Being Trump is easy

Perhaps you should not have been fascinated by Donald Trump — certainly, if you ever got fascinated

It only seems that being the President of the United States is a heavy and unbearable undertaking. Becoming one might be challenging indeed, but actually being one is no big deal… You could do just as well as Trump, believe me! You just need to follow a few rules.

In the morning, I spread butter on my sandwich…

This style involves making one or two loud proclamations every week. It does not really matter what they are about: one week, you may ‘not rule out’ sending troops to Greenland, the next, you could silence Voice of America. You are free to change geographical names on the globe at your own discretion or redate significant days on the world calendar.

The main thing is to do all this with an ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude’, as they say deep in the American heartland. With puffed cheeks, in our terms.

Your decrees, signatures, decisions, and grand words will immediately be disseminated worldwide — that is the nature of modern globalisation. Therefore, you will be completely indifferent when later these are challenged by courts, ignored by officials, mocked and ridiculed by journalists and bloggers, and when experts and lawyers find hundreds of inconsistencies and contradictions in your own reasoning.
Let them do that — as Americans say — as long as they spell your name right! ‘Without publicity there is no prosperity’.
Moreover: the court has ruled to reallocate some funding, while you have already declared war on the Houthis. Denmark is gathering UN Security Council support to defend Greenland, whilst you celebrate victory in the First World War. Remember: they simply must not catch up with you.
This will make everyone happy: Trump (or you) will shine on the front pages in mass media, while in reality nothing really happens on the ground — which is very important for the stability of democracy, from the perspective of Democrats themselves. And indeed, Republican officials too.
You will definitely last in this mode for at least one hundred days, it has been proven. Is it possible to sustain longer? Well, all of this is undergoing clinical tests right now. Meanwhile, let’s look at a couple of illustrative cases.

Peace in a day

The peace between Russia and Ukraine, promised by Trump ‘within a day’, has not materialised so far. Instead, a minerals deal has been signed — and now it seems that the United States no longer needs negotiations.
There is even an opinion that another ‘servant of the people’ (the one who will replace Zelensky) might challenge this deal, so the interests of the USA, the UK, and the EU are once again aligned: nothing needs to change. On the contrary, the military conflict should continue so as not to make Russia’s life easier.

So, here is a ready-made statement for the media: the USA (you or Trump) has signed a ‘super deal’, and now we are stepping back from the ‘negotiation process’ to avoid interfering with the parties reaching an agreement themselves. Meeting face-to-face, as it were.

Turkish newspaper Hürriyet even reports: ‘Donald Trump asked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to act as a mediator in the Ukrainian issue’. One can’t help but add an apt remark from the classics: ‘They might as well write ‘begged’, you bumpkins’. 
That is the trick the world’s best deal-maker has pulled right before our eyes.
And he probably thinks of himself exactly that way…

The obvious and the incredible 

You could also use well-known facts and American property as the news of the week for personal promotion and image enhancement — for example, by declaring the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America’, or the Persian Gulf as the ‘Arabian Gulf’ (or ‘Gulf of Arabia’). 
It is clear that the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO), which deals with standardising geographical names, might object, but — if American Google and other internet services just diligently fall in line — who will listen to those pedants after all?
Another option is to push that same ‘super deal’ (which, by the way, involves real money only in about ten years, possibly even later) as an agreement on mineral resources with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, as Breitbart reports. 
There is an armed conflict going on between these two countries, with Trump (or you) acting as a peacemaker. So why not privatise their mineral resources equally along the way, so neither Congolese nor Rwandan officials will be offended? Add as an argument: ‘Look, Ukrainians signed up too — and nothing bad has happened!’
In any case, the headline ‘I brought you Africa’s minerals’ (crossed out) ‘Peace for the Black Continent’ is guaranteed. As is employment for Marco Rubio and his entire department.
And nobody will even ask in a couple of years how it will actually turn out.

Keeping the face

Remember that one of the indispensable qualities you (or Trump) need to have is an ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude’. It is absolutely essential — for example, in order to publish a decree stopping federal funding for gain-of-function research, including coronaviruses and influenza viruses, which effectively recognises the role of American pharma, laboratories, and intelligence agencies in the emergence and spread of COVID-19.
Sure thing, projects in China and Iran will also be banned, and the White House will simultaneously remind everyone of the risks associated with experiments on bat viruses in Wuhan. Those who want to will read between the lines, although the number of people who can read is decreasing every year.

However, literate people will get a point that all this attests to the fact that democracy has long been rotten from the inside. In essence, there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans in the USA, or between Liberals and Conservatives in Great Britain. Each of them is hostile to sovereign Belarus simply because we are outside their worldview.

There is one more observation: how incredibly difficult it is — in this (just yet Anglo-Saxon) world — to be Batka [father] of your people.
But these insights are for the literate, for the clever.

Nobel Peace Prize

Here is another mission — a peacekeeping one, of course, like all previous ones (that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize really haunts Trump’s mind preventing him from playing both golf and cards!) — an epic in the Red Sea.
This is how the story goes: the Houthis started firing at Israeli ships in retaliation for Israeli strike on Gaza. Then the US sent an entire aircraft carrier group to Yemen’s coast and began bombing the Houthis. Together with Israel.
The result? Total losses in the campaign launched by Joe Biden include 2 F/A-18s, 1 MQ-1 Grey Eagle, and 22 MQ-9 Reaper drones. This is not counting other things, including a presumably damaged aircraft carrier. The Houthis, in turn, continue to fire on Israel, just as they did at the start of the Yemeni war — right now, for example, they are terrorising the main airport in Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion.
This entails direct losses, future risks, and reputational damage (think of the same Iron Dome) — it is a complete gevolt [‘scandal’ in Yiddish]. The same is true for Americans too, because it is unclear what more can be done, while rare-earth metals in Yemen’s mountains are still not there.
And now, the US has quietly signed a separate deal! Under it, the US will cease bombing Yemen, and the Houthis will stop attacking US ships and vessels in the Red Sea and off the coast. But the agreement only applies to the US! This has triggered a total freak-out in Israel, oy vey [a Yiddish phrase expressing dismay or exasperation].
Meanwhile, you (or Trump) continue keeping the face and preparing new headlines for the world media every week — sometimes portraying yourself as the Pope, other times as the Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, or the ruler of the planet Dune.
All this is done paying no attention to the journalists’ malevolence, like ‘the Houthi fremen of the Middle East have outdone greedy Baron Donald Harkonnen’.
However, the Nobel Peace Prize is getting closer. It seems Trump has already bought the rest — or at least what can be sold in this best of the worlds.

By Andrei Mukovozchik