Uhuru to meet 'injured' but powerful Donald Trump

NEW YORK

The US leader with whom President Uhuru Kenyatta will confer on Monday currently ranks as the most unpopular White House occupant of the past 75 years.

The disapproval rating for Donald Trump climbed to around 53 percent in polls taken following last week's felony convictions of his former campaign manager and his long-time personal attorney.

Calls for Mr Trump's removal from office are reaching a crescendo as Mr Kenyatta heads for the first Oval Office meeting involving a Kenyan president since Mwai Kibaki's talks with George W Bush 15 years ago.

But while Mr Trump is suffering grievous political wounds, he remains a formidable figure whose doom is by no means a certainty.

APPROVAL RATING

The same polls finding disdain for Mr Trump on the part of a majority of respondents also show that he retains an apparently unshakable base of support that could enable him to serve a full four-year term and even win re-election in 2020.

Mr Trump's current approval rating hovers around the 43 percent mark, which is only three percentage points less than his share of the national vote in the 2016 presidential election.

And as is the case with many wounded creatures, the ever-combative 72-year-old billionaire must be regarded at present with particular wariness.

Mr Trump has established a pattern of lashing out recklessly when he feels cornered.

"This is a perilous political moment for President Donald Trump, which means that it's time to pay a visit to the well of resentment and hatred that got him to the White House," blogger Paul Waldman wrote on Saturday in the Washington Post.

SOUTH AFRICA REMARK

One day after guilty verdicts were reached in the trials of Trump associates Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, the president sought to divert public attention and reinforce his base by sparking a controversy over race relations in South Africa.

"I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers," Mr Trump tweeted on August 22.

"South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers."

That incendiary blast echoed claims by some white South Africans that they are experiencing a "genocide" instigated by the country's black authorities.

In an official response, the South African government warned against "alarmist, false, inaccurate and misinformed, as well as -- in some cases -- politically motivated statements that do not reflect the policies and intentions of the South African government".

WHITE FARMERS

What's actually happening is that the administration of President Cyril Ramaphosa has proposed a constitutional amendment that would enable the government to seize some white-owned agricultural properties to redress racist inequities resulting from decades of white-supremacist rule.

According to Human Rights Watch, black South Africans account for 80 percent of the country's population but possess deeds to only four percent of all farms owned by individual land holders.

And while 47 farmers were killed in South Africa in the 2017-18 fiscal year, that is the smallest total recorded in any of the past 20 years.

Mr Trump's false claims were quickly challenged in sections of the US media, but his effort to stoke white racial resentments at home may well have succeeded.

"Part of Trump’s ability to dodge bullets in the past has rested on his ability to change the subject,” Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist and pollster, told the New York Times last month.

IMPEACHMENT

Mr Trump's continuing political potency is reflected by the US opposition party's reluctance to make his impeachment the centrepiece of the campaigns leading up to the November 6 vote that will determine control of the House of Representatives.

That body of the US Congress, currently run by Mr Trump's Republican Party, has the constitutional authority to initiate impeachment proceedings against a president.

Many rank-and-file Democrats are now demanding that Mr Trump be put on trial for apparent violations of US campaign-finance laws and for other alleged misdeeds.

But the party's leadership views talk of impeachment as "a red cape that will inflame the Republican base and possibly hurt their chances of taking control of the House," the New York Times reported on Friday.

DEMOCRATS

Bill Galston, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, warned in comments to the Guardian:

"At this stage there is an enthusiasm gap between the bases of the respective parties. The only chance the Republicans have to close this gap is to charge that the Democratic party is seeking to undo the result of the 2016 election through legal processes."

Similarly, far-right firebrand Steve Bannon, formerly Mr Trump's White House political strategist, is casting the November congressional election as "a referendum on Trump, up-or-down vote on impeachment."

President Kenyatta will thus enter an explosive political environment as he talks a seat in the Oval Office on Monday.

And how Mr Trump will use the occasion of a meeting with a key African leader cannot be confidently predicted.