Trump unfit to lead US – Chinese media
US PRESIDENT-elect Donald Trump has been ridiculed by the Chinese media as unfit to lead a superpower on the day he was officially anointed by the electoral college.
Across the United States, 538 electors met yesterday in state capitals to cast their ballots.
Some had come under intense pressure to abandon the tradition of voting as their state dictated, and instead vote for Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.
A group calling itself the December 19 Coalition said it wanted to try to persuade electors to change their minds, given the CIA and FBI’s conclusions that Russia interfered in the presidential election with the goal of supporting Trump.
One Republican elector said he had received 30 phone calls asking him not to vote for Trump, while in Texas, Christopher Suprun, the only Republican to say publicly that he would vote against his state, said that he had received threats to murder and rape him and his family.
Michael Moore, a documentary film-maker, volunteered to pay the fines of any electors who went against their state’s rules, and protesters chanted outside several state capitals.
UK politician Nigel Farage yesterday appeared on Fox News to say that it would be monstrous to overturn the November 8 vote and throw into chaos a system used to choose presidents since 1789.
“I think those who are trying to deny what the result was – and, by the way, we’ve got some here who still can’t recognise the fact that we voted for Brexit and would like to reverse it,” he said.
“It’s the same phenomenon. It’s the same kind of people. It’s those who’ve been in love with the liberal media elite, and I think it’s quite disgusting to try to get delegates to reverse their votes today, of all days.”
The votes will be announced on January 6.
But with a little over four weeks until Trump is inaugurated, Chinese media mocked the president-elect for his reaction to the Chinese seizing of an unmanned underwater drone.
The Global Times led a media chorus against Trump, after he accused Beijing via Twitter of stealing the drone, which had been taken by a Chinese vessel shadowing the USNS Bowditch in the South China Sea.
“Trump is not behaving as a president who will become master of the White House in a month,” the nationalist newspaper, which often publishes provocative editorials, said.
“He bears no sense of how to lead a superpower.”
The China Daily also lambasted Trump for his allegation that China stole the drone, which was in international waters.
Trump’s behaviour “could easily drive China-US relations into what Obama portrays as ‘full-conflict mode’,” it said.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the Chinese navy was only holding on to the equipment until it could confirm who it belonged to. – The Telegraph