Trump ‘duplimacy’ and US global leadership
The writer is a private professional and writes on geopolitical issues and regional conflicts
Despite the politically-motivated Donald Trump’s grandiloquence to whitewash his low-yield success against the coronavirus pandemic by shifting the responsibility on other countries, Americans, including both from the Democrat and Republican camps, are wary of support to his notion and blame their government for the severe health crisis.
A latest survey by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that an overwhelming majority of 56% Americans has put the onus of the deteriorating situation in the country on the Trump administration.
Commenting on the poll, Austin Wright of the Harris School said, “It reflected a general lack of confidence” of Americans on the federal government, a phenomenon that earlier plagued the United States and its leadership approval in global publics and is now threatening to strew throughout the US.
The poll’s findings, with 79% Democrats and 37% Republicans thought that the US government has a great deal of responsibility in handling the fatal respiratory infection, is an outright bipartisan rebuke to the President’s contention and could bore a hole in his electoral campaign entering into a final showdown.
In September, a Pew Research Center’s 13-nation survey noted that the worldwide view of the US under Trump had ebbed to a new all-time low under, a rare moment when the global nations, long modelled their strategies on US policies, refused to draw inspiration from the White House and developed their own health response to counter the insidious disease.
People from Europe, East Asia and the Pacific — including those from major US allies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea and the UK — not only radically dropped their favourable perception about the US but they also shelved the confidence in Trump substantially up to as low as 9%.
The latest survey results and the Center’s outshot that the majorities or pluralities in the major countries see Beijing as the world’s leading economic power or China as the most common choice as a global economic leader — leaves Trump naked in the wind who, if re-elected, would need to revive the trust of his allies and reinvigorate his efforts to decouple them from China.
Trump’s “duplimacy” — a fast-changing, duplicitous political track being excitably practised by the President to bring all states beneath his clout in a standardized, though vitriolic way — and a strong conviction that the White House tenancy gives him an organic right to dominate the world by pursuing his political rhetoric and economic ostracism could be singled out as the key factor behind the US and his crumbling global acceptance.
Over the last four years, his knavish tricks have pushed US allies and partners further away and by the time he would realise the domestic and global changing mood and clean up his act, his idealistic policies could have hit an irreversible damage to the tumbling US credibility.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak in the country, the American President hasn’t taken the deadly virus seriously. Trump doesn’t consider it a grave risk now either and despite catching the infection, he is still downplaying the highly contagious illness by equating it with the seasonal flu.
Trump’s paradoxical attitude, downplay the illness to re-open the economy and launch “the most aggressive mobilisation since the Second World War” in chorus — all with the exclusive object to satisfy his insatiable passion for the White House — would nonplus his voters and could prevent them to back the Republican nominee.
As polls after polls continue to decipher that his nonsensical policies are ripping off the longtime US kudos on the international stage, the prevalence of excruciating trend within the States could upend his life’s ambition to seek another four-year licence from the American public and encroach on the remains of the US global headship as an undeclared king of the world.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 12th, 2020.
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