Speak Up-Kōrerotia21 June 2017

Human rights in the era of Trump

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

John I think the world is going through yet another one of those troughs when it comes to human rights, it’s been there before and it’s risen but at the moment I think the world is not in the prettiest of shapes mainly because our governments seem to be receding and a kind of emerging ‘stockade mentality’ where rather than share problems and share solutions governments seem to be polarising.

Sally That was the response of human rights expert John Pace to the question "What is your view on human rights in 2017?" when I spoke with him on his recent trip to Aotearoa. John's comment sets the scene for this episode of Speak Up - Kōrerotia, which looks specifically at "HR in the era of Donald Trump."

We are doing something a bit different this episode: we'll hear some more from John as he reflects with me, Sally Carlton, on the state of HR in 2017; and then we will get the perspectives of four other guests on Trump's first 100 days in office. This panel discussion was recorded on 22 May 2017 as a seminar to the Christchurch branch of the NZIIA (NZ Institute of International Affairs), and includes an audience Q&A. Many of the themes that John raises in a general sense are again raised by the panellists in their specific reference to the United States under President Trump.

But first - getting back to John’s interview -

John has a hugely impressive human rights biography, which includes decades of work at the United Nations, including several years as Secretary to the Commission on Human Rights. He has also held senior positions in the human rights/humanitarian field in a variety of countries including Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Indonesia, Sudan and Cambodia. All this experience makes him supremely qualified to offer an opinion on the state of human rights in 2017.

He continued his commentary:

John The international activity is on paper quite intense but in reality when you come to assess what effect this international activity is having on the ground, unfortunately there is not as much as one would expect given the fact that there are so many international agreements and international procedures that have worked reasonably well over a few decades but there is not as much international interaction as one would wish.

Domestically I think it is connected, there is also a kind of tendency to recede from a more multicultural communitarian type of approach to government to one which is I would say xenophobic, really, even though xenophobia can be less evident in some countries and more in others depending on the nature and the outspokenness of the leadership.

I think there is a tendency ever since governments started to shrink in the ‘80s for governments to lessen their base and as a result of which the political class is no longer really reflecting the kind of representation of people’s needs and concerns as it is mandated to do. Governments are smaller, the private sector is much larger and the conditions in which people live are determined more by the activities and policies of the international and commercial environment than it is by governments. And moreover their political clout in my opinion has in many countries lost the plot in terms of representing the people that it’s supposed to represent. And in many countries the political clout is just serving itself and therefore a distance has been created between the needs of people and the way in which their representatives are supposed to address. In some cases, one can say that the interests in making large profits have a quiet precedence over the need to make sure that people live a fair and a life that they can actually develop their own families, their own culture, their own relations with others and that’s where I think the problem is at the moment.

Sally You mentioned increasing xenophobia and obviously the receding government, but in your view what are some of the other incredibly worrying human rights trends that you are witnessing?

John Well it’s all one world, as it were, because the social shortcomings - social and economic shortcomings - do also have a reflecting activity in civil and political rights issues and the need to make sure that the representatives of society do carry out the obligations for which they are elected to do. The rule of law as one would wish to see is more a subject of theory than practice in a number of governments in various areas and that is extremely worrying because if governments are allowed to get away with this kind of attitude and policies that weakens the overall fibre of the international community… A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, you know.

Sally A huge thank you to John Pace for taking the time during his trip to NZ to share with us his views on human rights trends worldwide!

As I mentioned earlier, many points raised in John’s interview were also noted by the panellists in reference to the US under Trump. We’ll now hear from these panellists. Firstly we’ll hear from Peter Field who is in the History Department at the University of Canterbury and whose research interests include the American civil war.

The second speaker is plastic surgeon Howard Klein, another expatriate American living in Christchurch who will focus mainly on the relationship between Trump and his home state of Kentucky

Laurie Siegel-Woodward is the third speaker, who will share her perspectives on the situation as someone who identifies as a self-identified ‘political refugee’ from the America under George Bush Jr. and she’s particularly going to be talking around the idea of women’s body rights.

Last to speak is Kevin Clements, Director of the New Zealand National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at University of Otago.

Peter Well it’s nice to see everyone here, how shall we begin? I can say that on Friday afternoon, as is my want, I was talking with my mother - so that’s a good thing in on of itself - in Florida and she asked me what was I going to say to this group on Trump’s first 100 days? To which I answered, “I don’t know because we have three days between now and then and surely something will happen in-between which will oblige me to talk in some other way!” But Trump is in Arabia and so the Press has calmed down and there isn’t much to report for the last immediate news cycle.

I thought I’d begin by focusing on a number that we ought maybe to remind ourselves of - and it’s not 100 as in 100 days or Trump’s first 100 days - but the number is 306. After all it is the number 306 that brings us here today to talk about Donald Trump and his presidency, the first 121 days in all. 306 is the number of electoral votes, of course, that Donald Trump on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November last year and that’s an extraordinary number. 270 is the majority you need to win in the Electoral College to become President of the United States so Trump not only astonished the pundits, the politicos and the Clintons by winning the Election but he clearly surpassed 270 by a wide margin.

More than that, of course, as I think you know, he won Michigan and he won Pennsylvania to go with Ohio and North Carolina, he won Wisconsin. This is an extraordinary feat. Not only is it an extraordinary feat but I think we should remind ourselves for those of us - and there were many - who thought, “No not Trump” if not “Never Trump” that surely Marco or Jeb or Rand or someone would surely beat Donald Trump. My sense is that not Rubio, not Bush, not Paul, not any of them would have won those states and defeated Hilary Clinton. So we went from the unimaginable - which is that this candidate Donald Trump would be the only candidate that Hilary Clinton would easily beat -- to maybe, in fact, exactly the opposite: that Donald Trump is the only candidate who would have broken the blue wall.

Now for those of you not necessarily in the know, the blue wall is the decided advantage that the Democrats have, blue being the colour of the states that tend to consistently vote Democratic. In addition to New York and Massachusetts and California, it is overwhelmingly the states of the north east in the so-called Rust Belt that give the Democrats in national elections a great advantage and Trump, in one fell swoop, destroyed the wall. Maybe he’ll build that one between Mexico and the United States.

I’ve long said, too, that if he’s going to build a wall it shouldn’t be Mexico who should pay it should be Pink Floyd, they wrote it.

Anyway to move on quickly, I would also say this: in trying to evaluate Trump’s first 100 days, I’m probably not the best person for a number of reasons not least of which I was in this classroom earlier day talking about something I actually do know about: the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. Once we get past about 1877, I know nothing. In addition to that, just my nature, my nature is one of being something of an ironist, I take a strange odd view of most things. As an historian, I tend to take a longer-term view of things and just as myself living in New Zealand as my family repeatedly tells me I can’t comment on any of this because I’m not there and suffering as they are with the new President.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m not suffering at all despite this man’s craziness. I’ve got to tell you: that Wednesday night of Trump’s triumph was one of the most fun nights I’ve ever had in American politics. To remind you that politics is only partially policy in the United States and part of it is just fun and when everybody is wrong and the people get to occasionally tell the elite, “Sorry you got us wrong and we can choose who we want” – I find that as fun as the Greek chorus singing in Sophocles’ tragedy.

Finally let me quickly sum up by suggesting this: we know the Democratic Party, we know it well - I’m a Democrat and I come from a long line of what we call yellow dog Democrats which is, if there was a Republican and a yellow dog running for election my family would vote for the yellow dog - he Republican Party has been for much of my lifetime, and probably a generation before, been the minority party in the United States, without a doubt the minority party.

That Congress has been dominated by the Democrats, the Supreme Court has been dominated by the Democrats and the Presidency has been if not dominated led by the Democratic Party since Herbert Hoover’s ignominious collapse as a Republican with the Great Depression in the 1930s - so from 1932 on, the Republicans have been the minority. That’s clearly not true, the last year under President Barack Obama has been a disaster for the Democrats and with all the nonsense and all the news and all the hype and all the removal chic of Trump not making it through his first 100 days or first 100 hours or the inauguration, that he’s not our President… Trump isn’t the issue. The issue is that 38 state houses are Republican, that the vast majority of the governors are Republican, that

the majority of both houses of America’s national legislator are Republican and that was hidden a little bit by the Democratic presidency (of my classmate, by the way) Barack Obama.

Now that he has gone and Trump has won and 306 reminds us only that it is a Republican majority in the United States and for many Liberals and especially for the Progressives this is something that is as difficult to digest as anything they can imagine in their political culture and at the moment they’re not digesting it. If Trump weren’t alive they’d have to invent him so they wouldn’t have to look at themselves and try to understand folks from Flint, Michigan and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Case Western, Ohio said Hilary Clinton – no, Donald Trump – yes.

Howard Right well that will be quite a hard act to follow but the good news is I’ve never met a plastic surgeon that didn’t have an opinion about almost anything. I’d like to take a slightly different tone to start and that is explain why my particular viewpoint about what’s happened in America has been coloured by how I was raised.

Now at any moment I can turn on my background accent where I grew up, I haven’t talked like that for a long time but when I go back home I sure do. Growing up in Kentucky where everybody goes to church on Sunday, Southern Baptists control what goes on, most people have a gun and think that’s a good thing – that’s what life is like in most of America. I think for many of us that don’t live in America there is a real tendency to see America as what goes on in California and what goes on in New York and what goes on in big college campuses especially in this university setting which actually does not represent the place that I grew up in. So I’m sorry to say that when I was still living in Kentucky - and it seems like 100 years ago - Mitch McConnell had just been elected as a Senator and he was undoubtedly at the time the most miserable young man I’d ever met, it was appalling the things he believed and now he’s the leader of the majority in the Senate. My opinion is he’s a bad man and I don’t want to give too much of my own opinion unsupported by facts but we’ll get a chance to figure out people like Mitch McConnell who’s a consummate politician.

I think one of the things everyone needs to pay attention with when they’re looking at what happens with Trump now is: At what point does the support of a leadership begin to fracture? McConnell has been very, very quiet over the last couple of weeks since the whole Russia thing has come out and the special counsel appointed. Normally he’s right out there poo-pooing it because most of the Republicans are simply keeping their head down because they can’t believe Trump won, they can’t believe that he still hasn’t brought the whole thing down and until that happens and he appears to lose popular support they’re not going to be doing anything, they’ll be quiet but they’re not doing anything. So it’s very curious that Mitch McConnell has been completely quiet.

Now I balance growing up in a place where coal was important, where tobacco farming was important, where people felt under siege for the last

30 years by all these warnings on tobacco packets and the gradual diminution of the coal industry. Just seems like life was getting smaller and smaller and smaller about what they’d been used to, you’d never know that if you were in California because it never comes up in California but it sure comes up around the rest of the country. On the other hand I spent summers with my family in New York, New York is a completely different place. When I listen to Donald Trump talk and close my eyes he could be anybody I’ve known for the last 50 years in New York: everything is the best. When you go to New York it’s the best, it’s about I’m going to give you the best suit, going to take you to the best restaurant; great, can’t get this anywhere else. When you listen to Trump talk, people are used to hearing people from New York talk like that, he’s the consummate New Yorker and so there’s this real disconnect in my own mind about how somebody like Trump - who for as long as I know would alienate… My mum used to hate to go to New York, she couldn’t stand all that New Yorkness where everything is the best and everything is so brash and everything is so right out there and everything is so self-aggrandising and all that because it just wasn’t the way things were done in Kentucky.

What is it about Trump that has managed not to alienate all the rest of the country? I think it’s this complete disaffection with politicians and it’s all about money. In America - as most of you would know because I assume most everyone here has either been to America or is from America or spent some time in America - if you were a complete idiot but had a lot of money and are successful, good, because it’s all about success, it’s all money driven, it’s all financially driven. Outside of California, West Coast, Seattle maybe, Austin, a few of those cities like that you don’t hear too much discussion every day about social issues, social good, social justice etc. etc. and so the fact that Trump is a successful business person who blows his own horn or at least appears on the surface to be quite successful - the truth is he’s been a bankrupt a couple of times, hasn’t been that successful - but it is one of those things where if you say something… Look at Winston Peters, if you say something often enough and aggressively enough to the right audience, enough people eventually just take it as a given.

I disagree with one thing you said about he’s overseas, just one, he’s just overseas now and so everything has gone quiet but I think what we’re going to find is that silly speech he made in Riyadh today is going to be horrible, especially the day after Iran re-elected a moderate, this was going to be our best chance. You’ve probably seen the reports that prior to leaving in his notes for his briefing it had lots of pictures - he’s got a very short attention span apparently, it had to have a lot of pictures - he had to mention himself every couple of paragraphs because he doesn’t find it very interesting if he doesn’t mention himself because no matter what he’s talking about it always comes back to Donald Trump. So it’s a very curious thing.

I’m ashamed on a lot of levels but I’m excited on some level to see what happens with the people in America who disagree with that, where are the

changes going to come from now? I wish I could tell you I was tremendously hopeful about that because the truth is there are more people in the middle of the country than there are on either coast so I think if there’s a fall from grace it’s going to be quite hard but I don’t think it’s going to be anytime soon and I’m sure we’ll talk about this more. Thank you very much.

Laurie I suppose I’ve come really with my background as an American, I have been here for 20 years so I’ve been following only loosely the Election and its aftermath. My background is having come from the north-eastern part of the United States, a variety of areas; I then moved to Texas and lived there for 18 years so I happened to live in Houston for eight and then I experienced some really interesting shifts from being up north, being in Boston and the New England area I noticed that it was much more subtle, the racism and the anti-Semitism, but when I moved down south, wow there it was. When I moved to Austin suddenly I was in this utopia and we had some liberal people and it was fantastic - until George Bush Jr. became the Governor and I could see the writing on the wall. It was around that time I met my husband and I consider myself a political refugee. I immigrated here as soon as I was legally eligible and I thought that George Bush Jr. was something to be feared. I had no understanding of what it would soon become… I say soon, 20 years later.

The bit that I’m going to speak to is around women’s issues and I think that there is a sort of amnesia that we have when talk about with disdain the global gag rule. So if people are familiar with the idea: Trump has reduced funding - not so much in the amount but if anybody within the UN Population Fund and that’s to help health causes for NGOs around the world - if any of them in any way discuss or mention or provide abortions then they are no longer entitled to be funded through this. So this is known as the global gag rule but this is not the first time that this has happened. Similarly Title X which is the funding that is used in the United States to fund things like Planned Parenthood etc. for women’s health and reproductive health: they have made it such that the states have choice about who they fund and if abortion is one of the things that they provide they have the option of providing it or side-lining it to another health organisation.

These are the areas that have caused the most concern for women and women like us in the United States but this is not the first time it’s happened. And I suppose the thing that makes this scarier than in other presidencies is Trump’s general lack of regard for women and anything to do with reproductive rights, dignity, those sorts of things and I’m also aware that under Obama we had 43% of the people that worked under him were women and now we’re around the 27% mark as you will have seen from photographs etc. We have pictures of lots of men signing away women’s reproductive rights. So I’m going to leave it there.

Kevin Donald Trump campaigned on a policy of America First, I agree with the first speaker, one of the best guides to why he was elected is written up in

that nice book called Hill Billy Elegy which is around all of the marginalised dispossessed who for some reason think that he is going to be their saviour, that he will be able to do the impossible which is to reverse automation, bring back coal and everything else. But his foreign policy has definitely been characterised by the impression of America is first. Being tough or looking tough is his top priority, it was through the election campaign and being dominant so he has that as an orientation which I think is a very blunt instrument in terms of foreign policy and so forth. When you ask Donald Trump to reflect on diplomats and others he says use tough negotiators instead of naïve academic people and diplomats who bought us nothing but trouble.

He’s learning…. So he campaigned on a policy against Hillary and Obama of deep hostility to US alliances so the whole alliance system. He campaigned on a policy of opposing all free trade agreements on the grounds that they were somehow or other counter to America’s prosperity… I think he could make a good argument that it may be critical to America’s prosperity. He’s indicated a indifference, if not opposition, to human rights and democratic regimes and he’s been willing to throw out most of what we can think of as the neoliberal world order. We haven’t seen what he’s going to do on climate change and so forth but I think that’s a big challenge.

So his campaign promises I think were pretty disastrous, they were isolationist in intent although at the same time he wanted to make America strong and brave and reinforce the military. If you look at his budget proposals there’s been a $157 billion allocation to the military which is already nine times larger than the next nine biggest nations in the world. He wants to cut back the State Department, he wishes to slash the USAID by 40%, he wants to zero line in his budget support for institutions like the US Institute of Peace and Woodrow Wilson Centre.

I think on the other hand he’s also becoming conscious of the fact that he can’t just impose his will on the rest of the world and there is pushback. So his original stance to try and feel that he could impose his two-China policy has been reversed, he’s now in favour of one-China policy. The speech he gave in Saudi Arabia is sort of sickening in terms of what it doesn’t say about Donald Trump’s own inclinations but it indicates that he wants to get the arms deal through; he’s reaffirmed US alliances with Japan and Korea. He’s taken a more moderate stance on NAFTA although he did come upwards withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership. Looking tough is a priority but it’s not a strategy and it’s not generating a coherent foreign policy. I’ve already mentioned in Saudi Arabia he’s now selling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons but complains about Ian [inaudible]. They just had a democratic election and arguably a much more positive orientation towards women than Saudi Arabia.

He’s let the generals ‘loose’ - in his words - which is a dangerous proposition. The mass subordinates air blast, dropping that bomb in Afghanistan against some dubious targets… I think is exactly what

happens when the Generals are in command. He doesn’t understand weapons of mass destruction, he doesn’t understand nuclear deterrence, he didn’t know that America has a nuclear triad; he thinks that there is no point having nuclear weapons unless you can use them. His foreign policy thus far in the last 100 days has been written on the hoof, it’s ill disciplined, incoherent and unpredictable, there’s no coherent programme. On Israel for example he said he didn’t care whether there was one- or two- or even a three-stage solution.

Questions of human rights and so forth: he’s in favour of water boarding torture and interrogation and am going to quote a little bit about what he said about water boarding. He’s called for the resumption of water boarding and repeatedly expressed his support for the use of torture by US persons trying to get information from terrorists. On one occasion Trump called water boarding “a minimal form of torture,” on another occasion he said “Nobody knows what is torture.” Whether water boarding is torture or not, Trump supports the law and the law is to allow water boarding and this is what he said. “Torture works and we have to beat the savages,” Trump said, “I go through a process and get it declassified as a war crime, certainly water boarding…chopping off heads of Christians and many other of people in the Middle East, they laugh at us when they hear we’re not going to approve water boarding.” He says water boarding doesn’t work [inaudible] for what they’re doing. So this kind of orientation is an invitation to those who are planning to extreme violence or political violence to go ahead with it because on the other side they see no restraint.

He aligns himself with dictators like Sisi in Egypt, Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines and supported [inaudible] in the last election and all of these things. He poses extreme dangers and extreme challenges to the whole notion of what we understand as the United States exercising kind of quiet leadership, quiet moral leadership. To put on one side the post-world war order and he’s promised “kick arse confrontation, we’ve been losing for too long, great response to [inaudible] not to get out of the game, to play it better, smarter, harder and tougher” and with ISIS he wants to “bomb the shit out of it.” He has surrounded himself on the political spectrum with some people who are more rational than that: Mattis, his Minister of Defence, and Tillerson, his Secretary of State. By and large I don’t think there’s any kind of justification right now in terms of assessing the first 100 days to think that under Trump’s foreign policy position is going to yield any order.

Japanese and other colleagues, for example, have been working like crazy to make sure that he doesn’t do anything in relation to either launches or Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapon’s development. He would be well advised not to sabotage the Iran deal either because the last thing we need is a nuclear-armed Iran and similarly in relation to non-proliferation issues it would be disastrous if he was to proceed and urge Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons.

So I think in terms of current progress thus far I think the missile attack on Syria was a disaster, I think his use of intelligence and blurting out intelligence to the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador to the United States was a major disaster, he shows no capacity for impulse control, no capacity for thinking altruistically or for taking issue of the other in terms of foreign policy positions. I think he generates both a rather worrying fascination on the one hand - we all wake up to wonder what new idiocy is coming out of the White House - and on the other hand we’re all nervous and hopeful that the checks and balances which are supposed to prevail in the United States will prevail. But it seems to me that at this moment that we have more reason for anxiety than hopefulness.

If any of you don’t know it, you might want to check out a nice website called www.whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com which documents every single policy decision since inauguration, foreign policy and domestic policy and it just shows you policies of irrationality and incoherence. Whether over the next three years and goodness knows how many days more coherence is going to come into the system is anybody’s guess - but at the moment when I see Donald in Saudi Arabia it doesn’t give me any cause for hope.

Sally If you have just joined us you’re listening to Speak Up – Kōrerotia with your host Sally Carlton. This programme is looking at human rights in the era of Donald Trump and we’re listening to panellists discussing Trump’s first 100 days in office, recorded on the 22 of May at the University of Canterbury. The panellists each introduced us to particular elements of Trump’s first 100 days in office, the audience was then invited to ask questions and here they are.

Male The one horror I’m left with is how America’s reputation is being affected. So whatever damage he does in the short term, I feel he’s left you with a long-term problem in the way the world looks at you and I think that’s the real damage he’s done to your country.

Kevin I think that the reputation damage is very great and goodness knows what’s going to happen when he goes to Israel or visits the Pope or knocks on the door of the EU…

Howard Look I agree with you completely but I also think it has some substantial foreign policy implications. I think, as the rest of the world gets this view, there’s a real opportunity for other countries - specifically China, specifically Russia; I mean choose a part of the world even in this part of the world, more of a chance for Australia - to show whatever kind of leadership they want. And I think that most thoughtful liberal Americans would agree with you, but as I said in my introductory comments I’m not sure that that represents the population at large who have seen for a long time the politicians, the people in power as a privileged elite. I think this is as much a reaction against the perception of politicians as being privileged, elite, disconnected people - none of which you’ve observed which is so obvious to us outside of the US are going to move Trump’s

core supporters. Trump’s approval rating now is at the lowest level of any president - ever - at this point in office. I don’t know where that’s going to go - he did show some signs six weeks ago that maybe he might be learning something but that’s all been turned on its head - he can’t resist that Tweet storm every time something happens.

Male I see a conflict here that Trump and a good number of the Republicans, they’re puppets for the money that’s being spent. On the other hand the people that they want the votes from are down at the bottom of the heap. My question is do you see any hope for democracy in America? I see it as going out the door and big money talks.

Male I follow the last question. My question is: Bearing in mind the disapproval rating that exists at the present time, the lowest of the low, are we likely to see an expression of disapproval in the mid-term elections? If it is likely, is there going to be the possibility of a change in the balance of power in the Congress?

Female I would just like to put into discussion a question about the role of the media and we look now what’s happened with Fox. We here in New Zealand are now exposed more than ever we have been to the role of the American media and the role that the media is playing in the American south.

Male I think watching Russian television recently, someone said democracy is impossible in a capitalist system and I said wow really? As I look at the huge shift in wealth discrepancies in America where wealth inevitably seems to rise… The issue in those discrepancies, really is this an undermining of democracy? Is democracy truly possible in a capitalist system?

Laurie I have a couple of things to say about media which is particularly notable in Texas although I can’t specifically speak for other regions. But my parents - who are particularly well informed, well-educated - it’s quite a shock to me that some of the information that they get and some of the information that they don’t get . And I mean just as an example, going back in the time of 9/11, I’m aware that there was no understanding that people were cheering as the Twin Towers went down so this is something that has always been… This is not specific to Trump.

But I’ll also let others speak about the interesting monopoly that Fox have had on a number of issues and for those who are listening to CNN I’m not sure that the information is that different. I think The Guardian has been probably again an oasis in this but even then…

Howard Part of the problem of course is there’s this huge segment of America that genuinely believes reporting by people like BBC, Huffington Post, and The Guardian - that’s all some kind of liberal plot. Trump, by report, is a cable news television addict and it’s very, very worrying now in America that he could simply say “fake news” - anything we don’t like, it’s just “fake news” -

and he can out-Twitter anybody. The New York Times has reported a 30% increase in their online subscriptions since Trump was elected, so I actually think that for newspapers like Boston Globe, New York Times, LA Times - some of the really big papers around the country - that Trump has actually been good for media and reporting and eventually the pressure they’ve applied I believe are directly responsible for the Special Counsel that’s just been appointed just holding their feet to the fire.

This fake news thing is very worrying. I’d be interested in an historian’s perspective because it was very much present with Hitler - I’m not suggesting Trump is like Hitler - but it’s by this massively narcissistic kind of leader trying to play off the press as an enemy of the people rather than somebody who represents the people. So that ‘fake news’ - or ‘lying press’ I think is what it was called in WWII; the lying press was something that the Nazis used - so the similarities are quite frightening in terms of the media.

But I’d be interested in hearing you talk about the mid-term election numbers because really one of the disconnects in terms of following American politics and what the House and the Senate say, are those guys trying to decide when to keep their heads down so that they can be successful in the 2018 election since Trump is making such a balls of what’s going on now? There’s got to be a lot to happen in terms of numbers to change the balance of power, I’d be surprised if it happens but I think one of the reasons why everybody is… All of the two Houses of Congress have been really generally quite quiet through what’s going on is they’re all worried about their political lives. And as someone else talked about, the money, you’ve just got to follow the money, where the money comes from, And sadly, I think that’s how you figure out American politics.

Peter Alright I’ll say a few words. When it comes to funding - we had the second question - yup, I would never be one to not say follow the money. I believe that the Democrats and Hillary Clinton out spent the Republics by 3.5 to 4 to 1 in the last general election, this is not to minimise money in politics but I think we’ve got that backwards. On the question of the mid-term elections I would say there let’s wait and see. It’s an uphill climb for the Democrats, on the other hand generally the off-year elections after a party in power has run into trouble and there’s a lot of trouble this one has run into then you’re likely to have some reversals. On the other hand it’s going to be very difficult in the Senate so I wouldn’t look for much change there, I don’t see a 2010 reversal that we found against Obama.

Then to foreign policy, yes I’d say here I read things very differently than my colleague in Otago. I think he’s right about everything and yet all wrong: I think Donald Trump is a man in the art of the deal and the art of the comeback that is really quite clever. He has a very specific plan which is you ask for much more, you aim way farther and then you pull back to compromise so he takes President Xi’s phone calls - that was never to reject the one-China policy and reverse America’s plans it was simply to get China’s attention and I certainly think that he has.

Finally, to take up the question of, how shall we say, the media: I think Donald Trump here is again being very coy and clever. I must admit as an academic and someone who insists that my students speak more than in one word or 180 characters but actually try to compose themselves in coherent grammatical syntactically logical paragraphs that I find Trump very difficult to take. On the other hand, 65 million Americans voted for the guy not because he’s an idiot, not because he doesn’t understand but because he does reach them. And while his approval rating is, I believe, 39% today, when you actually ask whom Americans trust more the President or the press… Donald Trump wins hands down.

Kevin There is indeed a major challenge to democracy and not only in America but in other parts of the world at the moment. I think Brexit, Wilders in the Netherlands, Hungary - are all manifestations of basically challenges to the Western Democratic ideal and I think it manifests in a number of questions and one is what happens to democracy when the electorates elect people who are fundamentally opposed to democracy and who exhibit high levels of intolerance? We’re in that classic paradox for tolerance: How do we tolerate the intolerant and what do we do if we don’t want to tolerate the intolerant?

That’s one element of this but the more important one is that Donald Trump’s instincts and inclinations are profoundly non-democratic. He thinks that he is above the law, he believes he can manipulate Comey, he’s going to stack the federal court systems with his own cronies. I think this is very worrying if the legal system is supposed to be a major check and balance on any tyrannical inclination. I think it’s symptomatic of a wider malaise with the whole western enlightenment project. Donald Trump has no commitment whatsoever to enlightenment principles - truth and scientific endeavour, understand rationality, logic or any of the things which we’ve become habituated - and I think that’s one of the challenges in a way. I mean, post-modernism has done its job in a way and post-modernism to some extent is partly responsible for this Trump election but that’s one thing I think there are some fundamental challenges to democracy which we really need to safeguard. In relation to change and balance of power in Congress, I’m not so certain about that.

I was in the States just two days before the Election and went from Washington to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where the Eastern Mennonite University is located which is normally a pro-peace, pro-justice institution but the good Mennonites of Harrisonburg - not to mention all the farmers - were Trump supporters because of his stands on abortion and on Supreme Court replacement. So they were voting on single issues like that and hoping that this man - an avowed anti-feminist and somebody who is not by and large going to be very pro-family and so forth - is somehow or other going to safeguard religion and the family and all the other things that went with that.

I hope there will be a change in the mid-terms but I’m not at all sure that

there will be.

In terms of the role of the media, this is one of the other things which I think has been a major calamity in terms of the Trump administration and god knows what’s goings to happen in terms of ‘old facts’ and ‘post truths’ and everything else. This again is another fundamental challenge to enlightenment principles. I wrote a piece in the Otago Daily Times saying that the inauguration of Donald Trump filled me with trepidation. I got all kinds of hate mail from people in Gore and Southland and elsewhere saying give the guy a chance. They watch Fox News and it’s clear that the Democratic establishment and the elite and the chattering classes in the Academy were all opposed to him and weren’t willing to give the guy a chance and then it went further than that and were urging that students and the university remove me from my post. This man’s ability to create a climate of intolerance doesn’t confine itself to the borders of the US; he’s created a permissive environment for all kinds of things to creep up from underneath stones and so the whole question of how we reassert radical commitment to science and logic and facts and evidence is going to be challenge.

Male Think of Europe over the last 50 years, they’ve actually given extra benefits to the population, gradually built up their debt and when the 2008 global crisis hit they did not have the resources to really bail themselves out and what has happened? You look across Europe and all of your established political parties have been thrown out. The UK: Brexit is across a population; even the French President hasn’t come from a basic party… Wou’ve actually got something fundamentally happening.

Kevin I think that Trump and the supporters of Trump to some extent have grown out of the global financial crisis and that generated the initial insecurity and anxiety that everybody has been feeling. I think it also reflects the fact that we’re in a situation of big power transition. It’s a little bit rich to say America is great and America is going to be number one again - that means China which will arguably overtake the US in the economic growth by 2047 or something and Japan and others are going to have to find their way in the rankings - and I think the reality is that the United States should have a little bit more humility in terms of its aspirations in terms of the global community.

The EU I think represents a major accomplishment, it may be bureaucratically neurotic in different ways but it does represent an aspiration which has delivered some real benefits to Europe in terms of human rights law and in terms of the cessation of interstate violence and in respect for enlightenment principles. So I think that one of the things that we really have to begin thinking about here is: How do we nurture the principles and aspirations which are going to deliver sustainable development, peace between nations and global justice? Donald Trump doesn’t have any interests in any of those issues and yet they’re pretty critical and goodness knows what’s going to happen once he does his bit on climate change, that’s going to generate a backdrop against which the

global financial crisis will look rather insignificant.

Howard I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said but I do think it’s probably important to state what we all know - and that’s all politics is local. And so it’s all well and good to talk about “America needs to be a good citizen and America is responsible for the GFC and America is responsible for all the misery in the world” but the point is, the similarities between what’s going on with Brexit and the election in France and whathaveyou is all about local economic positions, people feeling threatened and disempowered.

And I think that’s what’s going on and I think the frustrating thing about America for me - especially as someone who lived in America most of my life - for everybody else is it’s just as good as it is bad. We all enjoy all the great things that have happened in America and all the technology and all the success and all the stuff that gets exported but it just drives us crazy because when things go wrong - and especially here in New Zealand where we feel especially disempowered often about what goes on financially in the rest of the world - it is just maddening. I would just say in terms of what’s going to happen now in America, my view is I think you have to watch out about what goes on domestically because all of these foreign policy moves etc. are a distraction from what’s really bothering people, this repeal of the ACA (Affordable Health Care Act) is unbelievably traumatic and I think tax reform, we’re only finding out he’s going to cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15% or something like that and where is he going to make up the shortfall in the budget? I think that all of the foreign policy stuff that gets all of the dramatic coverage by the media is really serving a distraction for what ultimately may cause him the most trouble at home and that is how people are feeling in their own pockets.

Peter I’ll certainly say this that living in New Zealand, one of the things I really enjoy is talking about rugby because it’s one of the few times I get to say “America: a second rate power.”

Sally Well that concludes this episode of Speak Up – Kōrerotia looking at human rights in the era of Donald Trump. The reflection presented at the beginning of the show by John Pace set the scene for many of the themes raised by the panellists in relation to Trump’s America including the ‘stockade mentality’ of increasingly inward-facing politics, rising fear of the other at the expense of multiculturalism, the overarching importance of the commercial sector and the impact of economics and equality and the disconnect of the political elite from the people they are supposed to represent. The panellists also introduced other themes which we should bear in mind as we watch where Trump leads America: foreign and domestic policy decisions, the role of the media, decisions being made about women’s and other’s rights and the role of business and money in democracy… Lots to reflect on then, until next time.