Tariq Saeedi
I was planning to write a fairly enthusiastic endorsement for Donald Trump but decided to tone it down at the last moment — KKK and white supremacists have expressed their wholehearted support for Trump and he has still not distanced himself from their poisonous endorsement.
Trump has variously been described as racist, soulless, megalomaniac, sexist, immoral, etc. In fact a large number of negative adjectives in the regular and the urban dictionary have been attached to his name quite convincingly.
So is the case with Hilary Clinton. Except for being racist she has been accused of everything that gets filed in the Trump dossier.
The people who have been watching the United States from the outside are not surprised that even though there is no death of talent out there, the system has thrown up two nearly equally despicable candidates. The arteries of the system are severely clogged and what we see in the shape of these candidates is the plaque, not the real blood. The heart is barely pumping.
There are so many reasons to prefer Donald Trump over Hilary Clinton:
- Perhaps the biggest factor in his favour is that he is a complete outsider. He has bulldozed his way through the party lines. He has made his entry by breaching every bulkhead in the entire system.
- Trump is not weighed down by donors.
- Throughout the campaign Trump has shown that he can learn from his mistakes, change direction without losing the momentum and keep generating very catching sound-bites. He refuses to get distracted.
- The media has been going out of its way to spring Clinton to the top – the latest example being how CNN leaked questions to Clinton – and yet Trump continues to close the lead again and again. He is a fighter. And, he knows how to manipulate the media.
- He is a fat-mouth, in fact he is a gutter-mouth, and that is very helpful for those dealing with him. His hubris makes him a predictable entity. The countries that have been on the receiving end of the American aggression will find this trait quite useful.
- He may unintentionally expose the myth that the USA is a melting pot of cultures. His racism will possibly compel a fresh look at the things, which may initially be in the shape of clashes, sometimes violent, but will ultimately help redefine race relations and everything else associated with this elephant in the room.
As far as Central Asia and Afghanistan are concerned, neither Trump nor Clinton has declared any strategy. There has been no clear-cut policy statement from either of the candidates.
Chances are this part of the world will be left to the whims of CIA, Pentagon and the State Department. As such, one can predict with some caveats that the pigheadedness and selfish pursuit of their own narrow interests, otherwise known as the ‘American way of doing things,’ will not let them learn from their own mistakes. They will keep doing the same thing in the hope of getting different results, which is one of the definitions of madness.
This is just a lukewarm endorsement because, after all, someone must fill the post of POTUS. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.