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.
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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 war on the world is just bluff and bluster.
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."
In London, 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 in a speech to the CIA rank and file, he railed against the media – riled by the comparison pictures of the inauguration crowds this year and in 2009, he accused them of deliberately making his inauguration turnout look smaller than it was.
"I looked out, the field was – it looked like a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there was practically nobody standing there," he said. "It said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that's not bad, but it's a lie."
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.
