It was the easiest of questions from the softest of interviewers. “What is one of your top priority items for a second term?” the Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Donald Trump in June.
But the US president fluffed it, rambling that “the word experience is a very important word”, that he had barely slept in Washington before becoming president and did not know many people. “You make some mistakes,” the president continued. “An idiot like [John] Bolton, all he wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.”
As incumbent rather than insurgent, Trump has barely articulated any vision for his second term in subsequent interviews, debates and speeches. But critics are in little doubt what trajectory four more years of Trump would mean, widening chasms between rich and poor, justice and racism, truth and lies. It would accelerate American political polarisation to dangerous extremes.
Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution thinktank last week: “Donald Trump’s modus operandi as a candidate and throughout his first term as president was not to unify. It was to heighten the contradictions, to raise passions on both sides.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
