German Chancellor Angela Merkel is having trouble forming a new government after her party came in first in Gemany’s parliamentary election on September 24.
Just in the nick of time, along comes Simon Anholt, a German political consultant who, in a TED talk in June 2014, announced that he has developed the Good Country Index, which measures what each country contributes most to the common good of humanity and what it takes away, relative to its size (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Anholt). CNN’s Doug Criss tells us all about it at http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/17/world/nation-brand-ranking-trnd/index.html. His article is “Germany supplants US as the country with the best global reputation.”
So why, as Criss reports, has the United States of America lost its position as Number One on the Good Country Index?
Readers of Apocryphal Press won’t be surprised at all: it’s the Donald Trump Effect.
We’ve been saying for some time that after Donald Trump became our Commander in Chief, Angela Merkel quickly emerged as the Leader of the Free World.
The Anholt-GfK Nation Brands Index measures fifty countries in multiple categories, including governance, exports, culture, people, tourism and immigration/investment. The United States was the overall No. 1 in 2016, but Germany came out number one this year.
As Criss and Anholt report, America’s brand has taken a major hit in the age of Trump. Anholt said, “We are witnessing a ‘Trump effect,’ following Trump’s focused political message of ’America First.'”
This year is not the first time that the United States has experienced such a big drop in the Good Country Index. Anholt said that the US saw a “similar fall in global perception” after Bush Two was reelected in 2004, and the US fell to number seven.
Associate solitary reporter Larry Theis, our chief European correspondent, wondered out loud whether Russian president Vladimir Putin (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин) and his expert team of hackers and election manipulators were behind these developments. Russia, of course, didn’t even come close to making the top ten in Anholt’s list. “Putin is fluent in German from his five years in Dresden, in East Germany, as a low-level KGB operative,” Theis reminded us. “He used a cover identity as a translator. Putin is a master of deceit and manipulation, and he has proved himself to be a genius in manipulating, not only the 2016 presidential election in the US — far more than
that — he has conned Trump into thinking that he is Trump’s best personal friend.”
When associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones told Trump that the US fell to Number 6 in the Good Country Index because of the Trump Effect, Trump immediately said that it’s all the fault of CNN in general and Doug Criss, who is African American, in particular. “CNN is disgusting,” Trump told Jones, "and that’s why I’m gonna insist that Sessions has to do everything he can, through his Antitrust Division, to keep CNN off the air completely."
Trump also seized, with glee, on the troubles of Ohio’s Democratic Party. Seems that Ohio Supreme Court Justice William O’Neill, a Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio — a man who is evidently a bachelor — is openly boasting about his sexual prowess, according to Lindsey Bever in yesterday’s WaPo. As reported in today’s Denver Post, O’Neill is defending “heterosexual males” amid mounting accusations of male sexual misconduct here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. This, after some damn fool Navy flyers based at Whdbey Island Naval Station in Washington State used their Navy EA-18G Growler jet to sketch, in the clear blue sky, a cartoonish rendering of male genitalia. The F/A Super Hornet which created the images specializes in electronic warfare (http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/17/navy-penis-skywriting-washington/).
When ASR Jones told Trump about the Navy’s male genitalia rendering in Washington State, he called Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, a former Republican Congresswoman from New Mexico, and congratulated her on what she is doing for his morale. Trump won’t say a damn thing about Alabama’s leading sexist, Judge Roy Moore, but he loves attacking Democratic senator Al Franken — Trump seems to have totally forgotten the Hollywood Access tapes fiasco, which nearly cost him the election.