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US expats in UAE rate 100 days of Trump presidency

Dubai - Fake news in spotlight as Dems and GOPs meet for a debate in Dubai

The US expats in the UAE are offering different interpretations of how the President Donald Trump has fared over the course of his first 100 days in Oval Office.
On Monday night, four Americans - two Democrats and two Republicans - held a lively debate at the Capital Club in Dubai International Financial City (DIFC), organised by the GCC Business Council and moderated by a Khaleej Times journalist.
In his opening remarks, Tony Graham, the media spokesman for UAE chapter of Democrats Abroad, noted that he was concerned that Donald Trump was damaging America's standing in the world.
"Foreign governments, companies, and individuals need to be able to view US government policy and statements from our leaders with credibility. They need to believe there is a consistency in policy, whether they agree with that policy direction or not," he said. "I think in the first 100 days, it has extension of the campaign in the sense that American credibility and consistency in our foreign policy has been under-whelming. That's a very sad thing."
Conversely, Joshua Atkinson, the Dubai Director of Overseas Republicans UAE, for his part, had a much more positive outlook on the administration.
"President Trump has done a lot positive in the administration. One of the things he's done is (he's) sought to keep his promises, and there are many of those promises that he has kept," he said.
"He's been seeking to re-work of healthcare system, Obamacare, which has been failing and is slated to fail even further. He's kept his promises renegotiate trade deals to his constituency.and the stock market is up, and has hit it's highest peak ever in the last few months."
How fake is media?
Among the major topics of debate was "fake news", a term that Trump often uses to criticise American media outlets.
"I would grant that a lot of the shows on CNN or TV channels and media outlets in the United States don't shed a lot of light on much. They're after ratings and it's a business after all," said Orlando Vidal, the UAE Chair of Democrats Abroad.
"But the New York Times? The New York Times has been around for a long, long time, and it's a really respectable newspaper, and Trump categorise things that they publish also as fake news."
"It's really dangerous when you have a president setting that kind of tone for freedom of the press in the United States," he said.
A second Republican American, Yousef Beydoun, said that freedom of the press "doesn't really mean you can fabricate something."
"Basically, this is what has happened..this is why it's called fake news," he added. "Unfortunately, lots of media channels just want to make sure that their story is the most popular, so they make it as juicy as possible. Maybe some of it is true, but the rest of it is not, and it's always turned around in a way that makes it interesting."
bernd@khaleejtimes.com