From Obama to Trump

After seven years of presidency by Barack Obama, we must start thinking of a world without him. A third term is not allowed. Eight years are enough for a president to carry his work without sliding into distortions of all kinds that come about from a long stay in power. And so, in eleven months, the Americans will elect their next president. I will not go into reporting on Obama’s policy on America’s internal affairs. The facts [are] that he ensured medical coverage for all, makes a continuous effort to limit gun ownership, and delivered a unifying speech against every form of racism, be it attacks against blacks, or, as happens to be the case as of late, racist voices against Muslims. On the international stage, which directly concerns us, Obama proved that strong is not necessarily he who always makes use of the military power at his disposal, but is instead he who makes elective and measured use of it.

In the past few years we got really comfortable and let ourselves believe that the most important country in the world, the one with the largest economy and the most powerful army, will always have a modest and reasonable person as its leader. A president who contributed and celebrated the agreement about the environment in Paris, who withdrew the forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and who – at the last minute – did not bomb Syria. A man who, after all, has been awarded the Nobel Prize.

It is not at all certain that humanity will have the same luck again and that the next president will be equally modest. The reason for these comments is the “phenomenon” that is Trump. The more one watches, or if one lives in America, the more one realizes that this is not something temporary. The tycoon carries on regardless of the Republican Party’s resentment, due to his main vehicle being his appeal not to the wealthy, but to ordinary people. In a discussion yesterday in Washington, when a writer criticized Trump’s simplistic speech, he received the following reply by an elderly lady: “You are saying that the vocabulary he is using belongs to the fifth grade. So what? We all understand him and trust him and that’s what’s important.”* Despite the superficiality of his position and behavior, which is obvious to most of us, Trump persuades a third of the Republicans, which is just 10 to 20 percent of the Americans in total. But if he wins the presidency, the correlations will change – that he knows what he wants, that what he wants is good for America and that he, himself, has the intention to implement it and the power to impose it. The dangers from uncontrollable behavior of a president like Trump are great. Faced with the complex problems that our planet is facing today, we cannot afford simplistic and, by extension, extreme answers from the most powerful country in the world.

*Editor’s note: This quote, accurately translated, could not be verified.