By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

A telling Christmas cartoon in a Canadian newspaper (The Globe and Mail) shows the American Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehending and attacking Santa Claus as he lands in the US presumably without a visa. For their part, ICE agents have gone a step worse and got one of their men to be a fake Santa, with an ICE logo, in an advertisement that promises US immigrants a payment of $3,000 and free flight ‘home’ for Christmas if they would voluntarily turn themselves in. The overexcited and out-of-depth Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noam has added her two cents: “Illegal aliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport.”

That is Trump’s America and it is at terrible odds with the historical image of America that the first American Pope in Vatican devoutly cherishes and is unabashedly defending. Paraphrasing the gospel of Matthew, the Pope had pointedly admonished, “Jesus says very clearly, at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘How did you receive the foreigner?” The American Bishops followed suit and in a rare rebuke of the Administration, have expressed their “concern for the evolving situation impacting immigrants in the United States”.

But not all American Catholics are with the Pope and their Bishops. 60% of white American Catholics are said to be in favour of Trump’s vicious crackdown on immigrants. They and their voluble intelligentsia are a bulwark of Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) bandwagon. Five of the nine Supreme Court judges are conservative white Catholics. They are aided and abetted by Clarence Thomas, the lone male African-American and conservative judge on the bench. The six judges, ignoring the dissenting liberal judges, have been giving judicial cover to practically all of Trump’s controversial second term initiatives.

The new bullhorn foreign policy towards Europe is the speciality of Vice President JD Vance, a late convert to Catholicism and married to a Hindu Indo-American. The oversight of Central and South America is the responsibility America’s new neocons, the Cuban neocons, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Catholic Cuban American with a ton of chips on his shoulders. Trump used to deride hm as “little Marco.” Marco Rubio wants the US to browbeat Venezuela and use it as an example to other Latin American countries.

The US Christmas Day strike in Nigeria targeting ISIS militants has all the hallmarks of confusion and misinformation of the Trump Administration. Only after the strike, it was announced by the Nigerian government that the strike had been planned by both governments. Trump is claiming that the strike was meant to save Christians – to please the Sunday televangelists in America. But the Nigerian government is asserting that it was meant to save all Nigerians, including Muslims, from militant attacks. The bombs were also off-target geographically, and analysts fear that it may provoke religious strife rather than saving anybody in the country.   

Back in the US, Trump’s support is falling and almost all of his new initiatives are beginning to unravel even before he has finished the first year of his second term. Even among Catholics who are 20% of the population numbering 50 million, the 60% support of white American Catholics is negated by the opposition of 70% Hispanics to Trump’s deportation program even though Trump made significant inroad among Hispanics in the 2024 election. Among all Americans Trump has a negative approval rating with nearly 60% of Americans dissatisfied with his policies and performance across the board.

At 79, Trump is beginning to walk and talk like Biden when the latter was in office as the oldest American President. Trump is not losing his grip on power but he cannot keep tab on his zealous acolytes as they rush to further their own agendas on immigration, controlling Latin America and jettisoning Europe. It is the economy that is his business. It is literally so insofar as his family is enabled to make as much hay as they can before the curtain crashes. And the country’s economy will be his Achilles Heel just as it was for Biden. Trump will be considerably deflated should the Supreme Court rule against him on the constitutionality of his idiosyncratic tariff scheme. On the other hand, if the Court’s conservative judges were to rule in his favour it will do lasting damage to their already tattered credibility.

Regardless, the Trump presidency is not going to end all of a sudden like in so many other countries including Sri Lanka in 2022. The built in inertia of the US system will provide for the Trump presidency to peter out and for the country to take an even longer time to rid of the damages he has done to the institutions and to restore them slowly. In the meantime, one would hope that the carnage in Ukraine will be soon brought to an end. And, as Pope Leo XIV said in his Christmas homily, the people “in the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold, ” should be soon helped out of the “rubble and open wounds.”

While it is too soon to speculate about post-Trump America, Trump’s impact on the American political system over the last 10 (to be 15) years in politics is obvious. First, he was able to instigate a critical mass of people into believing that the mainstream political discourse in America is a fake enterprise. That was his route to victory in 2016 and much of his first term was about consolidating the belief of his followers that everyone who was opposing him were fake and un-American.

Four years later, when he was defeated in the 2020 presidential election, Trump took the extraordinary step of making his followers believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him and given to Biden by the Washington establishment. Trump’s playbook has been adopted by likeminded leaders in other countries to score their own political victories. Accusations of fake news, allegations of stolen elections, and widespread disinformation – i.e. intentionally spreading incorrect information – have now become the stock of politics in a number of countries. Sri Lanka is not one of them but it does manifest symptoms of this new malaise.

The NPP and its Square-toed Critics

Allegations of election fraud have always been a fact of political life Sri Lanka. A sizeable forensic industry grew out of petitioning courts to challenge the results of individual constituency elections based on allegations of fraud and corruption. Not infrequently, the allegations themselves were fraudulent. The two old Left Parties would have none of it and would accept the results of the election based on the official counts. They never challenged the results of any election that was lost by any of its candidates. When the Left was shut out of parliament in 1977, NM Perera wrote for the LSSP that the Party had been shut of the legislature twice in its short history. First, from the State Council by a colonial Order in Council, and years later in 1977 by the people themselves. The LSSP fought the colonial expulsion but accepted the verdict of the people in 1977.

Allegations of foreign interference are also not new. The Left used to have its routine rhetorical flights to warn of the circumambient presence of imperialism. The UNP countered with homemade stories of Chinese spies. But the first serious questioning of an election result and the accusation of foreign interference came after the 2015 presidential election that saw the defeat of Mahinda Rajapaksa when he tried to win an illegitimate third term in office. It was also the first defeat of a sitting president. The first reaction after the defeat was to blame Tamil sabotage. The second was to blame the long hand from New Delhi. Neither took serious traction but they created a local genre of political punditry that keeps itself busy.

The Rajapaksas have grown out of their defeats and losses. Their elders have no time for it and their next generation is desperate about finding a future foothold. But their loyal pundits keep churning the word bowl. The latest addition to this genre of commentary is the finally revealed revelation about the supposedly sensational proposition made by former Indian High Commissioner Gopal Baglay to former Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena, on the morning of that fatefully eventful day of 13 July 2022. The proposition was that Mr. Abeywardena should immediately become Sri Lanka’s new President.

Obviously, this meeting would have taken place after Gotabaya Rajapaksa had fled the country in the wee hours of that same morning. But what is not clear is whether GR’s letter of resignation was already official and whether GR’s appointment of Ranil Wickremesinghe as Acting President had already come into effect. Mr. Wickremesinghe himself has revealed the circumstances of his taking oath as president after GR’s fleeing – that he had to take his oath in secrecy in a Colombo Temple. This revelation came in an interview that RW had with former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in June 2023, during a gathering of the International Democracy Union (IDU) in London.

There is no reason to question the veracity of Speaker Abeywardena’s account of his meeting with the then Indian High Commissioner, in the Speaker’s parliamentary office. But what is amusing is the use of this single data point of this meeting – to draw a line of conclusion in two directions: (1) a causal line going backward to suggest that the entire Aragalaya phenomenon was potentially orchestrated by India and America; and (2) a consequential line going forward to the election of the NPP government with the assertion that the new government came into office after displacing Gotabaya Rajapaksa to serve Sri Lanka’s two masters – India and the US. The Aragalaya uprising and the people of Sri Lanka are reduced to doormats in this political theatre and their protests and votes were mere political counterfeits to elect a government of fake Marxists. Even Trump would be impressed by this pseudo-political creativity.

As amusements go, this genre of political punditry is fully supplemented by the NPP’s current critics and quondam comrades from the bookish left (as Philip Gunawardena used to scoff at the LSSP). They take NPP to task for any and all of its actions and non-actions – from its apparent ambivalence towards Israel to its alleged foot dragging on the Prevention of Terrorism Act, not to mention its similarly alleged kneeling before the IMF.

The criticisms themselves are not inaccurate, but their tone and timing do not appear to be intended for any positive outcome. They are also esoteric and out of place in a situation when the country has been ravaged by a torrential cyclone. I will conclude by paraphrasing a witty response to a recent online critique of the NPP on the PTA matter: while blaming the NPP government for not repealing all the bad laws enacted by every previous government, one must not forget that the NPP is the only government – that is not only against making use of bad laws enacted by others, but also against enacting any new bad law of its own.