Mahathir's Hypocrisy At Calling Out The Trade Deal

When Mahathir Mohamad filed a police report accusing Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of “sabotaging” Malaysia via a US trade agreement, the gesture felt less like a legal intervention and more like a return to a very specific kind of political theater. At its core, the report does not present evidence of a crime; it presents a political argument dressed up as one. Trade agreements are negotiated by governments the world over, involving a messy reality of trade-offs, compromises, and risks.

They can be brilliant or flawed, but a disagreement over policy does not automatically amount to treason or a constitutional breach. If it did, every major treaty Malaysia has signed over the last four decades would warrant a criminal investigation. If there were a genuine belief that the Constitution had been violated or that Parliament was bypassed, the appropriate venues, the courts and the Dewan Rakyat, exist for precisely that purpose. By choosing a police report instead, the issue is intentionally shifted away from the substance of law and into the realm of spectacle and accusation.

There is a hollow ring to Mahathir’s portrayal of himself as the lone defender of sovereignty, given that Malaysia entered into numerous binding international arrangements under his own long leadership without them ever being framed as "selling out" the nation. Sovereignty, it seems, only becomes fragile when he is no longer the one exercising power. This episode is impossible to separate from a historical pattern where Mahathir has repeatedly framed political conflicts as existential threats. Whether it was the judicial interference of the late 1980s or the moral crusade against Anwar in 1998, these actions were initially justified as necessary protections of the state, only to be recognized decades later as serious institutional abuses. In each case, a thumping declaration of certainty came first, while the reckoning arrived much later. 

The report against Anwar follows this same script: a complex policy issue is simplified into betrayal, and disagreement is recast as sabotage to generate headlines rather than understanding. None of this suggests the trade deal should escape scrutiny, Malaysians have every right to demand transparency and debate its implications,but that debate must be grounded in facts and conducted through institutions, not reduced to criminal allegations without a legal basis. Malaysia has outgrown politics by accusation; history has shown that declarations made with absolute confidence do not always age well, and a police report should never be used as a substitute for serious political debate.