Piers Akerman: You want a disaster, then look at Barack Obama

DONALD Trump has been President of the US for nearly a fortnight and while he’s done what he said he would do, he has idiots around the world frothing, Piers Akerman writes.

Piers Akerman.

DONALD Trump has been President of the US for nearly a fortnight and while he’s done what he said he would do, he has idiots around the world frothing.

The deal his predecessor Barack Obama cut with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull last September was a stinker for the Americans, which is probably why it received little or no coverage in the US at the time.

Though both Washington and Canberra claim there is no linkage, the Obama administration agreed in its dying days to accept 1250 refugees being held in immigration detention on Manus Island and in Nauru and, serendipitously, the Turnbull government agreed to tip in an extra $130 million to help those trapped in conflict zones and some 20,000 refugees now in Central America.

Labor claims it would have provided even more money and even further relaxed visa restrictions.

PM Malcolm Turnbull talks with U.S. President Barack Obama following their meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), in Lima, Peru in 2016. Picture: AP Photo

Trump’s right. The deal stank but he has said he will honour it, as distasteful as it is.

What may be most galling for his critics in the US and abroad is that he has not introduced a new policy but agreed to uphold Obama’s legacy.

While the luvvies remain wedded to the notion that they achieved some sort of sanctimonious virtue for voting for a black man, the reality is that they elected a committed “community organiser” with barely an undergraduate’s intellectual appreciation of politics who then proved to be the worst US president since Jimmy Carter occupied the White House and boasted of receiving advice on world peace from his pig-tailed little daughter Amy.

Carter finally left Pennsylvania Avenue famous for having his sozzled brother Billy launch a beer in an attempt to cash in on his family connections, and infamous for failing to secure the release of 52 American hostages held in Tehran for 444 days by revolutionary students who supported Iran’s fanatical ayatollahs.

The current brouhaha with Australia is not a disaster. The fallout from Obama’s foreign policy forays were catastrophic. There wasn’t a red line he drew in Syria that he wasn’t prepared to concede, he failed the Afghan people by telling the Taliban he was going to withdraw US troops there, and he failed the Iraqi people by letting the insurgents know that he was withdrawing troops from that field of operations.

US President Donald Trump had some issues with Australia’s refugee policy. Picture: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

He also showed an unquestioning support for Islam even though it was obvious that Islamist terrorists posed the greatest threat to their fellow Muslims than any other possible assailants.

Now Obama is lending his support to the packs of ratbag international protesters who oppose democracy and the rule of law in the West in nations where they enjoy freedom of speech and a right to protest that is forbidden in the Islamic nations with which they claim solidarity.

“Our” ABC has naturally added Trump to its growing list of objects for hate and derision along with those who wonder why Australia is not using its vast coal resources to empower the Australian people, and provide energy and jobs at home.

Shireen Qudosi, a US political analyst and American Muslim who supports Trump’s moves for more stringent security checks on nationals from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen, flummoxed Radio National’s Fran Kelly last week and even corrected Kelly when the activist breakfast show host called the measure a ban.

Qudosi pointed out that those affected were not US citizens, small numbers of people were likely to be involved and that the issue was one of security. She suggested that hysteria was not the right response.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May demonstrated far more sense when she faced down the usual critics and the left-wing Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn when asked to condemn Trump’s 90-day suspension of visas from the seven Muslim majority nations. She turned the tables on Labor by asking Corbyn to join her in denouncing the discrimination displayed by a number of Muslim majority nations against Israeli passport holders, including ­Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, UAE and Yemen.

Prime Minister May, like President Trump, is celebrating a victory over the political establishment with her decisive win on Brexit despite judicial attempts to block the result of the popular referendum.

As the days pass, it is becoming increasingly apparent that those who ignored Donald Trump’s rise and sneered at his hairstyle weren’t actually listening to what he was saying. They should have.

President Trump has mounted his own challenge to judicial activists with his nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the US Supreme Court vacancy. Judge Gorsuch, who has expressed concern about the politicisation of the courts, has criticised American liberals for being too reliant on the courts rather than their democratically elected representatives to achieve their social agenda.

“This overwhelming addiction to the courtroom as the place to debate social policy is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary,” he wrote in 2005.

NSW Chief Justice Tom Bathurst, who paraded his social agenda in a speech denouncing “xenophobia” and “popular sentiment”, should take note.

The public here, just as in the US and the UK, has had a gutful of unelected activist judges imposing their views on the public when their sole job is to apply the law as prescribed by legislation.

As the days pass, it is becoming increasingly apparent that those who ignored Donald Trump’s rise and sneered at his hairstyle weren’t actually listening to what he was saying. They should have.

It’s too late to jump up and down for the cameras, or hit the # button every time he puts into practice the policies he promised. He pledged to break the same-old, same-old model which encouraged more bureaucracy and more red tape, he said he would put Americans first, and he is doubling down on those promises.