquisition
of weapons-grade uranium from Africa. What perhaps is less well remembered is
that in the days and weeks following 9/11 the US government began singling out Muslims and people of Middle
Eastern origin for interrogation and detention. Trump is not the one who introduced anti-Muslim sentiment on the high plains of
Washington – though he made use of that sentiment in trying to cast
doubt on Obama’s patriotism.
A little more than a month after 9/11, Bush signed the Patriot Act
greatly expanding government powers of surveillance on US citizens. And so
began the never-ending war on that great abstraction – terror. Torture as a routine method of interrogation
for terror suspects was a notable
innovation
of the Bush administration.
What of Obama, the
president many of us wanted so desperately to believe in? On the plus side,
supporters may point to Obamacare (The Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act) that Trump has tried and so far failed to dismantle on largely
spurious grounds. Set against this one, short-lived success, however are failures to
close Guantanamo, to attend in any serious way to the continued
growth in
inequality, poverty and social deprivation, or to address the problems of
unemployment and urban decay in the rust-belt
states whose reaction at the ballot box helped to
put Trump into the White House. Even on deportation of “illegal” immigrants,
Obama has shown the way, his deportation tally amounting to
2.5 million – a figure comparable with Trump’s ambition to deport 3 million.
On the international
stage, Obama proved as militaristic as his predecessors. He launched
airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq,
Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, sanctioned assassinations of individuals instead of having
them duly prosecuted according to law, and upped the use
of drones to
kill designated enemies regardless of innocent lives lost to collateral damage
and misdirected targets.
The US is one of the
countries that have refused to
sign the 2008
international convention against the use of cluster bombs. Under Obama, approval for major arms
sales to authoritarian regimes has been no different from what one would have
expected of previous presidents and what we may anticipate from Trump. And the
latter’s stated policy of further increasing US expenditure on upgrading the
country’s nuclear capabilities merely continues a policy Obama already had in place. In Latin America, meanwhile, Obama
pursued the familiar US agenda of support for right-wing
governments, and tacit approval of coups against left-wing governments, of
which there have been three during his term of office: Honduras in
2009, Paraguay in
2012, and Brazil in
2016. Venezuela remains in the firing line.
If Trump differs from
previous recent presidents, it is not so much in his belligerence, unsubtle and
occasionally offensive language, lack of grace and political know-how, but in
the transparency of his opinions and prejudices. He makes public what he thinks
even when what he thinks turns out to be wrong, foolish, or causes
offence.
Many on the left of
centre consider Trump’s electoral triumph to be a catastrophe. Social media are rife with
hostility towards the new president. One
German editor has reportedly
recommended assassination as the easiest way to get rid of him. Bernie Sanders seems to be running his own anti-Trump campaign, telling The
Guardian
that though he opposed George Bush “every single day”, unlike Trump “Bush did not operate outside of
mainstream American political values.” Bernie is correct, of course, though not in the way he wants us to
understand. Bush operated exactly according to the secretive, ruthless,
unprincipled, profit-seeking, bullying values that have characterised several
US administrations since World War II.
Therein lies the fallacy at the heart of so much hand-wringing about the
new president. So far we have mainly Trump’s language as a guide to what he
will do. But even if he performs as horrendously as many of us fear, his
administration may well end up being no worse for humanity at large than those
that have gone before.