For Trump, silence is not an option
How do you fight a giant?
The famous biblical battle between David and Goliath, brought to contemporary light in a brilliant book by Malcolm Gladwell, describes Goliath as a six-foot-nine giant covered in armour. He carried three weapons — a javelin, a spear and a sword. His only physical weakness was an exposed forehead.
In contrast, David, his opponent, was a small shepherd boy. He had one slingshot and carried a pouch of stones.
Goliath, secure in his power and size, never imagined that one stone expertly slung at his forehead by David would cause him to fall. David pounced and cut off Goliath’s head with Goliath’s own sword.
The story resonates today because Donald Trump imagines himself to be a political giant. He ignores decades of a rules-based international order. Traditional allies and alliances are useless to him. He wants a bold new world of authoritarian leaders. He mocks war heroes such as Sen. John McCain and insults prime ministers such as Justin Trudeau.
He sees no issue with being rude and crude, especially when it comes to women. He uses dehumanizing language, likening immigrants to animals.
He has no time for truth, unless it is his own. Nixonian in his paranoia, he detests the mainstream media and uses them as convenient scapegoats. His White House is a revolving door of aides and minions who come and go, depending on his mood and temper. Impervious to criticism, he takes it, revels in it and turns it to his advantage.
His strength is his own giant-sized ego, which armours him in a protective shield. Like Goliath, his strength is also his weakness because it blinds him and binds him to only his narrow viewpoint.
For example, he never saw the kids coming. Like David, the shepherd boy, children were small and weak. How could they possibly hurt him? He would just take them away from their families and solve the problem of illegal immigration.
Trump never envisaged that even his Christian-right stalwarts would take umbrage at separating children from parents. He never saw that “family values” cannot operate in chain-link cages. He never knew that a child’s recorded cry, as her mother was searched by guards, would echo around the world. He never understood that children must never be used as policy hostages. Totally ignorant of humanrights concerns, he never felt the flame of true moral outrage until it burned him.
Panicked, Trump dramatically signed a hurriedly drafted Executive Order to halt the separation of families, an order that University of Pennsylvania law professor Cary Coglianese notes “is riddled with ambiguities that will likely cause confusion on the ground for some time.”
Trump’s surrogates spin that his retreat was strategic and that nothing has changed. Yet something has profoundly shifted.
Trump’s ugliness has been exposed because it was directed at the most vulnerable. It has reignited an already heated battle for democratic values, both domestically and internationally.
To preserve his power, Trump must retain a Republican majority in Congress when midterm elections begin on Nov. 6. However, Michael Bloomberg has announced that he will spend $80 million on those elections to return the House to the Democrats. Furthermore, it is not only money that could deal Trump a blow. Students, stunned by his cavalier attitude to the gun shootings of their friends, are also organizing.
Internationally, the situation is grave. Unprecedented waves of immigrants and refugees, fleeing from brutal regimes, are straining security and social infrastructures in Europe and North America. Dealing with this challenge humanely and in a just manner is a true test of democratic values.
Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, noted that “authoritarianism is on the march” during a brilliant speech in Washington recently. She made a plea for liberal democracies to fight back.
It will not be easy. Trump will continue to distract and destroy as he prepares to meet with Vladimir Putin next month while almost simultaneously attending what undoubtedly will be an onerous NATO gathering.
But at least we now know that Donald Trump is no Goliath. All it took was a child’s cry to prove that. We must not let that child cry alone.
Penny Collenette is an adjunct professor of law at the University of Ottawa, was a senior director of the Prime Minister’s Office for Jean Chrétien and is a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @penottawa