Columns

• Next Sunday, the world will awake to behold Trump in the White House

Still on the outskirts of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, Donald Trump fired a round of warning shots like an old Wild West gunslinger, sounding the signal that he’ll be back in town soon.

Just a Sunday away from regaining the much-coveted reins of the Oval Office that would make him the most powerful man on earth, in a blunt and brash speech, in a blunt and brash speech, President-elect Trump pulled no punches when he announced his aims to take over Greenland and Canada in the north and the Panama Canal down south.

The Gulf of Mexico will be baptised, on his second advent to the White House, as the Gulf of America. And to the stakeholders in the Middle East, he had a special message: “If the hostages aren’t returned by the time I enter the White House, hell will break out in the region; it will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.”

If the world had shuddered when Trump won the November presidential election, it now trembled in fear at what the man with the necessary economic and military power to stamp the ‘America First’ imprint on the face of the globe might do next to advance his agenda of world domination.

These were not mere idle ramblings of a 77-year-old man in the sunset of life but the calculated vision of a resurrected US president watching the dawn of a new sunrise beckon him to his destiny.

During the campaign trail he had appeared as a world peacemaker, boasting he had never led American forces into war anywhere in the world during his first term in office but adopting in the same peace seeker’s breath the warmonger’s tone, had said he hoped he would never be forced to do so during his second term. The sinister message was clear: If any state dared to cross America’s path, then the enormous might of its economic power, backed, if necessary, by its awesome military forces, will be marshalled to achieve America’s global ambitions.

THE WORLD IS HIS OYSTER: President-elect Trump celebrates with ‘America First’ speech at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida

Take friendly neighbour Canada. The United States and Canada share the longest borderline in the world between two countries. It spans a distance of approximately 8,890 km. The boundary line was drawn and settled in treaties by America’s founding fathers in the 1700s. But now even that hallowed line, which had peacefully remained undisturbed for the last 300-odd years, appears doomed to be blurred or condemned to disappear from the North American continent.

As the American press, led by the New York Times, pointed out, what was most alarming was Trump’s territorial expansionist aims. It covered Canada, which he had, during the campaign, jokingly referred to as the 51st State of America; Greenland, whose foreign and security affairs were controlled by Denmark and the prized Panama Canal.

Of Canada, Trump said, “Canada is subsidised to the tune of about $200 billion a year, plus other things. They don’t essentially have a military. They have a very small military. They rely on our military. It’s all fine, but they’ve got to pay for that. It’s very unfair.”

“Don’t forget, we basically protect Canada. But here’s the problem with Canada. We’re spending hundreds of billions a year to protect it. We’re spending hundreds of billions a year to take care of Canada.”

President-elect Trump said he plans to use economic force to make Canada yield to his demands. “But why are we supporting a country, $200 billion-plus a year? Our military is at their disposal, all of these other things. They should be a state. That’s what I told Trudeau when he came down. I said, ‘What would happen if we didn’t do it? He said, ‘Canada would dissolve’.”

“Canada makes 20 percent of our cars, but we don’t need their cars. We have Detroit to make them. We don’t need their lumber. We have massive fields of lumber. We don’t need their lumber. We have to unrestrict them, because stupid people put, you know, restrictions on, but I can remove that with an executive order.

“Canada wouldn’t be able to function if we didn’t take their 20 percent of our car upmarket. So, again, they send us hundreds of thousands of cars. They make a lot of money with that. We don’t need their cars. And we don’t need the other products. We don’t need their milk. We got a lot of milk. We got a lot of everything. And we don’t need any of it. So I said to him, ‘Well, why are we doing it?’ He said, ‘I don’t really know’. He was unable to answer the question. But I can answer it. We’re doing it because of habit’.”

Trump bluntly warned the Canadian government: “We do it because they’re neighbours. And we are good neighbours. That’s okay if they are a state but not if they are another country. We are not going to do it with the European Union, which has a 350-billion-dollar trade deficit with us.

“You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security.”

Furthermore, Trump added for good measure, “We’re going to put very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada because Canada, they come through Canada too, and the drugs that are coming through are at record numbers, record numbers. So we’re going to make up for that by putting tariffs on Mexico and Canada, substantial tariffs. And we want to get along with, but it takes two to tango.”

The outgoing Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said there isn’t “a snowball’s chance in hell” of the two countries merging. Having foreseen the fate of Canada without America’s economic support, he should be glad to have resigned last week rather than hold the dubious honour of being the prime minister to have presided over the dissolution of the sovereign state of Canada.

When it came to the Panama Canal takeover, however, Trump didn’t rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to surrender control of the canal that America built a hundred years ago.

He said: “The Panama Canal was built with our money and our people. 58,000 people lost their lives due to malaria. It cost us the equivalent of a trillion dollars in today’s terms, maybe more. It was probably the most expensive structure, if we call it a structure, which I guess you can, ever built. And Jimmy Carter gave it away for a dollar. We expected them to be nice to us. But they abused us.”

“Jimmy Carter,” Trump said, “was a good man. I knew him a little bit, and he was a very fine person. But that was a big mistake. Giving the Panama Canal to Panama was a very big mistake. The Panama Canal is vital to our country. It’s being operated by China. And we gave the Panama Canal to Panama. We didn’t give it to China.”

“But they,” Trump continued, “laugh at us because they think we’re stupid, but we’re not stupid anymore. So the Panama Canal is under discussion with them right now. They violated every aspect of the agreement. But the deal was that, you know, they have to treat us fairly. They don’t treat us fairly. They charge more for our ships than they charge for ships of other countries. They charge more for our Navy than they charge for the navies of other countries.

“What they’ve done to us, they’ve charged us—they’ve overcharged our ships, overcharged our navy. And then when they need repair money, they come to the United States to put it up. We get nothing. But it’s not going to be like that; it’s not going to happen. Those days are over.”

Thus did Trump seal the fate of Panama at his Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago, in the state of Florida, before a contingent of American reporters, a week ahead of reassuming the presidential purple.

Panama’s foreign minister, Javier Martínez-Acha, told reporters on Tuesday that the country would never surrender the Panama Canal to any country. “The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,” he said. “The only hands that control the canal are Panamanian and will remain so.”

But for all his tough talk, will his president be willing to risk an American invasion and defend to the death an American-built canal?

As far as Greenland was concerned. It, too, like Panama, is needed to protect America’s national security interests, nay, to protect the interests of the free world.

Trump declared on Tuesday, “Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. I’ve been told that for a long time, long before I even ran. I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time. You have approximately 45,000 people there. People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it.

“But if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That’s for the free world. I’m talking about protecting the free world. You look at—you don’t even need binoculars. You look outside; you have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen. We’re not letting it happen.

“And if Denmark wants to get to a conclusion—but nobody knows if they even have any right, title, or interest. The people are going to probably vote for independence or to come into the United States. But if they did—if they did do that, then I would tariff Denmark at a very high level.”

Hard luck, Denmark! Will the dubious title to a great chunk of an ice-cold, uninhabitable island be worth more than the kroner needed to finance for even a token resistance to a full-scale ground invasion, should Trump choose the military option?

An exuberant Trump was overflowing with optimism when he described the dawn of America’s Golden Age. He said: “So we’re going to have a lot of fun making America great again. And it’s going to happen, I think, very, very quickly. It’s already happened. So I would say this, and this has been pretty openly reported by the news; there’s never been anything like what’s happened in the last—since we won the election, a couple of months, since we won the election, the whole perception of the whole world is different.

“We’re approaching the dawn of America’s golden age; this is going to be a golden age for America. We have things that nobody else has. We have more natural resources. We are number one. Nobody knew that until I came along. I made us number one.”

How do you treat a man who says he’s the man who put America on the map? Very carefully.

And to make Trump’s pre-inaugural week replete, there came a surge of good news to make his chalice of victory fill to the brim with happiness. On Friday a judge sentenced Donald Trump to an “unconditional discharge,” bringing to an end the first criminal trial of a former US president.

Unlike what ‘Nidos kota nidahas’ means to Lankans’ sniggering minds, in the US it means his conviction stands, and he will enter the White House as a convicted felon. The sentence in the hush-money payment case involving American porn star Stormy Daniels means the incoming president has been spared any penalty, including jail time or a fine.

“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” Justice Juan Merchan said, “it is truly an extraordinary case.” And so it is.

Trump’s unstoppable march to the White House has also been extraordinary. He had survived two assassination attempts, defied all odds, and scraped through countless court battles to emerge defiant. No wonder he described his election triumph in the following glowing terms:

“So I would say this: there’s never been anything like what’s happened since we won the election; the whole perception of the whole world is different. People from other countries have called me. They said, ‘Thank you. Thank you’. The perception of the whole world is different.”

And though his cup is slightly smirched with the offensive drop of a felony conviction, he should say a special thank you, too, to Judge Merchan for getting him off the hook.

As Lanka’s president leaves for China this week, he should be on his guard not to queer the pitch by tilting too much towards the Red Oriental Dragon, whose fiery breath finds disfavour with Trump. If found on the wrong side as a mortal foe’s friend, trampling on this tiny jot of an island will be like quashing with glee a fly in the ointment.

Today the world is Trump’s oyster. As he returns to the White House next Sunday to receive his presidential spurs, he will, thenceforth, be the warrior god of supreme world power, an American knight on a special mission with a clear, articulated vision to fashion a brave new world in his style and shape.

By Jove! Good luck to him as he goes battling windmills and chasing rainbows.