After a week in which I wrote article after article about one man, President #Donald Trump I thought that writing an article about what happened in the rest of the world would be as much a relief for the readers as it would be for me. What I thought would be an easy task became the hardest article I have written in recent weeks.
Trump, Flynn and Russia
The weekend had become a period of relative peace as we await developments in the issues that have dominated newspapers and websites. Michael Flynn’s replacement is becoming ever more difficult to find.
Barring major surprises, the results of the investigations by the intelligence community on the allegations of Russian hacking of the presidential campaign will not be released for some time. And finally, we await the new executive order on Middle Eastern immigration announced by President Trump to see whether or not it the issue will continue in the courts.
So, it was with some relief that I began researching online news articles to show that the world continued to go forward while the United States drew a breath in the recent controversies. I was wrong; I could not get away from these issues and from Donald Trump.
Searching in vain
As I searched each major issue I found were related to the war on terror, presidential elections, bombings, security, court challenges and other issues related in one way or another to developments in the United States.
Using different definitions only shuffled the order of the items and very often the same news came out in different sites with only the headings of the pages changing.
At one stage I decided to look for light hearted and fun stories to contract with the serious issues covered in recent weeks and the news that came out was banal, childish, or at times even outlandish, in every way.
Defeat and messages
So with defeat in my heart I decided to put together a collection of snippets of stories that when read together make us all realize that how much the world is interconnected. The arrival of the internet has truly made the world even smaller, not in the physical sense, but in the way issues from one side of the world affect and change the lives of populations of other countries on the other side.
I will no longer look at the daily press briefings from the White House in the same way, or even the tweets sent regularly at all hours by Donald Trump. Worse still I wonder if the 45th President and his Press staff beginning with Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway understand that what they say and what they do are not limited to the United States.
The messages contained in their statements and press releases are being read, analyzed and finally judged by politicians, journalists, academics and finally by the public around the world. The journalists present in front of Donald Trump and Spicer are only the messengers that pass on their words.
Even more the internet transmits these encounters with journalists in real time and the United States and the world can decide on the message even before reading the summaries when the journalists file their reports.
The true enemies
The White House must understand that yelling "fake news" and talking about negative reports does not change the public perceptions, good or bad, of their announcements and actions.
For the prestige of the White House and therefore for the prestige of the United States itself in the eyes of the world, the Oval Office cannot continue its war on the Press. The journalists are not the enemy.
In fact, up till now President Donald Trump and his staff have been their own worst enemies and the world is seeing it in real time.
