What are we to make of Donald Trump’s intervention in the case of Charlie Gard, the desperately ill boy whose painful story has been in the news so much in recent weeks. Earlier today, the President took to Twitter – where else? – to say:
If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the U.K. and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2017
The President’s generous albeit somewhat vague message sends a clear signal to the world: Donald Trump has a heart. For that reason, it will invite cynicism. This is a reality TV news move from a reality media Commander-in-Chief; Trump is virtue-signalling; Trump is making political capital out of a morally complicated human story, presumably in order to show ‘pro-life’ America to be a kinder place than post-Christian Europe, where the courts will not let a child travel to the US for potentially life-saving treatment; he could have made this intervention more discretely, and so on.
Such reactions are not altogether wrong. But it seems foolish to let the suspicion towards Trump – and perhaps in Britain, the shame that our legal system is stopping two parents trying to save their suffering child – blind us to what is ostensibly a kind offer.
Trump has, for once, not phrased his tweet as an act of aggression. He did not say: ‘Terrible that the UK and Europe, which harbour thousands of terrorists each year 4 HUMANITY, will not help save little #CharlieGard. Sad!’ That would have been more his usual style. Whether Trump’s offer makes any difference remains to be seen, but it’s probably worth saying that, however cheesy and mawkish Trump’s interest in Charlie Gard may be, there is no denying that he now appears more human than the European Court of Human Rights.
Comments