As the whole world speculates how US President-elect Donald Trump would shape the destiny of his country and the world, Harvard-based academic Samuel Moyn, who is in the city, tells Express about what might be in store
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:As Donald Trump gets ready to assume office as the President of the United States, Muslims and immigrants who have been his targets during the election campaign, are seriously concerned about their future, says Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Harvard University.
Moyn, a specialist in Human Rights and International Law, was in the city to deliver a lecture on the topic ‘Human Rights and Globalisation’. The lecture was organised by the Department of Law, University of Kerala.
Speaking to ‘Express’ on the sidelines of the event, the academic said that those at most risk under the Trump regime would be migrants and people abroad. “These sections would suffer the most if Trump initiates wars. However, Americans in the US are unlikely to be victims under Trump,” Moyn observed.
Trump’s U-Turns
So what about Trump’s volte-face on many of the controversial positions he adopted during the poll campaign? “He has said so many things and has reversed them. So we all are hopelessly confused right now. Trump has just appointed his Ministers and they are worrisome. Most of them are inexperienced, they haven’t held political office,” he said. Asked about the repercussions of criticising the President-elect in a foreign soil, Moyn said that US has conventionally been a society in which Presidents have subjected to intense criticism. “Moreover, the general public does not have the fear that Trump will go too far to violate people’s civil liberties. He is more like a Berlusconi of Italy than a Hitler or a Stalin. We are worried, but not terrified,” he added.
Democrats losing out
Moyn attributes Trump’s win to the ‘mis-steps’ of the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as well as certain accusations against her in the final stages of the election campaign. “The Democrats need to re-think their politics. They can wait for more and more minorities to grow but that will take too long. So they will have to find a new way of reaching out to their old core constituency,” he said.
“Democrats have always appealed to the coasts of the country and not the centre. It was a party of the white industrial working class and now it’s the party of the wealthy elites on the coasts in places such as New York and Los Angeles. The Democrats need to rethink their politics for sustenance,” he added.