While reporters livestreamed footage from Libya’s interior of men being sold as slaves, Donald Trump was tweeting about turning down the honor of being named TIME magazine’s Man of the Year, a boast TIME’s editor said had “not a speck of truth.” While humans were being auctioned off at $400 a head, the head of the free world uttered not a word of acknowledgement.
While appalling proofs of this massive and systemic crime against humanity gained media traction, sending outrage and seismic tremors of public fury around the globe, he who some tout as the “Most Powerful Man in the World” was engaged in a popularity contest on Twitter:
And while his global counterparts (French President Emmanuel Macron, the French Foreign Ministry, the secretary general of the United Nations, the president of the European Commission, the Libyan interior minister and the leaders of several African nations) and even soccer stars and entertainers decried the Libyan slave trade, Mr. Trump remained conspicuously, resoundingly, emphatically mute.
If ever one wondered whether Trump, in his ambition to be “The Most Powerful Man in the World,” failed to consider the global accountability inherent in such a title, the proof of his echoing silence rings loud and clear. He is capable, as the world knows, of tweeting out scorching hashtags when his personal ineptitudes are exposed, his numbers are weak, his secrets are sniffed out, or when his ego is bruised. But when defenseless men on the far side of the planet are flogged and treated as chattel, he chooses to say nothing. Such inaction is a deafening declaration regarding his values, priorities, and his definition of power. His non-speak lays bare this appalling worldview: that human lives — particularly lives that are African, invisible on his ethnocentric map, destitute and therefore of no economic use to him — are disposable.
Far from being a foreign or local problem, the Libyan slave trade is a global cataclysm, one in which the U.S. and other Western nations are implicated. Over the six years since the fall of Gaddafi and the lack of an immediate follow-up strategy, the vacuum of leadership has fueled a roiling political anarchy, which has stoked the flames of a living hell, enabling a massive network of human trafficking with all its attendant evils.
Given that Trump is obviously disinterested in or incapable of being truly powerful, which means showing leadership against this international scourge, it behooves others of deeper humanity, greater moral courage and a keener gift for diplomacy to take up the gauntlet. Truly global leaders from all sectors must now prove themselves worthy of their influential positions, many of which have been granted only by the public’s voice. The exercise of that position must not be about amassing personal power, but about exposing and expunging abuses of power, as in Libya where the vulnerable are entirely stripped of power.
Leaders must ensure safety, restore dignity and grant life-governing power to our fellow human beings whose intrinsic value cannot be expressed in dollars, cents, dinars, euros or any currency known to man. Their lives, like all lives, are incalculable, equal in value to all others in the world, including those who are also slaves — slaves to their insatiable egos, though they profess to be the “Most Powerful in the World.”
Melissa Dalton-Bradford
Melissa Dalton-Bradford is an author, humanitarian, public speaker, international consultant, activist, wife, and mother of four. She is also a co-founder of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, a nonpartisan grassroots organization dedicated to the ideals of decency, honor, accountability, transparency, and justice in government.