During the last 10 days of the horrifying storm of the US election, I was in three different states of the United States, namely: Atlanta Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. These three states, as most people probably know are some of the traditional political safe havens of the Republican Party and there were no surprises from discussions, debates and forecasts making-the-round in the media among the university teachers in the states that Donald Trump would sweep the polls in these places.
However, the world was turned and shocked with the turn of events within the very last week of the elections elsewhere in accordance with popular expectations and the forecasts in the media. The depth of horror ramifying the entire landscape is best visualised in the raging and passionate anger propelling the nationwide protestation in American streets, the like of which has hardly been seen for decades. The voice of rejection of Mr. Trump, the perceived jester in the political arena of this election, has now become the President of the world’s most powerful nation.
Judging from the clownery, the base political ranting and the unmistakable superficiality (many call it crass ignorance or mental vacuity) demonstrated by Mr. Trump and his campaign team, not many would even dream that America could be sent from that elevated democratic high horse to the gutters that America found itself at the end of the elections. How did the United States come into this sorry pass and where will the country go from here? This question has been asked quite loudly by many public commentators and discerning minds in the US and across the Globe. Many have wondered aloud what will become the fate of this ‘model of democracy’ with the widely unexpected ascendancy of Donald Trump.
Most traumatized by this situation are the most thoughtful in society, especially those, in the words of a leading columnist of the New York Times, Paul Krugman’s “those left, centre and even right who saw Donald Trump as the worse man ever to run for president.” What political strategy can be fashioned for all those in the centre left and the large population of white educated elites? Added to this people of thought are the minority citizens and communities – the African- American and the Hispanics, the targeted victims of this electoral outcome against whom Trump’s wall would be built and among whom three million would be jailed or flushed out of America or both.
Let us forget for the moment that the expectations from the election are hardly about principles, facts, reality and truth but the attainment of power because as it became clear, the Trump campaign and his personality as a candidate including his nauseating body language reek of, again according to Krugnam, ‘unprecedented dishonesty and lies’ which yielded political capital in the end over and above the serious issues of the economy, values, ideals and humanity that aspirants to the American presidency, including the electorally deprived Hillary Clinton, have always espoused as cardinal dicta for seeking power to the hallowed White House. And this elevated vision for running for the American Presidency became most manifest in the Obama tenure, and which, no doubt, left enviable record of performance in the service of society in terms of public good deliver.
One fear, and which manifest legacies propelled Obama’s very active campaign engagement, is that, in spite of Trump’s token rethink after meeting the President in the White House, stand the great risk of being cleaned out by the new government. As I travelled back to Nigeria, my innermost thoughts pertained to, not just the fate of the Americans themselves but the level of ignorance of history that produced this new hurricane in office. Namely, that history never fails to repeat itself; that all empires, no matter how mythical in its monstrosity and how- larger- than life in its political assumptions, must end. The American empire with the frightening level of political descent symbolized by the new man in power seems to me set for a rapid collapse. This is neither a prayer nor a wish. It is the sign of the barometer of power stirring the entire world in the face.
That is the reality, which seems to me beyond what may be seen at some four or eight nightmarish years of America’s governance history inexorable. In addition, I will be glad, if four years from now, I am proved wrong—and the theatrician that we watched with all the agony at our disposal turns out to be a political success. Yet, it seems to me that the consequences of this Trump enthronement will not go in a hurry. As Ben Hubbard recently reported from Beirut alongside Ann Barnard from Syria, “the main casualty in this (US) election is the idea of America the leader of the democratic world by soft power.’’
Who, on other hand, are the beneficiaries of this electoral decision in America? Some hold the view, and this is a very rampant view in the United States and, I think in its neighbourhood, is that those who perceive Obama and his possible extension in Hillary Clinton as the clog in the wheel of reclaiming America for the white supremacists, the large population of non-literate white proletariat and the cynically silent but poll-vocal elites in the GOP, worked extremely hard to produce Trump.
The Clinton women who are visibly shocked, frightened and even disgusted at this election at the collapse of the dream of the Country’s first female president cannot be part of the beneficiaries of this banally sexist and misogynist new president. Many in the liberal zone where Hillary Clinton won nearly ninety percent of her votes cannot, by any figment of the imagination, be a part of the beneficiaries of this election.
The African-American, the Hispanics and other people in the margins of the American states are genuinely experiencing a real “sense of foreboding” and alienation already as they cannot be the beneficiaries of this election. However, there is this intriguing perception by Trump’s apologists which I find eloquently and roguishly represented in the views by one Lawrence Freeman in a statement that I found in my mailbox. He wrote in what he called the “summary of my thought about the US election” that he felt that no one should be surprised by the outcome of the election offering these very frightening words; “anyone who has witnessed what has happened to the US and (the world) under eight years of Bush and eight years of Obama” must be able to understand why Trump won.’’
This is because, as Freeman opined, Trump is an ‘imperfect vehicle for the rage of large section of the population against the establishment for making their life worse…there is a growing anger by people around the world against the elites /establishment dictating policies that are adversely affecting their lives.’’ Freeman found the sixteen-year reign of these two presidents to have been characterised by mindless invasion of countries, regime change, killing of millions including American soldiers. These two governments prodigally spent trillions of American dollars as the living condition of Americans worsened and declined.
What I find most cynical and even philistine is the uncritical lumping of Bush and Obama as if they pursued same ideologies and same war- mongering criminalities. This is the kind of deception that produced Mr Trump. The truth is that Obama’s tenure, as the sane part of the world would definitely agree, terminated one of the worse recessions Americans had faced, generated millions of jobs and humanised American’s relationship with most part of the world.
The bizarre tendency is that some nations of the world have begun to scramble to “do business’’ with Trump. They include nations like Russia and Japan, and even a country like Egypt who believed that Trump is someone they can ‘’strike a deal with” because as Mr. Abdel Fattah e-le Sisi, the President of Egypt said, through his agent “you can’t make any deal with this Clinton woman. She is a democrat and will come talk to us about human rights”. This is the sad point of the story; the race to reclaim America for the white race and for the Republicans’ anti-rights and anti-human but rabid capitalist accumulationist vision will sink America in the face of the sane world for which humanity is the first vernacular axiom of civilisation–, which America has for long proclaimed to champion.
As Trump hurries to carry out the repeal of Obamacare, reverse US climate policy on global warming which Trump calls ‘hoax’ as he envisions the termination of the Clean Power Plan, which is at the centre of Obama climate change policy, the world under Trump will be like a furnace and humanity is the victim.
