I keep finding myself singing ‘Nellie the elephant’ who, packing her trunk and saying goodbye to the circus, went off ‘with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump, trump’. I’m hoping against hope that Donald Trumpety-Trump will also say goodbye to the circus in Washington and return to the jungle whence he came; for irrespective of whatever he does in government, even if some of it proves to be beneficial, he is unworthy to be president.
The president is not only the country’s chief executive and commander-in-chief; he is the symbol of national unity and the protector of the American constitution, and he has already failed in both these last two roles. His dreadful inaugural speech intensified the already sharp division of American society, and he has already made clear that he doesn’t think much of the constitution’s first amendment of 1791 on the guarantee of the freedom of the press.
Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counsellor, warned ominously on television that the Trump administration would have to ‘rethink our relationship’ with the press if journalists continued to challenge proven lies by the White House’s new press secretary, Sean Spicer. Trump, of course, had started his presidency with a speech at the CIA in which he called journalists ‘among the most dishonest human beings on earth’, accusing them of inventing a rift between him and the intelligence agencies.
‘I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more,’ he told CIA staff members (which incidentally was also what he had said during the campaign to women he had been accused of abusing). The CIA employees cannot have forgotten that it was he, Trump, who had tweeted that their opinions were less reliable than those of both Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange and that ‘intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news [about Russian meddling in the election to help him win it] to “leak” into the public’.
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