There is something sane Trump is trying to say amid the bluster

Donald Trump is not a complete disaster. In the confusion he projects, the American billionaire and Republican presidential candidate has one or two commendable ideas, if only he could flesh them out properly.

One is his suggestion to phase out the NATO military alliance. Tied to that is his proposal to cultivate a less hostile relationship with Russia. The idea has inevitably caused an uproar in security circles in the US and Europe, but it really shouldn’t.

Whichever way you look at it, NATO is a relic of the Cold War, a carryover of the militarist mindset of that era. Mending fences with Russia, which long discarded its own Warsaw Pact military alliance, should be the way to go in promoting a better peace in Europe and the rest of the world. 

Nobody is suggesting Russia and the rest of Europe for that matter will suddenly become harmless pussycats, but permanent belligerence which leaves no room for other ways of engagement looks so, so old-fashioned going forward.

The problem with Trump is that he frames his opposition to NATO, and much else besides, purely on the financial cost to the US.

He reckons the allies are not paying their share. The same narrow focus on cost informs his threat to jettison America’s long-standing military support for Saudi Arabia. Even without that entanglement, there is a good case for the US to put some distance with this reactionary, theocratic regime that has been stoking sectarian conflict – Sunni vs Shia – in places like Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

And it remains a fact that 15 of the 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Centre towers in New York on September 11, 2001 were Saudi.

Trump has said he is not anti-Israel. Instead he has advocated something which no senior American politician in living memory has dared to. He says he will be neutral when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That is a great step forward. Open US partiality to Israel is what emboldens the latter to get intransigent and reject all reasonable concessions of ending this perennial conflict.

There are still huge minuses in Trump’s worldview that make many people recoil in horror. His daily bashing of China, which is America’s second largest trading partner, is quite problematic. It would mean a trade war that would ripple across the entire world were Trump to take office and carry out his threats.

Domestically, he has antagonised Hispanics with his unending, insulting epithets. African-Americans are not keen on his candidacy either.

Both groups form a significant chunk of the US electorate. Trump has said some pretty daft things about Muslims as well. Many women voters are also uncomfortable with the sexist utterances of the tycoon. The very unorthodox nature of his campaign has alienated key bigwigs in the Republican Party.

LOST POPULAR VOTE

Yet before anybody is rash enough to write Trump off, it helps to understand the US electoral system. The winner of the presidential contest is not necessarily the one who wins the popular vote. Rather the winner is the candidate who scores the most Electoral College votes, which are counted state-by-state according to the population of each state.

George W. Bush lost the popular vote in the year 2000. However, when the US Supreme Court ruled he had won the contested election in Florida State, his tally of Electoral College votes rose past those of Al Gore and he was declared President.

The US electoral map is divided between so-called Blue and Red states. Blue are those that vote for a Democratic Party candidate no matter what, like California. Red are those that invariably vote Republican, like Texas.

Then there are a handful of states called “battleground” or “swing” states which can go Red or Blue depending on the appeal of a particular candidate. In the current election cycle, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania have been tagged as the battlegrounds. Trump is gaining rapidly against Hillary Clinton there, according to polls.

If Trump wins these, the race will be over. But can the guy control his big mouth?

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A refugee acquaintance gave me a most absurd reason why the Dadaab camp should not be closed. Since the refugees are the same ethnic kin with the people where the camp is located, they should be left to stay, he argued. Now, if Ugandan Tesos flocked Busia as refugees, do they get the right to say they will never leave because they have kin in Kenya?

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