The last days of Trump: everyone who laughs and cries in America

Both the russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have remained silent after Donald Trump supporters stormed the Congress building in Washington a week ago. But don’t get it wrong; the deep inner joy of seeing the dysfunctional American democracy demonstrated on live television around the world drip onto the air channels of the two presidents.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has He took the opportunity to teach America about democracy, and graphically expressed that dysfunctional American democracy is lame on both legs. Whereas in China, the assault on the United States Congress is compared to the pro-democracy activists who assaulted the Hong Kong Legislative Assembly last summer. How Beijing brought down with brutal physical force.

And how do we know Progress itself, or in this case rather the lack of progress, is all very well, but the misfortune of others should not be neglected either. And this is where we have come, that authoritarian and semi-totalitarian leaders point their noses at the United States and say, what did we say? Allowing unlimited freedom leads to chaos. Democracy is anarchy and politically destabilizing. Just look at America.

Should be – and it was in all the postwar years – different. America’s role in the world was as the outpost of freedom. The country contributed greatly to crushing Hitler, initially supporting the liberation of the colonies after World War II, and became the guarantee of the West against the second great despot of Europe in the last century, Josef Stalin.

Then the Iron Curtain fell In 1989, and the communist satellites of the Warsaw Pact won their freedom, America was the ideal. The West German and EU brands were fine, but it was the United States that was the Hard-Core West. The ideal itself. American music. American movie. American lifestyle. American liberal democracy with the balance of state power and painless transfer of power was a powerful ideal. And it was more powerful due to the enormous power of example. The American example.

These words can get you

Now have the example True, it has been marred in the past by the Vietnam War and support for dictatorships and coups in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. But in much of the world, the United States – or the even brighter “America” ​​- still has the dream of a better life, an example to envy, live and perhaps emigrate. Now that example has been dragged into the mud. For President Donald Trump and the mob he sent to the National Assembly.

It’s a shock. Because what happened in Congress a week ago was not so much due to political disagreement as to disagreement about democracy itself. A violent mob that stormed the National Assembly and killed five people demanded to decide for itself who should be the President of the United States. They challenged an approved election result, which no court, despite Trump’s persistent attempts, could challenge. And this anarchy was initially applauded by the president and his main supporters.

With what weight Can “America” ​​and the West now condemn Chinese violence against pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, and that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko beat protesters insanely in their prisons? What happens when Russia elects a new National Assembly this fall and protesters protest an election in a disillusioned Russia, where Putin’s party will apparently need good aides with additional ballots to “win”? Should Russia allow anarchy and anarchy, as we have just seen at the heart of the beacon of democracy? Not that, no.

Will make Trump a “leper”

The seal of democracy – yes, the term is paradoxical – it is a painless step and of course the transfer of power from one regime to another through democratic elections. This is what separates democratic countries from, for example, the one-party state of China, authoritarian Russia, and the personal kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This democratic ritual has now been thoroughly stepped on.

The most ihuga Trumpeters who participated in the assault on Congress last week will be punished. Donald Trump himself can be punished. But those who will be punished at least as severely for the president’s attacks on democracy are all those who fight for democracy everywhere but in the United States. There are dissidents in China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, who have first lost sight of their beacon of democracy. Which, secondly, has given their oppressors a pretext to oppress further. It is another of Trump’s gifts to the world.