Trump’s vendetta against Pakistan

Remember Trump’s promise to punish countries which voted against the US for accepting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The 71-year-old American president may be “crazy” or “mentally unbalanced” as say 27 leading psychiatrists, but his capacity for hate and vendetta is razor sharp. Since Pakistan was one of the co-sponsors of the UN resolution against the US on Israel, Trump has lost no time in cutting off aid to us. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit,” Trump tweeted. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!” He has also suspended security assistance to the Pakistan’s military and has placed Pakistan on a ‘special watch list’.

One year ago, this same man as president-elect spoke on the phone with then prime minister Nawaz Sharif and used superlatives to praise him and Pakistan. He called Nawaz Sharif “terrific”. Pakistanis, “fantastic” and “one of the most intelligent people.” So impressed was Trump with the country and its prime minister, that he was “ready and willing to play any role that you [Nawaz Sharif] want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems.”

But wait… at home Trump is facing fallout that is reverberating all across America. The media is agog with Michael Wolff’s tell all on Donald Trump and his family. The book is called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. His cabinet members laugh behind his back and are quoted as privately calling the president, names. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calls him a “moron”. His national security adviser, General McMaster, says Trump is a “hopeless idiot,” and his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, doesn’t refer to him any differently, either.

His own daughter Ivanka Trump makes fun of her father’s weird hairstyle telling friends how he covers an “absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction  surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the centre and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”

Worst of all are the bombshell statements attributed to the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. He thinks Trump has lost his mind and will either get impeached or resign due to his lack of mental fitness. Trump, writes Wolff, increasingly repeats stories and could not recognise old friends. “Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes.”

How did Michael Wolff get the juice from people working in the White House? He says after the election of Donald Trump, Wolff approached Trump saying he wanted to write a book about his first year in the White House. He conducted conversations and interviews over a period of 18 months with the president and most members of his senior staff. He says he was able to take up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” — an idea encouraged by the president himself. In more than 200 interviews, he found how the administration’s “lack of experience and disdain for political norms” made for a hodgepodge of governance. But the most salacious bits are about the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump. He is said to go to bed at 6.30pm, eating cheeseburgers in bed and binging on three TV sets placed in his bedroom. He got the secret service all riled up when he insisted on locking his bedroom. Afraid of being poisoned, he forbids the staff to touch his toothbrush.

With such a man as the president of America, God help Pakistan! His wrath is lethal.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2018.

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