New Dusk in America
As the Gambia celebrated a new dawn with Yahya Jammeh finally tucked his tail between his trembling legs, the United States of America began a new journey into prehistory as white supremacist Donald Trump consummated his dream to “take back our country”. It is poetic justice on display because America had a Trump coming all along. When you don’t appreciate the positive, when you elevate lying to the level of statecraft, you deserve the demon you unleash.
Congratulations to the Republican Party for gifting their country with the most ethically challenged specimen that ever aspired to rule the greatest country on earth. They had it coming when they spent eight years frustrating all the efforts of President Obama. Americans deserve Trump. The same people that clamoured for a return of their soldiers from overseas duties after the fiasco of Iraq engineered by a Republican President, are now hankering after new wars and fresh games of domination.
In Trump they are now forced to embrace their worst nightmare - a megalomaniac hate peddler and serial liar who speaks like a reincarnation of Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany who famously said if you repeat a lie often enough people will begin to believe it. Because his worldview is ever so narcissistic, he floats on a bubble of selfcongratulations like the agama lizard that fell from the Iroko tree.
As Trump took the oath of office as the 45th President of the United States, the words of Jabin Botsford of the Washington Post continued playing a staccato at the back of my mind: “Trump conducted a dirty, dishonest campaign that sullied the very presidency he won… he trafficked in racism and demagoguery, and seems to have had poll workers in far-off Moscow…. He has done nothing to woo the majority of Americans who rejected his candidacy and has, instead, adhered to his schoolyard habit of tweeting his every grievance, denigrating his every critic, … It is a ‘Gong Show’ with no gong in sight.”
The demonstrations that followed his inauguration showed that millions of Americans still consider Trump an illegitimate president. In the last election, 65,844,610 voted against him. The demonstrations were a throwback to the Civil Rights marches of the sixties. Yet, he has nothing but insults for his opponents who he calls enemies. America is in for uncertain times with a very unstable captain at the helm.
While Israel and Russia gloat over their joint coup that propelled Trump to the White House, I have news for them: a house built with saliva will disintegrate in the morning dew. I visited Israel and Palestine last September and I am convinced that the two-state solution endorsed by the United Nations is still the viable solution to the age-long problem. Instead of working towards the realisation of the two state dream, Republicans and their acolytes are revving up sentimental rhetoric about Obama siding Muslims against Christians. And many Christians are biting the bait. If racist Trump - the man who boasts of grabbing women by their unmentionables - is the new face of Christianity, then God help us!
In the last eight years during which Republicans swore to make America ungovernable for the first Black president, Obama brought down the number of Uninsured from 16.1% to 8.6%; Unemployment Rate from 8.3% to 4.6%; Annual Deficit from $1,400 Billion to $587 Billion; GDP rose from minus 2.8% to 3.5% and Home Prices rose from minus 7.1% to 5.2%. Yet Trump supporters see nothing good in Obama, preferring Russia’s Putin to their own president for the first time in history. Poll figures show that Putin had 35% favourable rating and 51% unfavourable rating among Trump followers while Obama had 9% favourable rating and 90% unfavourable rating among the same group of deplorables. Throughout his presidency, Republicans undermined and disrespected Obama to the extent of inviting Netanyahu to address Congress against all established protocol.
Now that he had made it to the White House by hook and by crook, Trump will find out that reality could be many shades of grey. It is not all about black and white. He will also come to the realisation that making business deals and refusing to disclose tax returns is not the same thing as leading the free world. Being a pathological liar has its limits even where a man believes his own lies. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously noted, “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”
I wish America well. It is a great country, even if Trump thinks it can only be great under his watch. Those of us who admire America from a distance are impressed that it is a potpourri of diverse nationalities and ethnicities with immense opportunities for everyone. Trump’s rhetoric suggests that he believes that some citizens are more American than others. The coming months will witness the reawakening of movements dedicated to asserting the civil rights of Americans as enshrined in the US Constitution. Groups such as the NAACP, The Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter and others have their work cut out.
The courts will be busy. The division in the country will reach a crescendo when the cluelessness of Trump becomes as stark as day and night and mind-blowing revelations of his many underhand deals break to the open. When Americans realise that their beloved nation is on its way to perdition like the Persian, Roman, British, Mongol, Arab and other empires which ruled the world at various times in history, the system will eventually have to ease him out.
I wish I could be proved wrong, but Mike Pence may turn out to be more than a spare tyre. I’m hearing a refrain of the Biblical prophesy in respect of the Ultimate Betrayer: “His place let another take”.