Hyderabad: America witnessed its most controversial president in 2017 in its over 200-year-old democracy and his constant hardliner and aggressive pro-American approach is sharpening his blatant image day by day.
Blatant
Trump has openness, blatant, aggressive and even xenophobic attitudes that were considered as a benefit for his opponents while turned out to be wrong in the last four years of his political journey.
His political identity is not hidden behind the wall rather his merely four years old political experience has been more blatant that threw out the experienced political players and changed the election pattern in the US.
Controversy king
Trump, a president surrounded by massive controversies, has defended himself far better than his opponent. His defence has never been defensive it always comes up in a more aggressive way.
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From Stormy Daniel's saga to impeachment and the most recent his COVID-19 treatment suggestions and many others have put him in the spotlight. Although nothing could tarnish his image.
Always a winner
Donald Trump has always been a winner if some exceptions are ignored. He has come out innocent from all controversies and his white-handed reemergence from controversies made his presence stronger.
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Trump-sponsored China trade war badly affected the communist regime while it benefitted the US a lot and it sharpens the president's hardliner America First approach.
Similar Democrats' impeachment attempt failed and it boosted his presidency and it was clearly visible during his State of the Union Speech in February.
The major exception to his winner image includes North Korea where the president couldn't convince Kim Jong-un to abandon his nuclear programs.
Aggressive opportunist
He has been frequent in turning problems into opportunities and in exposing dark secrets of his opponent as the Obamagate still reemerges sometime.
Whether it's Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or his recent challenger Joe Biden, Trump has been constant offensive against his opponent.
Political journey
Entering the 2016 presidential race, gliding down the escalator of Trump Tower with wife Melania, he swept away a record number of political rivals to capture the Republican party's nomination.
With a message strong on law and order, Trump invoked his now-familiar mantra, "make America great again," as he accepted his party's nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
The president was banking on a booming American economy and highlighting fighting crime to win him into a second term.
But Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden are now staring down a coronavirus pandemic that has turned 2020 campaign logistics on their head. Trump's handling of the pandemic has already been a major flashpoint in his race against Biden, who spent much of the summer off the campaign trail and at his home in Delaware because of the virus.
Biden has since resumed a more active campaign schedule, but with small, socially distanced crowds. He also regularly wears a mask in public, something Trump mocked him publicly.
From the earliest days of the Trump administration, the country has been roiled by protests. In January 2017 reaction was swift after the president imposed a travel ban and pushed ahead with his plans to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico.
The president has been able to count on domestic successes, including appointing two conservative justices - Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh - to the Supreme Court in his first term and the anticipated appointment of Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election.
But as he pushed his way onto the foreign stage, Trump has met few successes.
Trump, who in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, was playing up his "friendship" and positive relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping in an apparent effort to preserve trade negotiations with the Chinese, now seems to have signed off on an all-out assault on China.
After initially touting his strong relationship with Kim Jung Un, with high-profile meetings in Singapore and Vietnam, North Korea in June officially ended its diplomatic relationship with the U.S. Efforts to get Pyongyang to relinquish nuclear weapons did not work.
For the past three and a half years, the administration has careered between Trump's attempts to curry favor and friendship with Vladimir Putin and longstanding deep-seated concerns about the Russian president's intentions.
Suspicions about Trump and Russia go back to his 2016 campaign. His appeal to Moscow to dig up his opponent's emails, his plaintive suggestions that Russia and the United States should be friends and a series of contacts between his advisers and Russians raised questions of impropriety that led to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
Mueller, along with the U.S. intelligence community, did find that Russia interfered with the election, to sow chaos and also help Trump's campaign. But Trump has cast doubt on those findings, most memorably in a 2018 appearance on stage with Putin in Helsinki.
Trump's approach to Russia was at center stage in the impeachment proceedings, when U.S. officials testified that the president demanded political favors from Ukraine in return for military assistance it needed to combat Russian aggression. But the issue ended up as a largely partisan exercise, with House Democrats voting to impeach Trump and Senate Republicans voting to acquit.
The grim reality of the coronavirus pandemic testing Trump's leadership and political survival skills unlike any challenge he has faced in office, including the special counsel investigation and the impeachment probe that imperiled his presidency.
The early fallout from the coronavirus pandemic is sobering. The Trump campaign 2020 slogan — "Keep America Great" — is already painfully disconnected from the reality on the ground in most states now fighting massive unemployment and health concerns.
The U.S. leads the world in cases as well as deaths, which have exceeded 2,15,000. With the U.S. tally of confirmed infections above 8 million and new cases surging.
The economy's recovery has also shown signs of stalling amid a resurgence of the coronavirus.
Trump appears acutely aware that his political fortunes will be inextricably linked to his handling of the pandemic. The once-daily lengthy briefings faded after a few months as the White House attempted to control pandemic messaging.
Trump's own health came under heavy scrutiny after he spent several nights at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, after a positive COVID-19 test. The diagnosis marked a blow for a president who has been trying desperately to convince the American public that the worst of the pandemic is behind them.
At the same time, the Trump administration is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, it is confronted by protests springing up following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him down and pressed Floyd's neck with his knee. Violent demonstrations have raged in scores of American cities, a level of unrest unseen for decades.
Nightly for months, protesters took to the streets of Portland, Oregon, for demonstrations against racial injustice that have devolved into vandalism and clashes with authorities. Long after such unrest subsided in other cities, small groups of protesters in Portland continued to set fires, spray graffiti on public buildings and battle officers.
In Biden and Trump, voters will choose between two white septuagenarians with dramatically different prescriptions for health care, climate change, foreign policy and leadership in an era of extreme partisanship.
The 74-year-old Republican president finishes his first term struggling against the well-financed campaign of his 77-year old opponent, Joe Biden.
Biden becomes the oldest major-party presidential nominee in modern history. And having spent most of his life as an elected official in Washington, no nominee has had more experience in government.
But now Biden is up against an adversary the likes of which he has never faced in his decades-long political career.
With inputs from agencies
