Donald will be Trumps for SA
Declares her ‘guilty as hell’
US PRESIDENT-elect Donald Trump will be sworn in on Friday. The Independent on Saturday spoke to Durbanites to find out what they thought of his taking office. Jemma van Breda, 18, from central Durban, said she could not comment on whether it would be a good or bad move for America, but believed Trump was incorruptible because he had too much money and for that reason it may be a good move. Obama had too many people influencing him on his decisions, she said.
“It’s going to be good,” said Prega Pragasan, 70, from Morningside. “He is a businessman and the biggest thing is that he is going to be creating jobs. There were no jobs for black people (in America) and through his business ideology he is going to create more.
“We’ve seen it with his idea of manufacturing Ford car parts in America.”
Lindo Langa, 20, from uMhlanga, said: “I’m on the fence. Trump seems super violent and unable to do the job, but we’ll have to wait and see and hope for the best.
“In the long run, I do think his presidency could have a negative affect, he could drag the world into war.”
Stanley Ncama, 34, a marine pilot, felt there was nothing wrong with him because he was fighting for his country.
“I have nothing bad to say about him, he just wants his country to succeed and that is why he’s always fighting with people,” he said.
However, Ncama thought Trump might affect the rand negatively.
“He’s fighting for America not for any (other) country and wants to improve the country’s economy for his people. Economically, it might be negative for us.”
Siphosethu Mngandi, 26, from Inanda, said: “Trump was the perfect candidate, even with his downfalls I admire him for the perseverance he has shown throughout his career. It doesn’t matter who the president is, the important thing should be his success.
“Trump is a well established person who came from the bottom to become the president of the US.
“I admire how he clawed his way back to be a top billionaire after his massive debt in the early 1990s.
“If South Africa had an established president who was a billionaire, our economy would be in good hands,” he said.
Mgandi did not have any positive expectations for Trump’s presidency in South Africa and thought America would be focused on its own problems, but he was certain that America’s economy would improve.
“I’m not sure about South Africa, I hope our economy also strengthens,” he said.
US PRESIDENT-elect Donald Trump promised yesterday that his “people” will release a full report on hacking within 90 days.
The promise came amid a series of three tweets rebuffing recent allegations that Russian intelligence has a secret file of compromising information about the next president.
“Totally made up facts by sleazebag political operatives, both Democrats and Republicans - FAKE NEWS! Russia says nothing exists. Probably released by ‘Intelligence’ even knowing there is no proof, and never will be,” he tweeted.
However, no hacking was alleged in that case. Rather, the information was allegedly leaked by a British spy who gained access to a larger report about allegations of Russian hacking attacks in 2015 and 2016 designed to affect the outcome of last year’s presidential election. The dossier of unverified information Russia has on Trump was an addendum to that report.
Given Trump’s free flow of information on Twitter, it is impossible to say which issue would be the focus of his promised probe, or whether he would have both looked at.
“My people will have a full report on hacking within 90 days!” he wrote, without clarifying to whom he would give the job. Yesterday’s tirade also blasted his Democratic competitor in last year’s election, Hillary Clinton, declaring her “guilty as hell” and deriding her supporters’ criticism of how the FBI handled an investigation into her emails.
The US Justice Department said on Thursday it would investigate an FBI decision to announce an inquiry into Clinton’s emails shortly before the November 8 election, a move she has blamed as a factor in her defeat.
“What are Hillary Clinton’s people complaining about with respect to the FBI. Based on the information they had, she should never have been allowed to run – guilty as hell,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
“They were very nice to her. She lost because she campaigned in the wrong states – no enthusiasm!”
Trump had often led crowds in chants of “lock her up!” during the 2016 election campaign, accusing Clinton of illegal conduct over her use of a private email server for official correspondence while she was secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
In a debate in October, the Republican real estate developer vowed Clinton would “be in jail” over the matter if he became president, but later said he would not pursue prosecution.
Some of the Clinton emails were determined to contain classified information. The FBI ultimately decided not to refer her case for prosecution.
Democrats said FBI director James Comey’s announcement of the new inquiry into the emails damaged her standing with voters right before the election, and he faced complaints that his moves were politically motivated. Senator Dick Durbin, the No 2 Democrat in the US Senate, said Comey’s statements were not “fair, professional or consistent with the policies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Comey said on Thursday the FBI would co-operate fully with the investigation.
Trump, who will be sworn in on January 20, will not have the power to dismiss the investigation. – Reuters and agencies
BARACK Obama has been a failure as president of the US. Despite being a twotermer, he bequeaths a negligible legacy, soon to be negated by a resurgent Republican Party that has snaffled not only the presidency, but – eat your heart out, Barack – now controls both legislative chambers and a majority of state governorships.
Well, this is the apparent consensus of the pundits. They are mistaken.
The first drafts of history are notoriously imperfect. Hastily assembled by vying participants and by observers tainted by partisan bias, they invariably are found in the rear view mirror to be imperfect, often grossly wrong.
We simply cannot authoritatively discern the future consequences of present actions. When state archival material is eventually released half a century down the line, and cause and effect more dispassionately assessed, the picture becomes clearer.
A case in point is Ronald Reagan, during his tenure as US president widely reviled for his stated readiness to consider the “zero option” of nuclear battle against the Soviet Union’s “evil empire”. But with the benefit of hindsight, this playing chicken with the Russians is now credited with triggering the tumbling dominoes that freed eastern Europe from communism and neutered the power of the Soviet Union, elevating him to a place among the great US presidents, in the view of many historians.
No matter how risible the award of the Nobel Prize to Obama looks, only months after he first took office, the future might yet find evidence of the “inspirational diplomacy” for which he was made Peace laureate. For at the very least, Obama was not afraid to take a hammer to ancient shibboleths.
There was his willingness to speak blunt truths to Benjamin Netanyahu, the first change of tone in the US-Israeli discourse in half a century, which may reverberate long after the Donald Trump presidency ends. In similar mouldbreaking vein was his ending the counterproductive 53-year isolation of Cuba.
So, too, his efforts to extract the US from the wars into which his Republican predecessors had plunged the country. While these endeavours became mired and messy, Obama was a reluctant warrior, foreshadowing in a way a growing American isolationism that translated into voter support for a Trump who talks of US military withdrawal from Europe.
On the domestic front, the incoming Trump administration has made clear its determination to try to backtrack the eight Obama years.
To achieve this, they will have to set the political machine to fast rewind, for Trump may have only four years to bring his plans to fruition. The new administration might actually find itself far more engaged with trying to maintain the economic revival that Obama engineered – his first-term stimulus measures saved an estimated 2.9million jobs after the banking collapse that rocked international finance – and which is now glossed over by his critics.
There is also the health-care initiative that bears Obama’s name. The right hates it with passion, but it was a game changer to the medical fortunes of millions of lower- and middle-class Americans, and cannot simply be ditched without an equivalent or superior replacement.
For the moment, the verdict of historians matters less than the verdict of the voters. Whereas Obama, the first black president and born in modest circumstances of a Kenyan father, easily won a second term, the hubris of a socially privileged Hillary Clinton saw her lose in the electoral college, even though she prevailed in the total vote.
Obama’s America – at least nominally – embraced hope, optimism and an ethically-grounded view of a world that it understood to be complex. The Trump America is a far simpler, more one-dimensional construct.
It’s Us versus Them. It’s an administration of political neophytes clustered around Trump’s brash confidence that he can intimidate his opponents or, if that fails, just cut a deal.
In a sense, the differences between the two men are tellingly encapsulated in the titles of their autobiographies. Trump’s ghostwritten collection of vainglorious platitudes is called The Art of the Deal. The more cerebral introspection of Obama is called Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
It may well be that what the US needs at this moment is the hardheaded, hard-hearted, homespun pragmatism and platitudes of a billionaire property developer. Certainly, one can confidently predict that Trump will not be the disaster that his embittered detractors predict. But nor will he achieve the dizzyingly ambitious Nirvana he has promised his often naïve supporters.
The world is not a simple place. On the contrary, it is becoming steadily more inter-connected and complicated. The US, although still militarily the single most powerful nation, must contend with new, fast evolving combinations of might and influence, ready to exploit every blunder.
This is a reality that is not really suited to Trump’s favoured political tool, the 140-character tweet. And incoherent, grammatically incorrect ones, at that.