Trump proves America great in spite of him

The United States has become a laughing stock since the shock election in November of the New York businessman Donald J. Trump.
The world had never seen a spectacle quite like this from the most important democracy, the standard for many countries.
Before the election Trump and his supporters warned that the election might be rigged to deny him victory. The US political, academic and media establishment was stunned.
It had always been a sacrosanct rule that nobody questioned the outcome of an election.
Whatever their misgivings or regret over an outcome, the losing candidate was elected to concede and call the victor to congratulate him.
Trump became the first nominee to publicly and in advance suggest that he might reject the outcome of the November 8, 2016, election.
Ironically after the election won by Trump, it became the turn of the Democrats and supporters of Ms Hillary Clinton to reject the outcome and angrily take to the streets in several cities holding up placards on which was written “Not My President”.
The inaugural parade on January 20 was a first indication of what the Trump presidency would be like. More than a third of the seats at the inauguration reviewing stand were empty.
The Trump campaign does not appear to have had the organisation to invite their supporters in enough numbers to fill the reviewing stand.

‘Mentally or emotionally unstable’
Trump’s press conferences are cantankerous; he strikes many people as mentally or emotionally unstable and impulsive.
The White House seems to be a hub of conflicting policies, many of which are improvised by the day without another wing of the same White House even aware of what’s being planned.
A large number of cabinet and civil service positions have still not been filled a month after Trump’s inauguration.
The candidate who won the popular, one man, one vote (that is, Hillary Clinton) came in second in the presidential election.
There has already been a high-profile resignation in the national security adviser, Lt Gen Michael Flynn, and at least two nominees have withdrawn from contention as cabinet secretaries.
President Trump speaks directly to the people through his habit of posting his musings and declarations via the micro-blogging site Twitter.
Often, his tweets take on the tone of vendetta and picking fights with anyone from Hollywood actresses and media companies to comedians on the late night shows.
There is not much effort by the White House communications staff to do background research before they brief the press, leading to the now common atmosphere of “alternative facts” coming out of the White House.
By every measure, the United States of America under president Trump has dropped several ranks in prestige as a democracy.
It’s now resembling and acting like a second world country such as Ukraine or Turkey, with some even feeling this great country under Trump is being run politically like an African state.
This rare set of circumstances provides political scientists, the media and the public the opportunity to do some comparative political study.
The common view in Uganda and other countries of a similar stature is that the biggest national and historical problem we face is that of what President Museveni calls “bad leaders”.
Be it ruling party or Opposition, civil society and the media, the general conviction is that if Uganda got a better president, cabinet and MPs, it would be a better country.
The 1995 Constitution imposed a two-term limit on the President on the basis of the belief that bad presidents or bad leaders in the past had sunk Uganda’s post-independence history.
So here we have a situation: the United States, the world’s leading democracy, being run since January like a Third World country.
And then we have several African countries with fairly sensible presidents.
Yet as everyone can see, America has not ceased to be America. The New York, S&P and NASDAQ stock indices have been registering record closures for much of 2017 so far.
Facebook and Google, the two largest Internet companies in the world, continue to tighten their grip on digital advertising and global market share.
Apple Inc., maker of the iPhone and Mac computer, remains the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation.
The US media continues to hold sway over much of the world. Stanford, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia and other American universities remain names of prestige and aspiration for millions of students around the world.
The US dollar remains the world’s most valuable national and most widely-traded international currency.
The Donald Trump presidency, in other words, is not having a significantly detrimental effect on America’s standing and strength.
Sure, the mixed signals and constantly evolving policies by the Trump administration are confusing long-standing allies and occasionally a statement or Twitter post by Trump causes the share price of a car maker or aircraft manufacturer to take a dip, but the price usually recovers after a few days.
The ability by the United States to absorb some of Trump’s more erratic actions and statements and to retain its competitive economic and creative strength is proof that a viable country is not made by the president alone.
The United States has a diversified economy, a rock-solid intellectual foundation and tradition and a depth of technological and scientific brilliance.
Last week in this column I argued that we need to examine carefully the new social media networks such as Facebook and use them as platforms around which to re-engineer Ugandan society.
By re-organising the country around the patterns evolving on Facebook, we can dismantle the historical hurdles and cultural complications that have bedevilled Uganda.
This in turn will start giving Uganda a semblance of the merit-based social structure that America and much of the Western world generally have.
With this new social and economic structure based largely on merit and interacting on these digital technology platforms like Facebook, the overarching influence of the President and Cabinet ministers on our lives will be reduced.
We shall start becoming the kind of society that can get on relatively undisturbed regardless of who occupies State House in Entebbe.