On Christmas Eve, Trump tweeted …
The reactions from ‘round the globe told the true story …
Definitiv nicht! Grüße aus Deutschland! (Translation: Definitely not! Greetings from Germany)
Nope
By whom?
Hahaha that was so funny with a baby president can never be respected
Ha ha, Na mate you are mistaken!
As an European, I assure you it is not
Only when the all caps unstable President is gone.
Australia says nope.
Really? Did you resign?
Hi. Ireland here. Nope.
America will not be respected as long as Trump is in office. Resign.
And many more … 68,000+ comments, in fact, and as far as I could tell (obviously I did not read all 68,000!) not a single one was positive. While I could pick Trump’s two years apart and come up with hundreds, perhaps even thousands of reasons why Trump has, in fact, cost us the respect we may have once had, in the long run it all boils down to one single word: trust.
Trust, along with respect, is the single most important element of any relationship, whether it is husband/wife, parent/child, friends, or on a grander scale leader/citizens. Without trust, a marriage will crumble, and by the same token a nation will fail if the people cannot trust their leader and if other nations cannot trust the one. The people of the United States cannot trust Donald Trump, nor those politicians who, elected to represent us are in fact acting in a manner contrary to our best interest.
Donald Trump has broken our trust in every conceivable way. It’s quite an accomplishment, really, that he has not once told us the truth, has not once acted in the best interests of our nation, of our citizens, of our allies. The odds were that he would accidentally do something right, make a true statement, somewhere along the line during his two-year tenure, but he defied the odds.
It is a terrible thing when the citizens of a country cannot trust an elected leader, and perhaps an even worse thing when no nation on earth trusts this country. Think about that one … we have let our allies down in a number of ways, and Trump has talked down to and denigrated the leaders of many of the nations who were once our trusted friends: Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, UK. He allies himself, instead, with nations that we should never turn our back on: Russia and Turkey.
Trust. It is earned. Or not. Trust can take years to be built and strengthened and can be destroyed by sometimes a single lie. How many lies has Trump told? Last I heard, based on a couple of different fact-checkers, he had misled or outright lied to the American people more than 5,000 times … in under two years! Must be some sort of a record.
Today, a large part of the government is shut down because Trump lied about his “big, beautiful wall” that “Mexico will pay for”. Those of us who are capable of coherent thought knew that Mexico was never going to pay for the wall, but Trump kept saying it and his followers kept believing. And now, he is asking us to pay for the wall that most of us do not want and for which there is no need.
Trust. It is so easily broken. Trump broke the trust of our allies when he announced he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Accord. He further broke their trust when he failed to renew the Iran nuclear agreement. He has denigrated our allies and NATO. And now … he is pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan in a move that will further de-stabilize the Middle East and leave our allies to try to keep the peace.
No. America is not “respected again”. We have less respect now than … perhaps ever in the history of our nation. We broke the trust of the rest of the world, and Trump has broken our trust.
“The glue that holds all relationships together–including the relationship between the leader and the led–is trust, and trust is based on integrity.” –Brian Tracy
“Leadership requires five ingredients–brains, energy, determination, trust, and ethics. The key challenges today are in terms of the last two–trust and ethics.” –Fred Hilmer
Filosofa's Word 