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So US President Donald Trump and his fellow trumpeters want to Make America Great Again (MAGA).

I cannot remember when America was great the last time. One cannot be great again unless one was great earlier. That must surely penetrate this trumpeter unless there is an urgent case to be made for a massive transfusion of grey matter.

One never knows these days with all sorts of technological innovations that even seem to produce devices that could remove your clothes without even a by-your-leave from you. One can quite understand our civilised bunch back home getting jittery at the very mention of a king completely undressed walking the streets to the sheer embarrassment of the multitude, like the tales of yore.

And there is poor Harini Amerasuriya, Minister of Education and prime minister to boot, being unceremoniously castigated for not having spotted some diversion in the pages of a new book—module or whatever—for school kids, as though she has nothing better to do than monitor reading material for kids.

So there we have Donald Trump, the grandmaster of American revival, undergoing system change long before his second term ends and even before our leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake could cotton on to it and then plaster the whole neighbourhood with threats of changing the whole blessed system before anybody could pilfer what he launched before his pre-presidential act.

So here I am trying to unearth when American chivalry plastered the whole world—or some of it anyway—to have Trump on his second run, wanting the world to hear what he has in mind. Not that we are unaware of his commitment to provide military cover to Taiwan in the event Beijing wanted to grab the neighbouring island, just as he did Venezuela a week back, and launching his comedy of terrors threatening a galaxy of world leaders near and far.

But then comes the second term, and Taiwan goes to the back burner almost immediately, what with Trump poking his nose in every other trouble spot, probably in his misguided desire to Make America Great Again.

But before long he is taking on the People’s Republic of China, and there we have the man who is going to make America great again, making lots of noises and sacking his own staff and many others and behaving like a street thug.

After all, who can forget Trump letting loose the dogs of war on January 6 five years ago when he actually urged his supporters to physically attack the Capitol, where the Congress was meeting to endorse the presidential election result and swear in Joe Biden?

His supporters, urged into attack mode, broke into the building and disrupted the proceedings. Here is the man who wants to make America great again. Certainly not by starting what was surely an insurrection that rejected a democratically elected president and undermined the best traditions of American democracy.

Trump would not accept the election result, though courts dismissed his claims of a fixed election 62 times, as far as I remember.

Is this the greatness Trump wants to bring back to make America great again? Is this what the American people expect their country to be and one that the world wants to deal with and even turn themselves into the puppets of a country that has now lost its dignity and its civilisational history?

Hark back into American history, and from the very beginning, the white people from near and who settled in that vast land grabbed it by fighting the Native American people who inhabited those millions of acres, defeated them in combat, and killed many leaders who continued with their traditional ways of life until those native tribes were slaughtered or corralled and a western culture and habits were imposed on them and the worst of western ethics spread all over their native land.

If this is what Trump wants to impose on the world with his uncivilised and militaristic ways, then let him do so in his own backyard instead of spreading his geopolitical habits throughout the world.

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse,” said Edmund Burke, who Trump might have heard of in passing, as I do not expect him to have knowledge of Burke, except by accident. If I had mentioned, say, Al Capone and other gangsters and similar figures that inhabited criminally infested Chicago of those early days when guns were the order of the day. One might well expect Trump and his associates to see that era as a part of the great American nation that he is harking after but should not expect more civilised nations with a history going back centuries to embrace Trump culture or whatever it might pass off as.

That is all the more reason our association with Trumpetian philosophy—seeking to stretch the Monroe Doctrine to a much larger area of the world and claim legitimacy—is what could be expected of his crude ways as a re-awakened imperialist in a business suit.

Trump is not a man much concerned with truth and legality. Given his current state of mind and desire to expand his domain with the use of arms, threats or even bullying smaller and less powerful nations on his way to confiscating territory that belongs to other nations, this is what making America great again means to him.

When President Junius Richard Jayewardene, a great supporter of the US, said, when launching his new economic policy and opening the doors to the world with great relish, “Let the robber barons come.”

That was long ago. But there is something more worrying given the aggressive mood in which Trump views the world today.

It was just a month or so ago that both President Dissanayake and his international sidekick spoke about the great many MoUs the NPP signed in a year. At first glance it seemed like as many runs as we made against Pakistan last week.

Among this boastful record of 70 MOUs, two raise concerns. One was an agreement signed sometime ago with India. What is of immediate concern is the agreement the government signed with Trump’s great power in the making.

What is that agreement about? What have we committed that could entangle us to have American boots on the ground in Sri Lanka? Why has this agreement not been tabled, and why is it being hidden from the people?

What is our great opposition doing without calling for its contents to be disclosed? Why do the opposition and other institutions that work outside the frame of the government demand to see what is hidden behind it?

Have we been so badly tied up in American strings that the government dare not make it public?

Maybe that vociferous spokesman called Nalin Jayatissa might be made to disclose its contents unless the government has been caught in the tailspin. Who has the presence of mind to ask for it?

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London, where he worked for Gemini News Service. Later he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)