If you think President Donald Trump is getting bad reviews in this country, they’re love notes compared with what he’s getting abroad.
Western Europe, the heart of the American-led NATO alliance, is puzzled by what it sees and hears of The Donald and wondering whether he’s in his right mind or out of it.
Only in Moscow is he celebrated as the Man of the Moment. As the Russkies see it, there’s reason to celebrate. They’ve already got a U.S. president who won’t criticize his pal Vladimir Putin for anything.
Latin America was already all lit up over Trump’s snide insults of Mexico in particular and Latin America in general. Last week Trump threw another log on the South American fire by clashing verbally with the Mexican president and even, by one account, threatening to send U.S. troops south of the border. Trump likes to talk tough.
He also turned his bad temper on one of our country’s most faithful allies, Australia, a country that has sent young men to fight side-by-side with ours even in our wars of choice, Korea, for example, and Vietnam.
Trump took the Australian president to the woodshed over what Trump said was Canberra’s decision to ship some 1,200 “illegal aliens” to America. Actually, they’re refugees, not “illegal aliens.”
And they’re to be sent here under an agreement the Aussies struck with Barack Obama — you remember Obama, the American president whom Trump claimed wasn’t born here. Nothing special, just another lie.
Our relations with the Arab Middle East have been pretty sour for as long as anyone can remember. Could hardly be made worse, people schooled in Middle East history believed. Alas, they underestimated Trump. One of his minions warned Iran out of the blue last week that it had been put “on notice.” What’s that mean? War? Who knows?
With help from a pair of freshly mined White House Mideast experts, Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, Trump slapped a travel ban on people coming and going from some countries in the region. Intentionally or not, the ban harshly affected even people in Iraq, including translators, who risked death to help U.S. troops, some still fighting there.
What qualified the two Stephens for such a pivotal role? Nothing in the record that meets ordinary professional or academic standards.
But they have something more important in Trump’s bizarre new world: They’re both alt-right, white nationalists, either of whom would be at home at a White Citizens Council meeting in rural Alabama. (Miller, in fact, worked for Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator and segregation-sympathizer who’s Trump’s nominee for attorney general.)
Most of Trump’s critics, like his defenders, are unrepentant political activists, party officials or officeholders — people, in short, with short-term, personal interests at stake. But folks at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists bring something different to the fight.
They bring a presumption of political objectivity.
The Bulletin people operate the “Doomsday Clock,” a means of measuring just how close the atomic age has brought mankind to midnight, the moment of extinction.
Since its inception in 1947, the clock has vacillated between 17 minutes before midnight — things were looking up — and 2 minutes till the hour when the omens were ominous. Last year the Bulletin moved the clock hands 30 second closer to midnight, setting it at 2 minutes 30 seconds till the end.
“The global security landscape darkened,” the Bulletin declared, because of the failure of the world to deal effectively with such mortal threats as nuclear weapons and climate change. But there was another, most unusual element that added to the menace last year, it added.
Namely, Trump.
“Making matter worse,” the United States now has a president who has promised to impede progress on both fronts, nukes and global warming, Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, and Rear Admiral David Titley (Ret.), wrote in an op-ed piece for the Bulletin.
The writers acknowledged that singling out Trump was new and different. But then so is Trump.
“Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person,” they wrote, “but when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter.”
In short, the Bulletin’s scientists, like so many here and overseas, have come to the same conclusion about a world led by Donald Trump: Be afraid, be very afraid.
John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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