How to Manage Trump, According to a Diplomat He Fired in Anger
Suehaila Rizvi is a prominent Pakistani scholar who, in her new book, “The President Will Follow the Law or Not,” explains how, throughout the years, she learned to think and act on her inner strength, as opposed to how other Americans had managed to behave with the president.
Suehaila Rizvi spent her career as an academic at the University of Minnesota, where she taught political science and international relations from 1990 to 2014. She is the author of “Hindus and Muslims: The Making of an Enemy in Pakistan,” “The Muslim World: What it Is and What It Can Become,” and “An Uncertain Legacy: Indian Politics in Pakistan after Independence.”
Suehaila is the director of the Pakistan program at Harvard’s Institute of International Studies, where she has served for 13 years and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is now a Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins.
I sat down with Suehaila in Islamabad in early December, and here is an edited version of our conversation.
The conversation of law and politics or the law and life is not new. But it is a conversation more important, and more essential, in today’s era. In the book you say that you think the president needs to learn to manage the law by following its limits. What are some of the ways in which he has not adhered to that? What are the things that have happened that you think led him to say some things in a way that was not in the best interest of Pakistan or Americans, or even the law of the United States?
The most striking thing about Trump is the number of things he has said which break the law of the United States or violate the law of the United States. For example,