A BULLY BEATEN BACK

Even the haughty and arrogant Donald Trump, the seemingly self-assured US President, bluffing his way through domestic and global affairs and leaving a trail of disruption and chaos behind him, has been made to bow before the moral outrage summoned by his critics and some of his own party men against separation of little children from their parents. In the name of fighting illegal immigration, Trump had forcibly ejected out some two thousand illegal immigrants at the US-Mexican border while penning their children in steel and plastic sheet cages. The sheer cruelty of caging toddlers and babies while their parents got pushed out of the US shook the conscience of the world. The Democratic Party leaders were joined by people from every walk of life to condemn the inhumanity and insensitivity of Trump. Even the First Lady Melania Trump publicly expressed anger and anguish at the atrocity inflicted on children by a grandstanding president. Noticing that the overwhelming public opinion was against him, belatedly even a few Republican leaders gathered courage to voice opposition. For a change, Trump relented, but not before seeking to put a spin on his foolishness. He asserted, wrongly, of course, that he was merely implementing policy put in place by Democrats. He sought to bolster the case by saying immigrants everywhere are trouble; in Germany since the recent wave of immigrants crime graph has gone up sharply. Soon, the German authorities countered, quoting figures, they said, since the recent ingress of immigrants, the crime rate had actually lowered. Even popular opinion turned against the ‘torture chambers’ for kids erected at the US border with Mexico. An opinion poll revealed that more than two-thirds of the Americans disapproved of the forced separation of little ones from their parents. So strong was the revulsion that even the religious leaders and the Pope deemed it fit to tick off Trump for the sheer inhumanity of his action. This was not American values. A nation of immigrants, a melting pot of various nationalities and races and ethnic groups which unhesitatingly absorbed them to make one whole, and gained immensely from their talents and hard work, was now putting its back up most crudely, most cruelly, against immigrants and their innocent children. For Trump, this was no more than pandering to the baser instincts of his base, antiimmigration, anti-free trade, anti-Muslim, anti-this and antithat. The disrupter-in-chief as President did not seem to be acquainted with humanness and kindness. But he was obliged to retreat by the sheer force of global opinion. And even while undoing the mischief, he indulged in double-speak and hypocrisy, saying that he was merely reversing by an executive order what was an old policy. He is like the man who caught with the bloodsoaked dagger in his hand blames someone else for the murder. He is a menace to America, a bigger menace to the established post-World War-II global order.