Thousands from across Britain have staged protest rallies against the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. This is while hundreds of thousands of people from across the United States have descended on Washington to voice their anger and anxiety over Trump’s presidency a day after he took the oath of office.
Catherine Shakdam, director of Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies in London, believes these protests do not have anything to do with public outrage, adding that they are orchestrated in such a way that they look like “a grand democratic outcry” on the part of not just the Americans but the Europeans.
“So I find it a little bit contrived and I think it has been engineered in such a way that you have the deep state of America trying to pressure the presidency before he actually got a chance to do anything,” the analyst told Press TV in an interview on Saturday.
She also said it is interesting that people have risen up against Trump’s policy which hasn’t taken shape yet, but when the “neocon establishment in the United States was selling war across the world, no one was objecting.”
She went on to say it is strange that people can demonstrate against Trumps’ comments about minorities but no one was saying anything when former president Barack Obama was killing civilians across the Middle East with the drone strikes.
Elsewhere in her remarks, Shakdam noted Europe is “very scared” that all the policies it has followed for the past decades are going to blow up in its face because they are not going to have anybody to protect them.
“What you see today is the crumbling of the American Empire and the European capitals are terrified because they do not know what is going to happen. They do not have many great friends in the East because they have continuously tried to promote wars over there,” she said.
She also opined that Trump “is not going to be a danger to the rest of the world”, arguing that he will withdraw the United States from the international scene and will try to rebuild it rather than promoting wars.
The activist further suggested that if the Americans have a problem with Trump’s presidency, they should try to change their constitution because enough people have elected him.