Trump – Uniter-in-chief

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Exactly a month before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy gave an interview to Jean Daniel Bensaid, a French journalist. JFK had told Mr Bensaid that he acknowledged misplaced American support of Fulgencio Batista, who had become Cuban president for a second time in a 1952 coup, and whose regime he categorised as the most corrupt anywhere in the world. JFK also stated that he had approved of Castro’s 1956 proclamation from Sierra Maestra, for justice and an end to the Batista regime’s endemic corruption. Mr Bensaid was to inform Castro that the US could respect a nationalist, even communist government in Cuba, but could not relate to a country “indentured” to the Soviet Union. When the Cuban Revolution gained victory on January 1, 1959, Batista fled the country leaving the Treasury empty; America refused to aid Castro, who was then deemed too much of a left-wing threat, and Moscow was only too ready to bridge the gap. This brief history of Cuba turning to the USSR for aid to survive, came to mind when reading of the current dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

President Trump’s ‘Chief Broligarch’ and world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is tasked with cleaning up the fraud and corruption that exists within Washington’s many agencies and government departments. President Trump had long campaigned to “drain the swamp”, but eyebrows and blood pressures are raised by the pace and severity with which Elon and his band of juvenile Musketeers are going about their task — using machetes rather than scalpels to perform delicate operations. Many poorer countries around the world depend on USAID, and if this is no longer available, surely Russia will again step into the breach; along with China, whose Belt and Road Initiative already has strong influence around the globe. The Musketeers are not alone in upsetting the status quo, as campaign promises to unite the country behind him became convoluted with President Trump’s peace plans to end the war in Ukraine. Those plans initially have only Russia and US meeting in Saudi Arabia, and therefore have united all the excluded countries of Europe against him. He has also united the entire Arab world and almost every country on the globe, except Israel, with his controversial plan to rebuild Gaza. By repeatedly threatening to make Canada his 51st state, he has united all the provincial and territorial premiers, who usually spend all their time bickering, back-stabbing and squabbling with each other, into a solid resistance that has motivated much of their population to wrap themselves in the Canadian Maple Leaf flag, too. There’s no doubt that President Trump is the uniter-in-chief.

BERNIE SMITH

Parksville, BC

Canada