The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Trump

  • Eric Trump posts, delete illegal ballot selfie on Twitter

    Eric Trump posts, delete illegal ballot selfie on Twitter

    Eric Trump, the son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, may find himself in trouble after he illegally posted a photo of his marked ballot on Twitter on Tuesday.

    The photo, which has since been deleted from the 32-year-old Trump’s Twitter feed, was in violation of laws in New York State.

    New York along with more than a dozen other states, prohibits voters from posting photos of their marked ballots.

    Trump shared the photo of his ballot filled out in support of his father with the note, “it is an incredible honor to vote for my father! He will do such a great job for the U.S.A.’’

    It is unclear if posting the image, also called a ballot selfie, will draw any legal consequences.

    Last month, singer Justin Timberlake also broke the law by posting a photo of himself in a voting booth in his home state Tennessee, where he was casting his ballot early.

    Local officials decided not to review the case but they warned Timberlake of the violation, which is punishable by a fine or up to 30 days in jail, according to local News Channel 3 Memphis.

    “We’re thrilled; Justin can’t stop the feeling when it comes to voting so much that he voted early in person is promoting voting to his millions of fans.

    “In Tennessee, using electronic devices inside polling locations to take pictures, videos or make calls is not allowed,” the office of Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett said.

  • Clinton, Trump make final pitch to US voters

    Clinton, Trump make final pitch to US voters

    Republican candidate travels to nine states over
    three days, while Democratic nominee banks on
    celebrity connection

    DONALD Trump and Hillary Clinton each woke up Saturday in Florida, the biggest prize on the presidential battleground, as they worked to turn out their supporters in a final sprint to Election Day.

    At this point, the primary goal is less to win over new voters and more to motivate their own supporters to show up at the polls. In battleground states across the country this weekend, volunteers will be making phone calls and knocking on doors, TV watchers will see a final burst of ads, and the candidates will travel thousands of miles in a last round of campaigning.

    Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is scheduled to appear at an afternoon rally in the Miami area before flying to Philadelphia, where she is set to share the stage with pop singer Katy Perry, the latest in a string of concerts aimed at moving young people to the polls.

    Her campaign said some one million volunteers would go house to house and make calls over the final stretch. Republican Donald Trump’s campaign is relying mostly on the Republican National Committee to reach out to individual voters, with a ground game generally seen as far less sophisticated.

    Campaign coverage

    Mr. Trump is campaigning in the Tampa area first thing on Saturday and then planned to jet to North Carolina and Nevada before ending the day in Colorado. In all, he was scheduled to visit at least nine states, maybe more, on the Friday-to-Sunday stretch. That includes places where he’s leading such as Iowa, tossups like Florida, and states thought to be safely Democratic, such as Wisconsin.

    Mrs. Clinton plans to campaign in five states over the same three-day period, including events all three days in Pennsylvania, a firewall state that tilts her way and where a win would block many of Mr. Trump’s possible paths to victory in the Electoral College.

    Locking down Democratic-leaning states is essential for Mrs. Clinton, who can win the race if the states leaning her direction come througheven if she loses most of the traditional battlegrounds. “Her priority is to focus on her firewall,” said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist.

    Both campaigns see hopeful signs in early votes already cast, with each side cherry-picking statistics to make their cases. But in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Mrs. Clinton campaigned Friday, nearly all the votes are cast on Election Day, so the campaigns face a bigger turnout challenge.

    Mrs. Clinton is getting high-powered help. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and others are campaigning for her this weekend. On Sunday, NBA star forward LeBron James will appear by her side in Cleveland, a rare showing on the trail for Mr. James.

    On Friday night, there was more star power in Cleveland, as Mrs. Clinton turned to Beyoncé and Jay Z. The singer and her rapper husband performed at a get-out-the-vote concert, urging a raucous crowd to help make history on Election Day.

    Beyoncé and her backup dancers donned pantsuitsa Clinton wardrobe staplefor the occasion.

    “I am so energized after this concert,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I’ve got to say: Didn’t you love the pantsuits?”

    Clinton aides had said their aim was to end the race with a unifying spirit in hopes of laying the foundation for her to better govern if elected. They emphasized her outreach to Republicans, announced plans to campaign in Arizona, traditionally a Republican state, and suggested she might be able to win Utah, too. They released a TV ad dubbed their “closing argument” featuring Mrs. Clinton talking about her commitment to children and families.

    But those goals largely fell away a week ago, after the surprise FBI announcement that investigators had found additional emails from Mrs. Clinton’s family server on the laptop of one of her aide’s estranged husband. It wasn’t clear whether these emails are incriminating, but the news dominated the campaign conversation.

    Mr. Trump has made the FBI disclosure central to his final pitch to voters. Mrs. Clinton replied by trying to revive discussion of what voters don’t like about Mr. Trump.

    “If she were to win it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis,” Mr. Trump said in New Hampshire on Friday.

    ‘I am so energized after this concert. I’ve got to say: Didn’t you love the pantsuits?’

    Hillary Clinton, referring to the costumes Beyoncé and her backup dancers wore

    In Detroit on Friday, Mrs. Clinton said: “Imagine having a president who demeans women and mocks the disabled, who insults African-Americans and Latinos and Muslims, who personally engages in busting unions and preventing people from having the right to bargain collectively,” she said.

    One question is whether this weekend either or both of them would pivot to a more optimistic tone. Typically, presidential candidates try to close out their runs with a positive message aimed at making voters feel good about voting for them. But this year’s election has defied all precedents.

    “The attacks work. Why stop what’s working,” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist who backs Mr. Trump. “Time is short. They need to paste the other with the best negatives they’ve got.”

    Colleen McCain Nelson and Reid J. Epstein contributed to this article.

    Culled from Wall Street Journal

  • Win or lose, Trump sullies America’s reputation

    Win or lose, Trump sullies America’s reputation

    WIN or lose, Donald Trump, candidate of the Republican Party in this year’s presidential election, will cast a long shadow over the global reputation of the United States of America. The erratic, brash and braggart billionaire businessman has affected the U.S. so deeply that the world is puzzled whether they ever knew that country as well as they thought or the media projected. Few gave Mr Trump any chance of blitzing his way through the Republican primaries. By a combination of bluster, invectives, nonconformism, clever deployment of disinformation, and sheer braggadocio, he did what many thought he couldn’t. He bested the opposition within the Republican Party and, as the perfect political iconoclast of this election, virtually took the party’s ideologues and apparatchiks to the cleaners. Should he win, the U.S., not to talk of his party, would be changed, possibly forever, in ways even Americans themselves would find astonishing.
    Mr Trump’s progress has been phenomenal. He started as a rank outsider, and has remained and frolicked in that position. For much of the campaign, he alienated Republican leaders, defied the establishment whether in politics or business, scorned Washington, and provoked into fury key political demographics like women and minorities. Yet, his appeal has not only been sustained, it has even flourished. Until about two weeks ago, he was virtually fighting alone, and was trailing in the polls. Now he has shocked pundits by outperforming his Democratic Party opponent, Hillary Clinton, in proportion to the efforts, resources, personnel and support put into the race. In contrast, Mrs Clinton has had the entire Democratic Party machine behind her, the support of all living U.S. ex-presidents, a disproportionate number of former intelligence chiefs, the creme de la creme of the entertainment and sport industries, the intelligentsia, and nearly all world leaders minus Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Yet, the race is an astonishing dead heat.
    But the 2016 presidential election is more a reflection of the real America than a barometer of the persons and values of the candidates. The two candidates are a study in stark contrast, so the choice of who to vote for ought not to be as complicated as the general impression of the two candidates’ repugnant manners. A vote for Mr Trump will be clearly an endorsement of divisiveness, hate and bigotry, and a nostalgic attempt to retain the political and cultural demographics of a bygone era. On the other hand, a vote for Mrs Clinton will be an endorsement of the steadying sameness of the conventional but stultifying politics that has dominated and shaped American life for a long time, and the paradoxical safety which that politics represents. The world probably wants that predictability and safety. But, apparently, a huge number of Americans long for something else: some sort of revolution, some sort of change, perhaps a beguiling insularity and nationalism.
    It is, however, significant that at a time when increasingly unstable global politics needs a strong, perceptive and dependable U.S. to provide leadership, no matter how imperfect, the American voter appears to be inured to the shifting dynamics of an unstable unipolar world, an aggressive Russia attempting to rebuild a bipolar world, a fracturing Europe confused about the future, and much of the rest of the world agitated, unstable or impoverished. In short, world leadership may be up for grabs, and it is precisely at this inauspicious time that America is unsure which direction to head: Mr Trump’s eclecticism, erraticism and lack of profundity; or Mrs Clinton’s reflectiveness, depth and global perspective. That they find themselves in this quandary is a testament to the shifting tectonics of American politics which the winner will have to grapple with in the years to come. The outcome of that internal struggle, like next Tuesday’s election, is by no means certain.

  • Finally, Trump faces waterloo

    Finally, Trump faces waterloo

    Short of a seismic eruption in the United States’ political landscape, that country looks formatted to make history by electing the first female President in more than 200 years of its practice of electoral democracy. Democratic Party candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, at different times previously First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State, looks impregnable on her homeward run towards becoming America’s first ‘Madam President’ in the election that is set for just eight days from now, with early voting having already commenced in a number of states.

    The candidacy of Clinton’s Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, has been on steady tailspin and there is simply no time left for a turnaround. An Associated Press-GfK poll published last weekend, 12 days before the presidential poll, showed Clinton gaining on Trump nationally by 14 percentage points. A TIME magazine report said the poll, conducted after the final presidential debate, found Clinton ahead among likely voters at 51 percent to Trump’s 37 percent. Clinton had 90 percent support among likely Democrat voters, plus 15 percent support among moderate Republicans – a profile showing she had not just consolidated her Democratic following but had managed to also draw Republican voters. The margin of error for the AP-GfK poll, conducted between October 20-24, was put at plus or minus 2.75 percentage points.

    During the candidates’ last face-off in a debate penultimate week, Trump scandalously broke with a two century-old convention of American politics by withholding assurance that he would concede defeat if duly outran electorally by Clinton. He doubled down at a subsequent campaign in Delaware, Ohio, saying he would respect the outcome only if he wins. A loser’s refusal to concede defeat is, of course, totally out of character with the American democracy; but, as with other electoral jurisdictions including Nigeria, it by no means detracts from the validity of the outcome. In other words, the determination of the next U. S. President will be on the basis of votes’ superiority and not the loser’s concession, conventional as that may be. In any event, most the latest opinion polls in that country revealed commanding unanimity among Americans that Clinton will win the November 8 election.

    The final nail in Trump’s bid for the American presidency was struck by a recent leakage of a lewd recording, in itself more than 20 years old, by which he boasted a licence to handle women improperly by virtue of being a celebrity. Even though he stepped out of character to publicly apologise for the conversation on that tape, his subsequent defence that it was just ‘locker room talk’ and nothing that he did in reality triggered a slew of allegations by women who came up to allege indecent encounters over the years with the businessman-turned-politician. At the last count, no fewer than 14 women had outed with damning claims of moral impropriety against Trump. The Republican candidate naturally denied any acquaintance with the women and said they were all lying, but very few outside his passionate supporters were convinced by his denials.

    The trouble with Trump’s candidacy, however, did not begin with the recent damning tape leak and the string of outings by women accusers. His trademarks since he declared for the race mid-2015 have been bombast, bluster, xenophobic bullying and arrogant swagger not seen before in modern history of his country’s democracy. This is one politician who betrayed the worst in America’s political culture and sheer revision of exemplary hallmarks of that model democracy. For a country founded as an immigrant nation and which prides itself in historical plurality, Trump started out in his campaign with the harshest xenophobic rhetoric ever seen in American politics and comparable perhaps only to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi ideology. He advocated a closed country and described immigrants from neighbouring Mexico as druggists and rapists, vowing to erect a border wall that Mexico will be compelled to pay for.

    Trump’s rhetoric mutated at some point into verbal hostility against other racial groups, though many of the statements attributed to him were more likely by proxy scripting than truly originated from him. He was reported, for instance, to have described African-Americans as lazy and good at nothing other than gallivanting, eating and making love; and was separately quoted as telling ‘Black Lives Matter’ advocates: “If black lives matter, then go back to Africa. We’ll see how much they matter there.” An attributed comment that got Nigerians rattled the most was at a purported rally in Wichita, Kansas, where he allegedly threatened that if he wins the presidential race, he would expel our compatriots resident in his country to make America great again. He was quoted as saying: “Why can’t they stay in their own country? Why? I’ll tell you why. Because they are corrupt. Their governments are so corrupt they rob the people blind and bring it all here to spend. And their people run away and come down here and take our jobs! We can’t have that!”

    On campaign trail, Trump’s electioneering was a bad example for upcoming democracies like Nigeria where political culture yet lacks the level of civility and decency that had made the United States a model to emulate. The Republican candidate trafficked in rhetoric of hate, exclusion and intemperance, and literally egged his loyal supporters into peeling down to bare knuckle confrontation with those who shared views different from theirs, thereby promoting physical violence at his campaign rallies. In a large measure, and quite uncharacteristic of the American model of electioneering discourse, issue-based orientation of campaign was replaced by instigation of base instincts and hate mongering.

    With just one week before Election Day, American voters appear to have reset their electoral values and are holding the candidates firmly to these values. Trump fell grossly short of acceptable norms and must prepare to pay the price. From all indications, Hillary Clinton is headed for a big win, and is obviously looking beyond the contest with Donald Trump already to angle for big wins by Democratic candidates in the U. S. Congress. The beauty in all of these, for me, is that American voters are calling the shots. Never mind the hype by Mr. Trump that the elections were being rigged – and that, he alleged, by the media! – voters are stamping in their preferences and redeeming their country from a dangerous slide in electoral culture that Trump signposted. Voters in our own clime can be cultivated in this mould. Relevant stakeholders could work at a level of political education that would enable voters to hold the political elite to preferred ethics, morals and conventions. Achieving desired results is without doubt a long journey down; but voters must begin to ask reasoned questions of the elite, and make informed electoral choices based on the answers to those questions.

  • America and the Trump challenge

    The difference between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, the two contestants for America presidency is clear. Nothing brought the difference home more vividly than their final appeal to the electorate after their last week final debate. Clinton advertised the record of her achievement in public service along with her manifesto: “…You know, I’ve been privileged to see the presidency up close and I know the awesome responsibility of protecting our country”, Clinton intoned with confidence.

    “I have made the cause of children and families really my life’s work; I will stand up for families against powerful interests, against corporations. I will do everything I can to make sure you have good jobs with rising incomes, that your kids have good educations from preschool through college. I hope you will give me a chance to serve as your president”.

    But from Trump, came a message of fear and of divisiveness: “We’re going to make America great. We have a depleted military. It has to be helped. We have the greatest people on earth in our military. We don’t take care of our veterans. We take care of illegal immigrants, people that come into the country illegally, better than we take care of our vets. That can’t happen… We are going to make America strong again and we are going to make America great again”.

    Perhaps the difference between the two also brought out the major weakness of democracy, the new god worshipped by more than half of the nations of the world. Free and fair elections, the hallmark of participatory democracy which often involve group bargaining or ‘a do or die’ approach – a euphemism for outright rigging as we have in Nigeria, sometimes throw up a nightmare. Here we have the experience of 2011 when we ended up with a Goodluck Jonathan who turned up to be a scourge of our nation. But even America, the home of democracy is not immune to this phenomenon. The process threw up a George Bush who did not know his left from his right and ended up committing America to two avoidable wars that turned Afghanistan and Iraq into failed states and foisted terrorism on the world.

    Writing for the New York Times back in 2008, Ian Kershaw, a professor of modern history at Sheffield University, and the author of Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution reminded us how skilful politicians in the mode of Adolf Hitler proved adept at using democratic structures to erect forms of authoritarian rule and went on to advise on the need for international cooperation to restrain potential “mad dogs” in the world before they bite. Back then, he had Vladimir Putin of Russia and the late Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela in mind. That was long before the emergence of Donald Trump, a creation of disgruntled, racist, Islamaphobic, college uneducated white workers and their Tea Party that ignited what many have described as a civil war in the Republican Party. His emergence with is message of hate has sent fear down the spines of many in the world especially Western Europe with greater stake in who becomes the next American president.

    We must understand where Europe is coming from. The horrors of the Second World War foisted on the people through the follies of a mad man are still fresh. Unfortunately, there are just too many parallels between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, credited with the slaughtering of 11 million people including the six million Jews incinerated in a gas chamber.

    Let us start with the environment. There is a frightening parallel between the social dislocations in Hitler’s 1929 Germany and Donald Trump’s 2007 and 2008 US. Just as the defeat and humiliation of Germany in the First World War and the great economic depression provided a fertile ground for Hitler to exploit the misery of his compatriots for political power, Trump has tried to exploit the political divisiveness within the Republican Party following the loss of power to Barak Obama, international terrorism and economic insecurity, fallouts of George Bush misadventure and bad policies. But for Trump, the scapegoat is Obama. Lying without shame and sounding like Hitler before the Jew final solution, he says ‘we have problem in this country. It is called Muslims. We know our current president is one, he is not an American…They have training camps where they want to kill us; we want to take our country back’.

    Like Hitler, Trump does not believe in political parties. Just as Hitler used Nazism as springboard to take over power, Trump hijacked the Republican Party to secure the party’s presidential ticket. Just as Hitler didn’t believe the party needed to serve the people, Trump after using the party to achieve his aim, assaulted the core values and the soul of the Republican Party. Like Hitler, he humiliated the real leaders of GOP. And just like what Hitler did to his party leading members, Trump has attempted to stop Speaker Paul Ryan, the highest ranking Republican from getting re-nomination ticket.

    Hitler had a ‘barstadisation’ policy for children born in Germany but of non-German parents. He believed they were inferior to German children and cannot be given citizenship because citizenship was by blood of the Aryan race. Trump like Hitler is against the Fourteenth Amendment which confers citizenship on all children born in America. Trump wants all such children deported.   Reminded of his constitutional limitations, he says because the constitutional process is too slow, he would explore other methods if he wins.

    Both are against freedom of expression and the press is their whipping dog. If Trump like Hitler has his ways, the state should control the press and use it as instrument for propaganda. Both have no regard for the famous declaration of Thomas Jefferson, the American founding father and the principal author of American declaration of independence (1776) that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the later”.

    Trump’s ‘I am the only one who can fix America’ is not markedly different from Hitler’s delusion that he was ordained to protect the Aryan race. Just as Hitler blamed the Jews for most of the problems and evils in Germany as well as the world, Trump blames China for unemployment and Obama perhaps for stopping two wars. He then broke into lamentation: ‘Our country is in serious trouble, we used to have victories, not any more”.  How can Trump have victories when there are no more wars, if one may ask? Trump like Hitler, engages in rabid nationalism bordering on fascism.

    And finally, Trump and Hitler did not believe in democracy. For Hitler, ‘democracy will in practice lead to the destruction of a people’s true value’.  His plan as reflected in his ‘Mein Kampf’ was to “destroy democracy with the weapons of democracy”. In other words, secure power through democracy and then become a dictator because for him “One works best when alone” – a rejection of participatory democracy. Trump like Hitler probably wants democracy as a means to an end. There can be no other more compelling argument than his current attempt to undermine the foundation of the democratic process by insisting he will only accept the outcome of the coming election if he wins.

    As Matt Brundage has also reminded us, had “Hitler, the quintessential anti-democrat, who ascended to power as swiftly succeeded in World War II, he would have foisted his views and policies on an unprepared world”. American voters on November 8 have an opportunity to save their country and mankind from a dangerous man whose belligerence and ignorance may lead to Third World War.

  • How next U.S. president will emerge

    How next U.S. president will emerge

    Many democracies across the world are fashioned to reflect the United States (U.S.) presidential model. How many of those democracies have constitutional technicalities that almost made the U.S. presidential system a flawless model?

    Presidents and Vice Presidents are elected by popular votes in a presidential system. But, the U.S. model is complex. According to the U.S. Constitution, America’s presidents and vice presidents are not elected by citizens’ votes alone. After the popular votes, the contenders for the U.S. presidency will need to go for another election at the Electoral College.

    Electoral College, as the name may have implied, is not an institution, but a group of representatives (electorals) from all the federating states. America’s founding fathers ostensibly foresaw a situation where an unpopular candidate may find his way into the White House. “American founding fathers feared the rule of the mob and feared about democracy,” John Zogby, a renowned pollster, said of the Electoral College.

    Zogby, senior partner at John Zogby Strategies, said the purpose behind Electoral College as is to give every constituency an opportunity to have input in the selection of who becomes occupant of the White House. He said it is a form of check and balance in the electoral process to prevent election of a “dangerous candidate”.

    In the U.S., there is a total 538 Electoral College votes. This number is determined according to constituencies represented in the Congress. The representatives of these constituencies may automatically become the electorals or each party may nominate loyal members as electorals.

    Each state has two senators. Membership of the House of Representatives is varied, because it is based on population and size of a constituency.

    For any candidate to be elected president or vice president, he must garner 270 majority out of 538 Electoral College vote.

    Does that mean the popular vote is meaningless?

    Winning popular votes during the presidential election is not enough to declare a candidate as winner, but it puts such candidate in a position to win the Electoral College votes of the state. For a candidate to win electoral votes in a state, he has to win the state during presidential election.

    In his analysis, Zogby said: “New York State, for instance has 29 Electoral College votes. A candidate does not have to win the majority of the popular votes to win New York; if that person just wins the total votes cast, that person gets the full 29 electoral votes. It is the same way in almost every state. There are couples of states that are different, such as Nebraska and Maine. It is because they are very small states.”

    How Electoral College works

    Traditionally, Republican and Democratic parties put together a slate of electorals in each state. These are loyal members and people that could be counted on to support their candidates. According to the U.S. Constitution, one month after the presidential election is held, the electorals of the winning party in each state go to the state capital to cast their Electoral College votes for the president and vice president.

    Each electorals will cast ballots for the president and do the same for the vice president. This is regarded as the official election to the U.S. presidency.

    Can any electoral change his mind?

    There is possibility an electoral may change his mind and vote against the party’s directive. Although, the electorals are chosen on the basis of long time loyalty to the party and trust, but America’s founding fathers wanted in the system to run a final check and ensure Americans did not elect somebody too dangerous.

    The electorals are deemed as responsible people and can ultimately make the decision on behalf of their constituencies.

    Zogby said: “It is impossible that electorals may go to the state capital to cancel out that state’s votes. This has not happened, but individual electorals vote according to their conscience. When people cast popular votes on election day, they vote for candidates in each party as a single ticket.

    “But, electorals, technically, will cast two different ballots. It is technically possible to elect the president from one party and vice president from another party. It depends on who each party chooses as electorals in the first place.”

  • Why Trump presidency will be good for the world

    SIR: Donald Trump, brash billionaire businessman and presidential candidate of the Grand Old Party (GOP) or the U.S Republican Party is media favourite for visceral pillory. Ever since he made his brash entry to U.S primary nomination in the Republican Party, media heckles and tantrums have been his lot. His political insurgency, peppered all the way with outlandish innuendoes, including the most notorious jibes to ban Muslims from entering the U.S and building a great wall across the shared border with Mexico, rankled the established pattern of U.S political correctness, jarring the jaws and profaning the serenity of America’s traditional political hypocrisy where grandstanding holds sway.

    However amidst Trump’s so-called daily garbage of tantrums are some immutable and seriously intelligible diagnoses of what ails the United States of America. He consistently remarked that the worldwide misadventure of Washington is eating away at the vitality of the country to provide for its own people. He implied that there is no sense in American exceptionalism and the burden of a global policeman it has imposed on itself. Trump promise to make America a normal country that looks after itself and its people first, while contributing its own fair share to global governance.

    For saying that America would under his presidency mind its own business, the war industry and their political and media wing, across partisan divide went up in arms against candidate Donald Trump, but his unmistakable message that seemed to have resonated with the weary ordinary America that shot him to the GOP nominee is likely to see him through the presidency. If he fulfils his vision to restore America to a normal country that minds its own business, the world would leap to a new framework of multilateralism, mutual consultations and dialogue of civilizations devoid of the arrogance of exceptionalism and indispensability of any one nation or group of nations.

    Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party candidate purports herself as the epitome of civilized political behaviour but who is actually the political package of the war industry. Her rhetoric of active Washington bohemia across the world is a recipe for global chaos to be orchestrated by a new Washington bully. She and her war industry patrons would escalate confrontations with Russia using the pretext of Ukraine and would most likely draw out China in a military conflict by exacerbating the tensions in the South China Sea.

    The chaos of the Middle East will be further expanded as more military violence are likely to be piled up on the existing military stalemate in the region, under the usual arrogance and delusion of the war industry that only military escalation can guarantee its victory and ensure its hegemony.

    There is no doubt that the system of U.S global domination has taken a huge toll on the quality of life of ordinary Americans, including the white working class, who are the main support base of Trump. The worsening state racial violence in which African Americans are the largest victims in the United States, represent the travels of the overstretched system.

    The finesse in the language of American politics has always disguised the undercurrent of systematic exclusion of the working and toiling people to the country’s political and socio-economic mainstream. The highly regimented discourse of the America electoral politics has been busted by the brash and freewheeling interjections of Trump. The Trump mystique and even his popularity among American nativist working class are the unusual candour and clinical expressions that mirrors their fears and even hopes. Straying from rudiments of American political hypocrisy and electoral correctness has earned Trump the ire of the guardians of the system, including the mainstream media.

    It may not really matter to the rest of the world, how Trump resolves many America’s intractable domestic problems but if he could refocus Washington to the real challenge of improving  the lives of America, with less penchant to global trouble-making, the world would be a better place.

     

    • Charles Onunaiju

    Abuja.

  • Trump’s asinine appeal to African-American voters

    SIR: Just when it seemed like Republican presidential entrant Donald Trump, a man known for his unchecked bravado, had turned a new leaf after he expressed “regret” over some of his past comments of insults and racialism, he once again displayed his continuous lack of meaningful direction in an attempted outreach to black voters.

    In that ostensible pitch for African American votes made on Friday August 19th before a virtually all-white audience in Michigan, he reportedly said: “Tonight, I’m asking for the vote of every single African-American citizen in this country who wants to see a better future…What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump? You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”

    If I may ask, does he really think he can appeal to black voters with such condescending fallacies and indecorous annotations?

    My answer to this question from a man who has repeatedly rebuffed invitations from black colleges and organizations to appear before African American audiences, then addresses white audiences about blacks is that the African Americans have everything to lose by voting a man whose policies are conceived in xenophobic spasm.

    His first mistake was to group black people as one monolith. Secondly, he took the worst example of black people and applied their circumstances to all black people in America. Just like other races in America, not all black people are poor, unemployed, nor do they all live in crime riddled areas.

    Trump’s comments betray his mistaken impression that only blacks do drugs, only blacks are on welfare, only blacks are dependent on the government, only blacks are involved in crimes and gangs. As it has been largely observed, many have been persuaded to pitch their tent with Trump largely on the single issue of his presumed pro-business credentials. But again, a man who has filed for bankruptcy four times in 25 years, and in the process, stiffed thousands of small-business creditors hardly seems to be good for business judging by American standard.

    Governance is not about incivility. It is about policies, strategies and advocacy working side by side with citizenship participation.

    Donald Trump, in my view, lacks respect for citizens of the country that he claims to want to represent and help lead without inequity. He only cares about people who share in his contemptuousness and fit in with his group.

    Donald Trump’s “black outreach” campaign is simply an attempt to rob African Americans of their political intelligence and decision-making.

     

    • David Dimas,

    Maryland, U.S.A

  • White House Race: Health questions flip back to Trump

    White House Race: Health questions flip back to Trump

    A CRITICIZED and scrutinized letter from Donald Trump’s doctor about the candidate’s general health was written in just five minutes, the doctor says, raising fresh questions about Trump’s fitness and willingness to follow political norms as he and his surrogates launch unsubstantiated rumors about Hillary Clinton’s physical well-being.
    Dr. Harold Bornstein, a gastroenterologist affiliated with Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, admitted to NBC News that he wrote the bizarre letter extolling Trump’s “astonishingly excellent” test results in just five minutes while Trump staff sat outside in a car waiting for it to be done. “I thought about it all day and at the end…I get rushed, and I get anxious when I get rushed. So I try to get four or five lines down as fast as possible so that they would be happy…I’ve got five minutes to sit right at this desk and write that letter while the driver waited for me,” Bornstein said.
    The lack of attention shows. Bornstein’s letter is heavy on Trumpian adjectives and light on medical specifics. As Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald noted: “It is one of the most ridiculous documents ever to emerge in any political campaign. First, the letterhead is in the same font as the letter, which appears to have been created using Microsoft Word…The letter also has problems with sentence structure and major typographical errors, such as the opening line, ‘To Whom My Concern.’ Most amusing, it says that his medical examination of Trump has ‘only positive results.’ In medical terms, if the test is positive, it confirms the existence of disease. Is this doctor saying Trump has every medical ailment that could be found in examination? Does he not know the meaning of the word?”
    Bornstein, who says he examines Trump annually, pronounced the Republican presidential candidate as the “healthiest individual” ever to serve if he is elected president. This despite a document that only offers medical tidbits such as Trump’s aspirin intake and “low dose of a statin” while claiming, in true Trumpian bravado, that his blood pressure and lab tests are “astonishingly excellent.” The curious adoption of Trump-speak was new for the doctor, he admits. “I think I probably picked up his kind of language and then just interpreted it to my own,” he said. Despite the slapdash letter, he did tell NBC that Trump’s “health is excellent, particularly his mental health”before breaking up in laughter.
    In contrast, Democratic nominee Clinton has offered a letter more within the norms of such disclosures, listing her medical history and results of a physical while noting negative test results. That has not stopped Trump and his surrogates, such as former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, from launching vicious rumors about her supposed ill health that appear to be smears with no basis in fact whatsoever.
    The online trolls have gleefully picked up on the attack, filling social media with vile memes and easily debunked photographic and video “evidence” of a range of supposed maladies attributed to Clinton. Fox News’ most boisterous Trump booster, Sean Hannity, even has gone so far as to host supposed medical experts to analyze videos and suggest that Clinton may be suffering from epilepsy.
    Clinton has largely tried to not substantiate the invective but did tell Jimmy Kimmel this week that the rumormongering is “part of the wacky strategy; just say all these crazy things and maybe you can get some people to believe you. On the other hand, it just absolutely makes no sense.”
    It’s easy to read Trump and his cronies’ willingness to spread lies as an act of desperation. With fall almost here, the GOP candidate is behind in virtually every poll and is expected to be walloped in the Electoral College vote. It appears to be a two-pronged strategy: attack Clinton and try to woo moderates and independents by softening on policy.
    Neither is going well. In addition to claims about Clinton’s health and “stamina,” Trump has taken to making the dubious claim that she is a “bigot” while seemingly tying her to every Democratic domestic policy of the post-war generation to argue that she wouldn’t be a good choice for minorities.
    His bid to win undecided votes has consisted of shifting statements from his team and himself on what his immigration and deportation policies will bestill an ongoing effort, apparently. The waffling has only earned him the ire of the likes of Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and their hardline followers.
    Trump’s medical history may end up being one of those things that the candidate says you must trust him on. His team told NBC that he would be willing to release more medical informationif Clinton does the same. Of course, Clinton has released years worth of tax returns, and Trump has declined to respond in kind, sometimes citing audits, sometimes just flat refusing.

  • Trump accuses Obama of ‘founding’ ISIS

    Republican Donald Trump has described United States President, Barack Obama, as the “founder” of the Islamic State group.

    “They honoured President Obama,” he told a rally in Florida on Wednesday. “He is the founder of ISIS [Islamic State].

    Mr. Trump also attacked his Democratic rival for the White House, Hillary Clinton, calling her a “co-founder.”

    The BBC reports that Mrs. Clinton responded by accusing him of “trash-talking” the US and echoing the talking points of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Mr. Trump stood by his remarks on Thursday, using a sports phrase to say Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton were the Islamic State’s “most valuable players.”

    The Republican presidential nominee has endured 10 days of negative headlines after a string of controversial comments.

    Most recently, he appeared to urge his supporters to take up arms against Mrs. Clinton to stop her from appointing liberal judges to the U.S Supreme Court if she wins the election.

    The hotel developer-turned-politician denied he was inciting violence, but the daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, who was shot in 1981, condemned his “verbal violence.”