Trump - And Why Singaporeans Should Care
News about the United States’ 45th President seems to be almost unavoidable these
days - you can’t even get through half an hour of news without hearing his name
once. If he isn’t on the first page of the news, he probably isn’t farther than a few
pages behind. Every morning when I wake up and check Twitter, he seems to
be involved in yet another controversy, each time more racist, xenophobic, and
transphobic than the last. Today it’s the Muslim ban, tomorrow it’s the repealing of the
transgender bathroom bills. Maybe by next week Trump might open a portal and just let
the Chitauri destroy New York.
However, with that being said, you can still choose to live in your own bubble and
ignore America’s spiralling descent into the Dark Ages. All you really have to do is wake
up, go to school, go home, study, and sleep. Rinse, lather, and repeat. We
don’t really have to worry that some old white guy will try to stop you from taking
a leak in the bathroom of some public facility, or someone stopping you from entering
a country that you have a green card in. We don’t really feel the impact of Trump’s
policies, because we don’t see them happening to us and those around us, and
thus it’s easy to ignore something that isn’t happening to you.
But we have to recognise that just because we’re not suffering the brunt of America’s
presidency, doesn’t mean that the events in the U.S. don’t affect us at all. As they say,
when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. The U.S. has a hand in
many international affairs. Trump has already pulled out of the Trans Pacific Partnership,
the world’s largest free-trade agreement, and that is likely to have impacts on jobs, food,
the environment, healthcare, and more; and Trump’s going to keep making policies that
affect the rest of the world.
His policies might affect, say, the environment, for example. Trump previously tweeted
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make
U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” (I’m honestly not making that up. I wish I was.)
And if Trump doesn’t believe in man-made climate change, and starts pulling the plug on
U.S. policies that were designed to mitigate it and its impacts, the whole world will pay
the price, because climate change doesn’t care about national borders. Singapore could
be said, even, to be one of the nations skating on thin ice, because if sea levels continue
to rise, and threaten to bring this island underwater, it’s really all we have. And the one
paying the price won’t be Trump, because the worst parts of climate change will be
suffered by the next generation, long after Trump is six feet under.
Even if what Trump does doesn’t affect us, like, let’s say, his plan to remove
Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act that don’t directly impact us, we
should still care. Perhaps our late founding Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, said it
best: “This is not a game of cards, this is not a game of cards, this is everybody’s lives.”
I’m not going to say that it’s because they paint a cautionary tale for us, or give us
a case study for what happens if we ever choose to go down a similar route. What
is happening right now is not a case study, nor is it an experiment. Real lives hang
in the balance here, and even if they are not our own, they are lives. How can we
ignore the plight of others simply because we are separated by the flimsy label of
nationality?
If we are to be in support for causes like feminism, then we must acknowledge the
struggles of women under Trump’s presidency in the U.S. as a step back for us all.
Trump once infamously said, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do
anything. Grab them by the p-ssy” in reference to women, and continued to be
unrepentant when the video of him saying that surfaced in the course of his campaign,
calling it mere “locker room talk”. Even if that was “locker room talk”, as he calls it, it just
shows the culture in America, where men feel comfortable talking and even joking about
committing sexual assault. This is something that should be recognised as a problem
and condemned by the leader of the free world, not something that he should be a
participant of! I would go on, but there are literally too many instances of Trump being
misogynistic that I cannot write them all. My point is, Trump has proven himself to be a
step backwards for many causes, such as feminism. If we are to ignore this, it would be
ignoring many of the problems that are faced by, say, women in America, and we cannot
discount such a significant number of people when we are in support of feminism. We do
not move forward unless we all move forward together.
Lastly, we should care about Trump because a president has impacts beyond his
policies and executive orders. When Trump won the election, it was a legitimisation of
his beliefs, many of them sexist, xenophobic, and islamophobic. People felt emboldened
by his election, that they shouted comments like “go home, this is Trump’s America”, the
day he became the president-elect. The spread of ideologies like these is dangerous,
and again, they are not confined within national borders. In fact, Trump’s victory could
be considered a part of a nationalist movement that has already spread within Europe,
what with Brexit and Marine Le Pen’s rise to prominence in France. We would be foolish
and careless to think that we will not be, or have not already been affected. Several
Singaporeans on Facebook said things like “Singapore is a civilised nation and not a
nation of extremism…. Singapore also doesn’t allow people from [the seven nations that
Trump imposed a travel ban on] to come into Singapore”, and another user called them
them “7 troubled countries” (if they’re troubled, which means that their citizens are living
in a difficult situation, isn’t that then even more impetus for us, as the global community
to help them? LMAO) as well as “Yes, that affects some good people from these
countries, but let’s just be realistic. It’s difficult to individually check everyone; also there
are many economic immigrants in the disguise of refugee.” I would honestly like to see
the writer of that last one to be one of the “good people” affected by the Muslim ban and
then say the same thing. While I, again, cannot go through all the flaws in this line of
argument, lest this goes off on a tangent, this shows how Singaporeans buy into
Trump’s justification of the Muslim ban.
And that’s why I think Singaporeans should care about the Trump presidency and
everything that’s happened along with it. If this still fails to persuade you to give a
damn, then there’s really nothing I can do. Continue living your life in a bubble.
But this quote probably puts it best: “Remember sitting in history, thinking ‘If I
were alive then, I would’ve…’ You’re alive now. Whatever you’re doing is what you
would’ve done.” History has its eyes on you.