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ANALYSIS

US President Donald Trump ignores worldwide protest marches and addresses CIA

Paul McGeough

Washington: Now that's a counterpunch. Forever telling Americans that if he's punched, he'll counterpunch, Donald Trump woke from his first sleep at the White House to find the streets of the capital flooded with probably as many people protesting against him as were there on Friday to welcome his inauguration.

As his slap-in-the-face inauguration speech sank in, Trump took himself off to see a bunch of guys he's punched relentlessly – the CIA. And around the world, leaders tended to be mute or, like Malcolm Turnbull, tweeted platitudes that seemed to pretend Trump's threatened war on the world is just bluff and bluster.

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Trump meets CIA employees, pledges support

President Donald Trump is telling CIA employees whose work he has publicly doubted that no one feels stronger about the intelligence community than he does.

German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned of a "drastic radicalisation" in American politics. Claiming that Berlin was ready to fill the global void left by an isolationist Washington, he took a swipe at Trump, saying that the only thing missing from Friday's inauguration speech was a denunciation of Congress as a "gossip chamber" – the term fascists used to dismiss German institutions in the 1920s.

"Should the United States start a trade war with China and all of Asia, then we as Europeans and Germans are fair partners," Gabriel said. "Europe and Germany need a strategy geared toward Asia and China – and we have new opportunities."

Remember Trump's relentless mocking of the security agencies, even likening them to Nazis in a tweet as recently as 10 days ago? His ridiculing of their ability to work out what the Russian hacking was all about, because 10 or 15 years ago they had bungled on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?

Turns out all that was the media's fault – the media "sort of made it sound" like he was at war with the intelligence agencies; whereas he now wanted the CIA to know that "I love you, I respect you, there's nobody I respect more".

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And if that's not enough to prove press perfidy, then Trump knew he had them bang to rights.

"We caught them in a beauty," he said of reports on the crowd size at his inauguration, most of which included aerial pictures of the crowds at the Trump inauguration and that of President Obama in 2009 which showed the Trump crowd to be smaller and patchy compared to the estimated 1.8 million that welcomed Obama.

Trump claims that as many as 1.5 million attended the inauguration. Other estimates put the attendance as low as 250,000.

Trump accused unspecified outlets of using pictures of "an empty field" – and to the extent that the National Mall, stretching from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, is a field and that huge swathes that were crowded for Obama's inauguration were indeed empty for the Trump event, Trump was correct.

And while press spokesmen are not supposed to imbibe on the job, clearly Trump flak Sean Spicer had been bingeing overnight - how else to explain him fronting in the West Wing  briefing room to berate the media with unfounded accusations of reports on the crowd size being manipulated to denigrate Trump? And how amazing that on their first day running the country and the world, this was a subject that preoccupied them, to the point of someone having been ordered to fetch blow-up pictures of Friday's crowd as a backdrop for Spicer's rant?

Back at the CIA, Trump assured the spooks that he is no one's dummy - "I'm, like, a smart person" – before offering evidence to the contrary, by seeming to suggest it would be a good thing to invade Iraq again. Getting back to his campaign riff that "we should have kept the oil", he added: "Maybe we'll have another chance."

Meanwhile, in the real world British Prime Minister Theresa May said that in her upcoming visit to Washington, she'd explain to Trump the importance of NATO and the European Union, both of which have been the target of his dismissive anger, for European and global stability.

Officially Beijing opted to say nothing, save for a bland observation by a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman: "China-US relations should push forward from this new starting point to make greater progress."

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted congratulations and then a counterpunch: "Sovereignty, national interest and the protection of Mexicans will guide our relationship with the new government of the United States."

As one strongman to another, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte took Trump's undertaking not to "seek to impose our way of life on anyone", as a licence to get on with the mass execution of suspected drug dealers. His spokesman said Trump "promises a more placid and mutually beneficial relationship, especially with longstanding allies like us."

Americans are still grappling with Trump's Duterte-like political reduction of their nation to "us" and "them" – the "them" being immigrants and Muslims, corporate and political elites and the media. They saw it in the primaries and in the election campaign but as President, many expected Trump to pivot towards something more inclusive.

Trump wanted to make his "us" angry and fearful. That required a massive denial of his country's history and any sense that his election is a stop on an imperfect journey governed by an imperfect process – for all its inequity, the most powerful country with the most powerful military was a wasteland populated only with victims which had sold out to a world which, as he is wont to say, had "raped" it.

But his conflation and misrepresentation of the facts of America were astounding.

Sure, jobs have gone offshore – and he knows because much of his merchandise is made overseas. But automation has been even more brutal in shrinking manufacturing jobs – how else to explain an 86 per cent increase in manufacturing output since 1987, even as five million jobs were lost?

Any level of crime is bad. But the Trump account ignores that despite year-on-year fluctuations, most crime statistics are now lower than 10 and 20 years ago – and they might even be lower if people like him supported sensible gun control.

Similarly his twaddle about Washington throwing money into an international drain as its military is reduced to a boy-scout outfit was just that – twaddle. These days, it spends more than the next seven countries combined and more than it did pre-September 11, 2001.

Seventy per cent of the $US10 billion a year that the US spends on foreign military bases is soaked up by its operations in Germany, South Korea and Japan. But in a defence budget of $US500 billion, the foreign base spending is petty cash.

Most of its $US6 billion a year in foreign aid goes to Israel and Egypt. While he might contemplate halting the feed to Cairo, he's unlikely to cut off the Israelis – and never mind that most of the aid grants are conditional on them being spent on US equipment, which means they create jobs in the US.

There are divisions in the US, but Trump seems bent on exacerbating them as he spouts an ideology that is more a reflection of his alt-right, nationalist White House counsellor Stephen Bannon than of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, either of the George Bushes or Barack Obama.

As Saturday's huge demonstrations in Washington and other US cities demonstrated that there is passionate opposition to Trump's policies as much as his style – and Trump and the Republicans, to the extent that they are at one with him, no longer have Obama as a whipping boy.

All he could do on Saturday was ignore the protests – and what the huge turnout said about his presidency.

But campaign slogans and press-conference pantomime don't always mesh with reality.

One of Trump's most explicit campaign promises, at a rally in Phoenix in August 2016, was to immediately start deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records: "We will begin moving them out, Day One. My first hour in office, those people are gone."

Didn't happen. Instead Trump contented himself with issuing an executive order to slash Obamacare before he took himself off to an inauguration ball.

Seemingly it's the same with his promise to resign from his companies as a brake on conflicts of interest. Remember his January 11 press conference at which he wheeled out a small mountain of files, which he claimed contained all the necessary paperwork and a lawyer who said everything would be placed in a family trust by inauguration day?

Hasn't happened, according to a report by ProPublica. The hundreds of ownership transfers would require document filings in Florida, Delaware and New York, but when ProPublica checked at 3.15pm on Friday, officials in all states said no documents had been filed.

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