GUEST POST/Don’t compare Joseph Muscat to Donald Trump

By H. P. Baxxter

I don’t think it’s very helpful to compare Joseph Muscat to Donald Trump. It only confuses issues, and it allows the Maltese to play their favourite game, which is to cast opprobrium on another country to avoid doing anything about their own.

There really is no comparison between Muscat and Trump. The United States is a solid democracy, and its institutions are designed to keep one another in check. The US president is boxed in with all kinds of rules and checks and balances, and however nasty he or she may be, the institutions will make damn sure he or she never violates the Constitution.

There are no such checks and balances for the Maltese prime minister. Ours has violated the Constitution even before he was sworn in, and continues to violate it with impunity. The branches of government, instead of acting as a check on the abuse of power, actually facilitate the abuse.

Just look at Malta’s disgusting judiciary. Ditto for parliament, where the Opposition, in a pathetic attempt to look ‘positive’, spent the best part of four years giving their assent to the most revolting actions of this government: Anglu Farrugia as Speaker of the House, Marie Louise Coleiro Preca as head of state, Karmenu Vella as EU Commissioner, the sale of citizenship and more, besides being press-ganged into shoring up the fiction that LGBT this and LGBT that, transgender nonsense, etc are the most important issues facing this country right now.

It could never, and has never happened, in either of the Houses in the United States of America. They know the meaning of opposition. Ours (the Nationalist one, for Labour opposed with a vengeance) tends towards corporatism.

The press? Again, no comparison. The police force? Ditto. The military? The most senior leadership in the US military has criticised the president’s decisions countless times, even when the executive branch tried to play the ‘direct order’ card. And there have been resignations. The Armed Forces of Malta’s senior officers are lickspittles, just like Malta’s journalists, Malta’s members of parliament, Malta’s police officers, Malta’s senior civil servants, Malta’s academics, Malta’s business operators, and Malta’s intellectuals.

So really, no comparison at all. We live in a dictatorship. US citizens do not.

So OK, he wears orange make-up and is really worried about his hair.