Basic decency will tame wild West Wing once Trump is gone
...and security at the Capitol was far better when I was there with George Bush
BE there. Will be wild!’ This is what Donald Trump tweeted a few weeks ago, exhorting his supporters to attend a rally to coincide with the formal joint session of the US Senate and Congress. Little did anyone forecast how wild it would be. Even Trump must have been taken aback by the turn of events last week in Washington.
But no one should really be surprised. Trump has, since the election, incited his supporters by feeding them a ‘fake news’ narrative that the election had been stolen from them by fraud.
Some will maintain that Trump didn’t incite the crowd in his own lengthy speech. But his sidekick Rudy Giuliani, at the same rally, called on the crowd to settle the dispute over the election with ‘trial by combat’. Is it any wonder some of the crowd took him at his word?
Later, Trump’s son, Donald Jnr, castigated those in the Republican Party, who didn’t support Trump by saying ‘they are not willing to fight, the people who did nothing to stop the steal’.
Strict
Videos have since emerged showing Trump, members of his immediate family and close supporters celebrating while they watched the gathering crowd. It’s not known if their mood changed when the storming of Capital Hill began.
As someone who, during my political career, has been in the Oval Office and Capitol Hill many times, I was astounded to see the scenes of siege unfold. I could not believe it was physically possible for anyone to storm the building, in such a fashion.
Even as a VIP attending meetings with then president George W Bush in the Oval Office, I was subjected to strict checking and security, before I got in.
Indeed, on one visit to the White House, myself, the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern, and our entourage had to make a quick exit from the complex, in order to avoid getting caught in a total lockdown. A single intruder had scaled a perimeter wall, and was seen walking in the grounds. All hell broke loose, as we were getting into our vehicles to leave. If we had been a minute later, we would have been held there for hours, until the crisis ended.
After last week’s incredible scenes, serious questions have to be raised as to how, in one of the most supposedly secure locations on earth, a rabble could, with relative ease, breach the security surrounding the complex. It is tragic that there was a loss of life, in such fashion, in the seat of US democracy. Undoubtedly, there would have been a greater loss of life had those who rioted been armed with lethal weapons. Unusually, and thankfully, some of the more radical elements of Trump’s supporters left their guns at home.
In any competitive setting, be it in sport or in politics, there is nothing worse than a bad loser. And Trump is a very bad loser. The latest proof of this is that, like a spoiled child, he has declared that he does not intend to go to Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Previously, the leaked phone call of Trump pressuring fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn the election in that State was a case of political corruption at its worst. And yet, subsequently, he didn’t resile from that attitude.
His speech to the mob, last Wednesday, before they went on to riot, clearly, was designed to put pressure on his fellow party members, such as his own Vice President, Mike Pence, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to back his charade.
He addressed the baying crowd saying that they would be clapping for those who supported their cause, but would not be clapping for others who didn’t back them.
Indeed, during the height of the disturbances, Trump, apparently, refused a call by Pence for reinforcements, in a petulant response to his VP for not siding with him. He also dubbed some of t he j udges he r ecently appointed as being ‘ungrateful’ because they declined to back his legal challenges against the election result. All of these instances are, yet again, proof positive that the man is not fit for high political office and that the sooner we see the back of him the better.
One good thing that may come out of last week’s events is that they may irreparably damage Trump’s chances, and those of his offspring, of ever getting back into the Oval Office. He succeeded in garnering a huge level of support in the election, but the scenes in Washington must have swayed many of his voters to waver in their support.
Having said that, since the election, I believe that Trump’s campaign over the validity of the election has been a clever ruse to cast continuing doubt on Biden’s right to be president. His hope was that by repeating it more and more people would believe it.
Victory
His tactic brought to my mind the infamous statement by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that ‘if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth’. And, if given a platform over the next few years, Trump and his family would have continued to chip away at Biden’s government to such an extent that, come the next election, he or his son would hope to walk straight back into the Oval Office.
One event that slipped under the radar, last week, was the Democrat double victory in the Georgia run- off election. Their two new senators defied the odds by winning, and it means that the Biden administration now has control of the Senate. Most pundits felt that Biden would have been a lame duck president if the Republicans had the upper hand in the Senate.
The Georgia result means that it was a slam- dunk victory for the Democrats. But despite all of Biden’s success, he has a huge job ahead in unifying a very divided United States.
I would like to think that last week’s happenings will diminish Trump’s opportunity to dominate the Republican Party into the future.
Hopefully, the decent and honourable members of that party, such as Mitch McConnell, will ‘take back proper control’ of that organisation, and ‘make it great again’!