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Unlike Lankan politicians’ election promises to build a people’s dream of a rich and beautiful life in castles in the air, dissolving into dust when elected, Trump’s election promises had already taken concrete shape and form with over a hundred executive orders waiting to be signed the moment he took his presidential oath.

MANY A SLIP BETWEEN THE KISS AND THE LIP: Trump’s presidential kiss never made it to Melania with her hat strictly exerting border control

But before being sworn in, President-elect Trump, soon to be the world’s most powerful man, went with his family to St. John’s Church in Washington DC to kneel before his God, praying for strength and guidance, and to thank the Lord—as he later said in his inaugural speech—for having saved his life for a reason. “I was saved by God to make America great.”

It was reaffirming his faith in God, as had been the traditional style of past US presidents, unlike in Sri Lanka, where the recent fashion is to deny traditional Buddhists’ blessings of ‘Seth Pirith’ or ‘Jaya Mangala Suthra’ from gracing auspicious events and hold their government as being above a superior divine force.

In his inauguration speech, President Trump did not forecast the day when the Golden Age he’d promised to dawn for America will begin but boldly said at the outset, “The Golden Age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation. And we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.

“During every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply, put America first. Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the Justice Department and our government will end. And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud and prosperous and free.”

Neither did Trump dilly-dally delivering on the promises made during his campaign for the White House.

Within moments of being sworn in, President Trump decisively declared in his inaugural address, “Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders. With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.

“First, I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted. And we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

MELANIA AND DONALD TRUMP: The Presidential Waltz at Inaugural Ball

True to his word, once the inauguration ceremony was over, Trump signed the executive order declaring an emergency at the US-Mexico border, vowing to deploy troops to the region, including the National Guard.

It was the first in a series of important executive orders he signed on his first day as President.

By Wednesday, 1500 troops were deployed to secure the southern border. They were just the vanguard. Thousands of additional active-duty troops are to be deployed to further beef up the Mexican border. The Pentagon announced troops will fly helicopters to assist Border Patrol agents and help in the construction of barriers.

Just two days in the Oval Office, and President Trump has made good on his promise to lay to rest the fears of a vast majority of Americans who had voted for him to stop millions of migrants, some with criminal records, some with terrorist or drug links, illegally streaming through the Mexican border, gone lax under a complacent and infirm Biden administration.

It wasn’t the only promise he kept. It was just for starters. Action man Trump went on to sign executive order after order as if atoning for his manifest sins at the Pearly Gates.

As he had said in his address, he designated the cartels as foreign terrorist organisations. “By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil, including our cities and inner cities.”

HE HAS THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HAND: President Trump back at the Oval Office shows Executive Orders he signed

Next, he declared war on the rising costs of food and said, “I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.” How the Lankan public would have loved to have a Trump in office in this bleak hour, with determined resolve to reduce food prices with one stroke of his pen. He put Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations on notice. He declared war on high energy costs. There’ll be a new player in town: American. In his speech, President Trump said, “We will drill, baby, drill.”

Kicking Global Warming restraints out of the way, President Trump proudly declared, “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth. And we are going to use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again. And it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

America’s get-rich-quick scheme to dawn her Golden Age will be funded by oil money.

“With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate,” he said, forcing a U-turn in past American policy that hailed the electric car as the car of the future.

He did it, he said, “to save our auto industry and keep my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers. And thank you to the autoworkers of our nation for your inspiring vote of confidence.
We did tremendously with their vote.” Damn it. Who’s afraid of global warming? Who would certainly have been afraid of the big bad wolf returning to office, was the growing army of transgenders in the United States. They were right to fear him.

Trump said in his speech, “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colourblind, and merit-based. As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”

Back in office, President Trump signed a new federal government definition of the sexes that could have a major impact on
transgender people in the States. The order calls for the federal government to define sex as only male or female and for that to be reflected on official documents such as passports and policies such as federal prison assignments.

Then came Trump’s announcement that heads of states had hoped would never come.

The US President declared, “The US will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens. For this purpose, we are establishing the External Revenue Service to collect all tariffs, duties and revenues. It will be massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury coming from foreign sources.”

Thenceforth the Lankan president should be very cautious, treading the highly charged stage of international power play. Should he be bent too much in taking the One Belt Route in China’s embrace, he might risk falling foul with Trump and thereby damn entry to our biggest export market for Made-in-Sri Lanka garments and various other products, with the imposition of higher tariffs to dull the competitive edge, if thought of as America’s foe’s friend.

One more thing: upon being sworn in as president, Trump promised in his speech, to the delight of Elon Musk, to invade Mars.

Even as President John F Kennedy had promised, in his inaugural speech in the sixties, to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade, so did Trump declare: “We will pursue, too, our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars’. Ambitious?

Well,Americans are made
of ambitious stuff. It was ambition stuff that made them seek the last frontier.

Whether the hundreds of executive orders he signed in a flurry on his first day are right or wrong, it cannot be denied that Trump instantly made good on the promises he made to the American people.

President Trump ended his 30-minute-long inauguration speech to the nation, stating: “From this day on, the United States of America will be a free, sovereign and independent nation. We will stand bravely. We will live proudly. We will dream boldly, and nothing will stand in our way. Because we are Americans. The future is ours. And our golden age has just begun.’ God bless America.”

Alas, the promised Lankan dream seems destined to remain pie in the sky.

Don’t squander coconuts on pol sambol, warning Once ‘rilaw’ plunderers were blamed for the shortage of coconuts that led to high prices of the nation’s palm fruit. But now the blame game has shifted to household coconut consumers for the current shortage and, as a result, for the prevailing high prices of coconuts. The kitchen of every home in Lanka has been named as the breeding ground of profligacy, a scraping or grinding tool has been identified as the instrument of evil, and the householder stands accused of the darkest villainy. JVP ABEYSINGHE: Pol sambol How come? No longer is a Sri Lankan’s home his castle. A deputy minister has peeped through the keyholes of homes in the country to find out what goes on behind closed doors inside people’s residences. This week the Deputy Minister of Industries and Entrepreneurship Development, Chathuranga Abeysinghe, showed his industry and entrepreneurship skills when he revealed what he had seen when he peeped into people’s kitchens: The utter squander of the national precious coconuts, with massive export potential, scraped and frittered away to make a pol sambol or ‘kiri hoddha’ in the kitchen. SYSTEM CHANGE: Look what’d happened to the humble old pol sambol? It was this profligate habit that lay at the root of shortages and high coconut prices, the deputy minister thoughtfully explained to the public on TV news. Apart from pet dogs being lavishly fed on kakulu causing a rice shortage, what next? It was reported in the Daily Mirror on Friday that the price of green chillies had shot up to Rs 1800 per kilo. Gosh! Can it, perhaps, be due to the profligate addition of a cut green chilies or two to give a fiery taste to an otherwise bland pol sambol?