By Anjan Roy
One hundred and thirty days have passed since Donald Trump took oath as the second time President of United States on January 20 this year. After arousing big expectations in the initial days, the hyperactive President is now gradually reconciling to the fact that he is a big failure. “Trump Always Chickens Out” a label that the Chinese netizens had coined for him as afraid of a fight with China on tariffs. Trump had raised US tariffs on Chinese goods to 145% and in stages brought that down to 30% even before negotiations started.
The Chinese described the Trump concessions as his fear of engaging with China in a tariff war. It was quickly followed up by his own countrymen in the famed Wall Street who gave him the title “TACO Trade” referring to the ups and downs in the American stock markets depending on his quickly changing positions on tariffs.
When a reporter posed the question to the US president straight in a press conference in the Oval Office, it clearly caught him on the wrong foot. He described it as “the nastiest question” and told her never to raise it again. He was at pains to prove that he was no coward.
But his attempts at refuting this now-ubiquitous badge, Trump has now been proved a loud mouth, not worth what he had promised and his talk about following a hard line on issues he was taking up. Be it the claim that he would stop the Ukraine war in a day, if elected to power. Or, his claims of reducing US federal spending and budget deficit. On all counts, Trump hoax has been called.
Trump’s closest ally, Elon Musk, who he had appointed as the head of the department for government efficiency —the so called DOGE— has stepped back and really resigned on Wednesday. He went public criticising Trump’s failure to cut down federal spending.
In fact, Musk had plainly observed in a TV interview that the much touted “Big and Beautiful” bill for approval of deep tax cuts and large hikes in federal spending in military and defence was in fact a retraction from Donald Trump’s earlier promises. This piece of legislation would add to US federal deficits to the tune of $3.8 trillion. This is en enormous jump in US government deficit in place of his promised reduction.
Musk has ironically pointed out that the bill could be either big or beautiful, it can’t be both, as starkly opposed to Trump’s description of it. Musk is virtually saying Trump is chickening out of his promised big ticket reforms of US fiscal imbroglio. That’s the most unkindest cut for Donald Trump, using Shakespearian word.
In case of Ukraine war, despite the provocations from Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Trump so far has molly coddled him rather than come down sharply on the Russia for defying his call for an immediate ceasefire. As president Trump had been talking of peace and urging Ukraine to cease fire under his formula for peace, the Russian president ramped up his attacks on Ukraine.
Putin mounted some of the worst missiles and drone attacks on Ukraine positions outside of the battlefields and military installations and straight into cities and civilian targets. Trump had been forced to admit the escalation in hostilities from the Russian side when he was talking of his ceasefire formula.
The Russian president has simply ignored Donald Trump and his efforts to resolve the Ukraine war. Even when, Trump has been conceding and using the language of Putin in spelling out the resolution formula, Putin simply ignored Trump. Despite Putin’s diplomatic snubs, Trump had been using most deploring language about Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky. Putin kept mounting fresh demands.
Faced with Russian defiance and playing around, the US president had proposed to consider further punitive measures in the form of fresh sanctions against Russia. These were to be slapped on third entities like sanctioning those who were buying cheap Russian crude.
That would have punished mainly China and India who have emerged as the largest buyers of Russian crude, which is the principal source of funding for Russian government expenditure, including its war funding. A really strict sanction on Russian crude sales could strangle the Russian state.
Other sanctions were also being proposed like further closing Russian options of using international payments systems for external transactions. American had also so far not mentioned using up Russian funds confiscated abroad for funding Ukraine and even its war efforts. American weapons were to be used by Ukraine for deep strikes inside Russia as well.
However, the US president has actually refrained from announcing any of these measures. On the contrary, in his latest press conference from Oval Office he has said that fresh sanctions on Russia could jeopardise the peace process he had initiated.
It may be mentioned that starved of any clear achievements of his proclaimed goals and targets, the US president had repeated grabbed the ceasefire between India and Pakistan as his own credit. He had claimed time and again that it was his ”use of trade that resulted in the ceasefire”. The claim has been repudiated time and again by Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar. What thus remains of the US president’s second term so far is a bagful of lies and a long line of failures. (IPA Service)
