By Rotimi Fasan
IN just 24 hours since he became president of the United States of America, Donald Trump has been bombarded with a series of protests in the US and around the world. Over one  million women, it is estimated, in the US alone and tens of thousand in many European capitals from London, Melbourne, Paris and Madrid among others, have marched against what they called the anti-women stance of the new administration in America. Although not all Americans, they fear they would be negatively impacted by the ultra-nationalistic and anti-women poise of the US government under Trump.

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 20: President Donald Trump delivers his inaugural address on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. In today’s inauguration ceremony Donald J. Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States. /AFP

In what looks like a foretaste of his relationship with Americans and the rest of the world, Trump has been giving no quarter to his critics. Still in the mode that saw him through the presidential primaries and campaign, Trump has not deemed it fit to reconcile with his opponents. He appears not to be bothered that he lost the popular vote by very wide margins even though he won the majority of votes in the Electoral College.   The traditional practice of a new American president of calling for unity after an election is alien to Trump.

He didn’t expect to win the election that brought him into office and knows the majority of Americans question both the moral and political legitimacy of his presidency. But he is determined to make them accept him on his own terms. He has therefore kept up the heat rather than find a way to cool things down. It was in this mood that he continued his feud with the American press during his visit to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency CIA. The intelligence community has lately come under his attack for their alleged part in the leaking of what Trump called fake news about him and the allegation that the Russians hacked American electoral system in order to raise Trump’s chances against Hillary Clinton.

Trump had called the intelligence community unreliable. On his visit to the CIA office he had called the press liars. It is a measure of how petty and self-obsessed Trump could be that he spent the better part of his apparently fence-mending trip to the CIA base to attack the press for saying fewer people attended his inauguration than did Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and 2013. In spite of his post-truth claims, the fact checks should indeed be sobering for him: more people attended the Obama inaugurations than did Trump’s. Even when nobody seems to be bothered about this, it is too much bile to swallow for Trump who claims that his was the most attended inaugural ceremony in American history. As a former reality television star, it is normal for him to be concerned with viewing stats. But the reality of the screen is not the same as that of the real world. This is the bitter truth Trump will learn soon. His relatively low approval rating seems set to dip even further.

Clearly he and his team are starting on a very bad note and it is very doubtful he can win his self-declared war against different sectors of the American public, especially the press. Already the press has picked up the gauntlet and has continued its close scrutiny of Trump as it did during the campaign months. Then Trump was not president and he could be as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘unconventional’ as he chose to be. But it is a different ball game now that he is president. A lot more is at stake and not the fact of Trump’s braggadocio will see him through. Even his trumpeted unconventionality much of which rests on his belligerency and tendency to cuss sometimes appears overstated.

Trump is not the first American president with this disposition. Richard Nixon was something of a curser. He cursed freely even if a lot of it was behind the door. Yet, we know how he ended up. And the press was his nemesis. But Donald Trump has vowed to bypass the press and speak to the American people directly. Yet, the press will not let go: it is determined to perform its traditional and constitutional role by holding him to account. And it is difficult to see how his 50-character twitter sound byte can take him through the maze and clarify a lot of what he would want to communicate to the American people.

This man would have to step slowly, take a deep breath and look for a better way to reconcile the American society, not to mention the millions around the world already made anxious because of his hostile rhetoric. Trump would need to be very careful as he goes forward or he would find out too late that he had only won the presidency for Mike Pence to complete the term. It may not be certain how that might happen but Trump seems to be clearing the way for a Pence presidency.

He is getting to know the true nature of democracy as a game of compromise. He would find out pretty soon why Obama’s jet black hair all went grey in eight years (no thanks to people like him) and that it is easier to promise action as opposed to ‘too much talk’ than to deliver on that promise where human beings and not machines are concerned. The world waits to see how he engages the different fronts on which he has courted enemies and from where he is now being called out for a fight.  Something must give and somebody must blink or the battle royal has not begun. Of course, Donald Trump is not without his supporters.

The ultra-right politicians and their foot soldiers across Europe are fanning out in his support. Their numbers however fade beside the huge numbers of persons and groups ranged against him, home and abroad. Even in Nigeria, Donald Trump appears to have his supporters among some groups and individuals who appear totally ignorant of what he stands for. They rolled out the drums to celebrate his inauguration and made much song and dance over who was or was not invited there.

I’m lost knowing where Trump’s ‘America first’ chant that gets even America’s European allies anxious accommodates the supposedly pan-Nigeria claims of Ayo Fayose or the pro-Biafra chant of the indigenous Peoples of Biafra. Both Fayose and IPOB rightly condemn Mohammadu Buhari for his exclusivist administration that favours more northerners and Muslims than Nigerians, especially the Igbo, of southern extraction and Christians. But Trump’s government of billionaire business men and women is nearly 100% white; it is the first in nearly 30 years without a single Latino. Ben Carson is its only black input. This somehow places Trump in the same boat as Mohammadu Buhari. Whither then the celebration?