By: Azhar Azam
A latest survey by The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that an overwhelming majority of 56% Americans has put the onus of deteriorating situation in the country on the Trump administration.
Commenting on the poll, Austin Wright of the Harris School of Public Policy said “It reflected a general lack of confidence” of Americans on the federal government, a phenomenon that earlier plagued the US and its leadership approval in global publics and is now threatening to strew throughout the US.
The poll’s findings, with 79% Democrats and 37% Republicans thought the US government has a great deal of responsibility in handling the fatal respiratory infection, is an outright bipartisan rebuke to the president's contention and could bore a hole in his electoral campaign entering into a final showdown.
In September, a Pew Research Center’s 13-nation survey noted that the worldwide view of the US under Trump had ebbed to a new all-time low under, a rare moment when the global nations, long modeled their strategies on the US policies, refused to draw inspiration from the White House and developed their own health response to counter the insidious disease.
People from Europe, East Asia and Pacific – including those from the US major allies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea and the UK – not only radically dropped their favorable perception about the US but they also shelved the confidence in Trump substantially up to as low as 9%.
Latest survey results and the Center’s outshot that the majorities or pluralities in the major countries see Beijing as the world’s leading economic power or China is the most common choice as a global economic leader – leaves Trump naked in the wind who, if reelected, would need to revive the trust of his allies and reinvigorate his efforts to decouple them from China.
Trump’s "Duplimacy" a fast-changing, duplicitous political track being excitably practiced by the president to bring all international states beneath his clout in a standardized-though-vitriolic way and a strong conviction that the White House tenancy gives him an organic right to dominate the world by pursuing his political rhetoric and economic ostracism – could be singled out as the key factor behind the US and his crumbling global acceptance.
Over the last four years, his knavish tricks have pushed the US allies and partners further away and by the time he would realize the domestic and global changing mood and clean up his acts, his idealistic policies could have hit an irreversible damage to the tumbling US credibility.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak in the country, the American president hasn’t taken the deadly virus seriously. Trump didn’t consider it a grave risk now either and albeit catching the infection, he is still downplaying the highly contagious illness by equating it with the seasonal flu.
Trump’s paradoxical attitude, downplay the illness for reopening the economy and launch “the most aggressive mobilization since the Second World War” in chorus – all with the exclusive object to satisfy his insatiable passion for the White House – would nonplus his voters and could prevent them to back the Republican nominee.
As polls after polls continue to decipher that his nonsensical policies are ripping off the longtime US kudos on the international stage – the prevalence of excruciating trend within the States could upend his life’s ambition to seek another four-year license from American public and encroach on the remains of US global headship as an undeclared King of the world.
*This is one of my opinion pieces (unedited) that first appeared in "The Express Tribune":
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2267951/trump-duplimacy-and-us-global-leadership