Opponents seek to delegitimize Trump through social protests: Analyst

Only one day after Donald Trump assumed the office of the 45th President of the United States, women’s marches were held across the US, and the world over, against his leadership. What are we likely to see in the next four years in a country which seems to be so bitterly divided? Would Trump be able to hold the country together or would he repel the opposition even more? These are the questions we have put forward to Rob Kall, the editor-in-chief of opednews.com, and James Jatras, a former US Senate foreign policy analyst, in this edition of  Press TV’s ‘The Debate’ show.

James Jatras maintains that certain Democratic and Republican figures are angry with Trump’s anti-establishment agenda and are, thus, trying to delegitimize his nascent administration through every possible means, including encouraging social protests.

“I think that Trump has made it very clear. He is challenging a corrupt establishment, not just the Democrats, not just the Obama legacy, not that corrupt warmonger Hillary Clinton who was the alternative in the election, but the Republican establishment as well. That he is going to throw out a lot of the retired orthodoxies of both parties when it comes to things like trade and putting America back to work. I think that will be the ultimate test of whether he succeeds,” Jatras underlined.

He further opined that the politicians who are protesting against Trump are in a sense shock troops of the corrupt establishment.

“If they succeed in bringing him [Trump] down, the alternative will not be some kind of Bernie Sanders-type progressive agenda. It will simply be a return to the corrupt Bush-Clinton duopoly that has ruled Washington back and forth for decades,” Jatras warned.

Meanwhile, Rob Kall, the other panelist on the show, called Trump an egocentric person who has come to power via exploiting people’s anger and fanning the flames of irrational nationalism among the masses.

“I look at Trump and I see a classic Narcissist who is thinking about me, me, me. And he is talking to people who are angry and all of them are justifiably angry. But you can’t just do it with cutting off the rest of the world. We have diplomacy and that works with working with other people and building bridges and relationships. There were a lot of signs at the protest today [reading] ‘Build bridges, not walls’ and that’s where we need to be going,” Kall said.

Criticizing Trump’s appointments as not being in line with his rhetoric, he continued, “His appointments have told us more about him than anything else… They look just like the appointments that would have been made by any regular Republican insider. I don’t think Mike Pence would have done anything much differently except he might not have the gall and the nerve to make appointments of the people who don’t even go through the process of being vetted by the ethics committee which is outrageous that that has not happened.”