Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley’s family came from Punjab, India. Like a former student and still valued friend, a Sikh working in Malaysia, Haley knows America well. She is the governor of South Carolina. She is the youngest, just about everything, at exactly 44 today.
POTUS — President of the United States — gave his last State of the Union address to Congress last Tuesday. My ever-forgiving readers will predict that this correspondent thought it part of a unique history, given that this president has presided over a staggeringly successful economic recovery. Well, our national product is pushing RM68 trillion.
The Republicans chose Haley (her husband deployed a year in Afghanistan with their state’s National Guard) to respond to the president’s address.
I counted five veiled swipes at the oval-mouthed poll leader’s manure — on Mexicans and much else. The party wants him out. The establishment, in other words, has closed ranks. Donald Trump has to go.
Now, it’s an open secret that POTUS actually is friends with your prime minister. POTUS can talk Bahasa (Indonesian) with him. He can also smoke and talk English with President Benigno Aquino of the Philippines. Aquino is a rather chubby bachelor, however, so “all that glitters is not gold”.
Yes, leaders make friends. It’s rather easier, as a leader, to make friends with people of functionally your same rank, and Najib (Datuk Seri Najib Razak) is surely the leader of Malaysia and importantly, a friend of China.
We will soon know if Hillary Clinton has committed felonies; we will know if Senator Ted Cruz from Texas is constitutionally eligible (he was not born in the US). POTUS hates Hillary and can sit this one out, while 74-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont may win both bell-weather first primaries. Iowa is five days away. Then, there comes the whopper in the snows of New Hampshire.
It’s getting funnier and funnier. A famous conservative commentator said over national television, “Cut the crap” to Trump.
Yet, this is deeply serious. There is a substantial move in Great Britain to bar Trump from ever entering the United Kingdom were he elected president.
Britain is America’s closest ally. The Labour Party opposition leader in Parliament, however, invited Trump to come to London. They would visit a mosque together.
Truly, my many Malaysian friends — several of whom have written doctorates under my supervision — there is nothing more to say. Yet, there is.
Billionaire Trump has won an endorsement from his greatest asset in winning the Republican nomination. Sarah Palin, then governor of Alaska and former vice-presidential candidate, said in a press conference that she was qualified to run the country because she knew that Alaska was near Russia.
She didn’t know who the president of Russia was. She thought Africa was one state. The “Tea Party” crazy gila hard right adores her.
Trump, with no sense of irony, said that we had to avoid having a nut case with his finger on the nuclear trigger. He wants to deport all Mexicans.
President-dictator of Russia Vladimir Putin and Trump complimented each other; Trump thinks this is great. Putin called Trump “bright and talented”.
Putin, Trump replied, “is at least a leader, unlike what we have in this country”. This is unprecedented. Our biggest enemy’s leader and the leading republican candidate are almost buddies.
Silly people are silenced by silence; or they are ridiculed. It isn’t, yet enough, that he promises to put 11 million foreigners on planes and deport them. He will force Mexico to build “the Great Wall of Trump”.
Now, just who will pick apples in California, or do any of the work that Americans are no longer willing to undertake?
The leading humorist of the US, Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker, (this being a parody), wrote this week: “One day after Donald Trump claimed that he could shoot people on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose support, a leading member of the random-shooting community complained that the billionaire’s random-shooting plan lacks specifics.
“There’s no weapons cache, no twisted manifesto to be found later by authorities,” Borowitz wrote, in quoting Harland Dorrinson.
“To anyone in the random-shooting world, Trump’s plan fails on so many levels. Before you do a random shooting, you’re supposed to be quiet and keep to yourself.
“Trump is always shouting at thousands of people.”
Maybe that’s enough ridicule — to trump Trump.
The writer is professor emeritus of international politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, United States