The selfish president who shrank America

The president who promised to "make America great again" is the one who made it smaller than any other president in modern times. Foreign leaders - friends, partners and allies, but mainly rivals and foes - saw Donald Trump's America as a country that is unreliable, phobic, introverted, uninterested in issues like human and civil rights violations, and incapable or unwilling to assume its traditional role as leader on a slew of vital questions, most notably demonstrated by the United States turning its back on the Paris Agreement for climate change and more recently on the World Health Organization.

Behaving in the manner of a banana republic dictator, Trump was often driven more by private interests and those of his entourage than by any desire to work for the good of the nation.

Much of the media, meanwhile, must also be held to account for the part it played in...