Wenceslao: With Trump as US president

SO billionaire Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States? Some people would say, no big deal. But yesterday, protests with several hashtags the more direct of which was #notmypresident swept the US, including around the Trump Tower in New York. I reckon these are mostly people worried that Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign would dictate his rule.

Trump said many things during the campaign, among the more controversial being his promise to build a wall along the border of the US with Mexico. One banner waved by protesters thus read, “If he builds a wall, we will tear it down.” Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, who had conceded defeat is now calling for unity amidst the division brought about by the campaign.

Trump has been reconciliatory so far, with him giving Clinton lavish praise after calling her corrupt during the campaign. New York Times reported that Trump, during a telephone talk with South Korean President Park Geun-hye, pledged to “defend South Korea under an existing alliance. During the campaign, Trump had said he would withdraw US military personnel stationed in South Korea if that country would not pay a bigger share for the cost of the deployment.

We don’t know how long Trump’s holding back would last but the protests should warn him what would be the backlash if he moves carelessly. Even US politicians both from the Republican and Democratic parties have already talked about vigilance. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the man Clinton defeated in the Democratic primaries, said Congress will only support Trump’s good moves, or words to that effect.

This means that Trump may not be able to actualize many of his controversial promises because of strong resistance from within the US. In a way, that can be the difference between the presidency of Trump and that of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Americans are so steeped in democratic practices they are not hesitant to protect and advance these practices. In the Philippines, even militants have been essentially muted.

I also do not expect the President to say anything bad against Trump, unlike what he did to Obama. For one, there is no bad blood yet between him and the US president-elect, unlike when Obama called Duterte’s attention to the extrajudicial killings in the country. Secondly, The President knows how volatile Trump is because he himself is volatile. I don’t think Duterte would be as vicious in his attacks against the US under Trump as he was of the US under Obama.

But I think the basics of Trump’s standpoint would remain and would seep through the policies he would lay down. He is a capitalist and a conservative so we will be seeing a different US-Philippines relations. I don’t think the US will now be as eager to support us in our territorial row with China as the US was under Obama.

I think Duterte’s demand for the pullout of the few remaining American troops assisting the Armed Forces of the Philippines in going against terrorist groups in Mindanao would even be realized. The benefits of the US-Philippines military exercises called Balikatan may also be reevaluated. A drawback there is that we may no longer hear a fuss about extrajudicial killings in the Philippines from the White House as Trump is not known to dwell on such issues.

What I am saying is that with Trump as US president, we will be left to our own devices, which is what the Duterte administration wants in the first place. And since a Trump administration would be more inward-looking, American investment in the Philippines could lessen. New immigration policies could also affect Filipinos there and their relatives here.

(khanwens@gmail.com/ twitter: @khanwens)