Sunday Times 2
Trumping Trump in incompetent president stakes
I have been musing recently this month about this man Donald Trump.
Trump, who managed to con the gullible voters of America to vote him in as president of their country in November 2016, has, for almost the past three years, presided over what, according to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, has been called “an era of paralysed dysfunctional government that even Trump enthusiasts must know is bad for the nation’s health.”
What Trump has shown since being elected to office is that he has no knowledge of — and no respect for — the norms of high office. He is well known for disdaining the need to read the President’s Daily Brief — the document that provides the most pressing information collected by American intelligence agencies from hot spots around the world. He has been described as a president with a short attention span who gets much of his information of the world outside America from television’s Fox News.
Trump has discovered, after becoming president, that there exists a precedent called the Presidential Pardon. Article II of the United States Constitution grants the president the authority to completely set aside or commute the punishment meted out to a convicted criminal by the courts. Such authority is granted in Clause 1, section 2 of Article II of the US Constitution.
Past US presidents have utilised this privilege — for example, President Andrew Johnson pardoned thousands of former Confederate military personnel and officials after the American Civil War with the objective of helping the country heal after the divisive war.
Trump issued his first presidential pardon in August 2017, setting aside the punishment of the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio who had been convicted of criminal contempt by the courts — a man who had been accused of innumerable types of police misconduct including abuse of power, misuse of funds, abuse of suspects in custody, unlawful enforcement of immigration laws and election law violation. Thanks to Trump’s intervention, the convicted criminal was allowed to go free without serving his prison sentence. It was almost as if Trump was thumbing his nose at the courts, sending a message that the courts of his country were wrong and that he was right, that he was above the law.
And Trump, being a man who does not respect convention and the diplomatic niceties of his office, makes no secret of the fact that he favours his family. Soon after being elected, he appointed his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as ‘Special Advisers to the President’ — and next month will take four of his children with him when he goes on a state visit to Britain. Although they do not really have a formal role in the US administration, the Trump children will go along for the taxpayer-funded ride with the president. As Sir John Kotelawala famously said when he was prime minister “As long as the ladle is in your hands, just keep serving yourself and your own” — and Trump makes full use of this opportunity.
The more I thought about Donald Trump, the more I began to realise that we have in our own country a man who can trump Trump for such blatant behaviour unbecoming of his presidential office.
Our own president, whose greatest qualification is that he challenged (or was manipulated to challenge) Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2015 presidential election, was propelled into office despite himself. Since then he has, like Trump, presided over what could truly be described as a dysfunctional government.
Not only did he, as one of his first acts as president, appoint his brother as chairman of Sri Lanka Telecom, he went ahead and took along his son as part of the country’s official delegation to the United Nations General Assembly.
Being ignorant or ill advised about the law of the land he famously dismissed the prime minister last year — and only corrected his mistake when the Supreme Court of this land told the president that he just could not take the law into his own hands and do what was illegal.
Like Trump not reading the president’s Daily Briefings, our own president appeared to be unaware — or was aware and did not take the matter seriously — about the intelligence we had been provided about the terrorist threat leading to the April 21st bombings — and blithely went off on a holiday to India and Singapore. After the carnage in our country, he then callously went ahead with his son’s wedding at the Hilton — oblivious to the fact the people he is supposed to lead were hurting and hurting badly after the terrorist attacks.
And after the anti-Muslim rioting, he felt it more important to visit China to attend a conference about the Dialogue of Asian Civilisations. When Britain faced the German Blitz during World War Two, King George and his family stayed in London, refusing the chance of going off to Canada for safety — and stayed to show their support for the suffering people of London. Not so our president for whom the May 9th five-star hotel wedding and the trip to China took precedence over his need to show leadership to our people.
And just as Trump pardoned the convicted Joe Arpaio, so too our president has taken it into his head to pardon a man who was convicted by our own courts — the Ven Galagodaaththe Gnanasara.
Trump has proved himself to be a most unpresidential and ludicrous president over the past thirty months of his holding the office of president of the United States.
Sadly for our country, it seems that our president has trumped Trump in the incompetent president stakes.