The US status quo

The media has been portraying Trump as a diabolical leader who is out to change the ‘world order’. While Trump is arrogant, he has done nothing so far to change the     status quo.

We need to remember that what catapulted Trump into office was the perceived or actual sense of economic injustice. People who were frustrated with the US’s ‘merit’ system voted in Trump’s favour. The challenge before Trump assumed office was whether he would be able to tax the rich Peter to pay the poor Paul. Trump’s travel ban is in consonance with the previous US government’s visa policies towards ‘countries of concern’. The Mexico wall is nowhere in the offing. Trump is only as much an advocate of torture as his predecessors – from Reagan to Obama (read Jennifer Harbury’s          Truth, Torture and the American Way). Historian Alfred McCoy points out that victims worldwide endured CIA’s ‘torture paradigm’, that was developed at a cost of about $1 billion annually. For a glimpse of the bipartisan support to torture, one may read cases          Boumediene v Bush   (June 2008) and       Rasul v Rumsfeld. The belief that ‘terrorist are ticking bombs that need to be defused’ was embedded in successive presidents’ psyche. There were no efforts to tell a terrorist from a        mujahid, a criminal from a freedom fighter. Trump is unlikely to take further steps in a jiffy.

Amjed Jaaved

Rawalpindi Cantt