Rise and fall of MAGA USA – a treatise on falsehood and propaganda
By Achike Chude
For the second time I think, sometime last week, Ichie Tiko Okoye once more took Donald Trump to the cleaners in a diatribe usually associated with TDS – ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ in America. This political malady that is essentially left-inclined in the United States and has become the tool of the American left in their attempt to stop a second term president of a ‘once beloved’ Donald J Trump who once paraded the corridors of the American entertainment Industry and was a well-known businessman.
Ichie Tiko Okoye has obviously built his conclusions on very faulty premises and has thus endangered the validity of such conclusions.
Donald Trump, hate him or love him has defined America’s politics in more ways than one. It is true to say that his entrance to high level American politics has forever transformed and shaped not only American political life, but has brought about a chain reaction that today reverberates in American culture and social life.
Mind you, he wasn’t seen as a perfect person and had his own share of warts, gnats, and all. But truly speaking, is there such a person that is without those foibles that make us very much human in a world full of uncertainties and dangerous suppositions?
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The man who today is labeled by some ‘malcontents’ as ‘dangerous’ to American democracy was once the toast of Hollywood and wined and dined with notable blacks like Jesse Jackson whose political ambition he supported, Opra Winfrey who once claimed that she wanted to be like Trump, and so many others, including whites and other minorities. At that historical time, Trump had no sins and was not a racist – until the day he decided to run for the presidency of the United States.
This was a sacrilege – for a non-initiate and non-establishment person to run for the highest office in the land without the say so and permission of America’s ‘democracy’ gatekeepers. He had to be stopped.
In order to do that, the system went into maximum overdrive and generated a plethora of political dynamics that threatened to envelope and engulf him right from the moment he became president (they couldn’t stop his 2016 victory). The vilification has continued till the present.
For a man not given to deep introspection, calculation and subtlety, Donald Trump unwittingly and easily handed himself over to his traducers and the defenders of a status quo that had become degenerate and bent on destroying all that had symbolized America – her greatness, triumphs, and challenges. His rhetoric, sometimes laced with the absence of diplomatese were deliberately turned, twisted, and subverted to convey a different, dark and sinister meaning by those too frightened to see an America that no longer conformed to a stereotype. Simply put, Trump was an outsider and did not belong.
And here lay the mystery of Donald Trump the billionaire businessman who wined and dined with the high and mighty in America – the gateway to obtaining a pro-establishment pass, and somehow, was seen as dangerous to the status quo.
The trial and persecution of Donald Trump by America’s political establishment is the type of stuff that helped generate the fictions that made Hollywood great. But today, the great irony is that the same Hollywood has been incorporated as an essential element and partisan ally in the great political, cultural, and economic battles going on in the United States. The outcome of such a battle, come November 2024 in the general elections will determine the rapidity or slowdown of America’s decline, with analysts predicting that the reign of the ‘great American empire’ is coming to an end with China being the major beneficiary.
The Watergate scandal in 1974 that saw to the demystification of presidential power overreach showcased the best of America’s politics and politicians. Presented with ample evidence of gross abuse of political powers the party of then incumbent president, Richard Nixon had no choice after a strenuous battle than to cut him loose.
Though benighted by their own flaws, those American politicians of yore were imbued with better motivations and vision for the nation.
Trump’s trials and persecution today speaks volumes about the decline in political values, ideals, and practices in today’s America. Indeed, all those demised actors, both state and non-state who led the push to clean up the system then, would be shaking in their graves to see the death of basic political decency in governance today. Certainly, those still alive from that era must be quaking in anguish at the rot that has become America’s politics.
Watergate, perpetrated by a Republican political leadership is nowhere close to the deliberate subversion of government and governance in the United States today by the Democrats-led government. They have generously amplified everything that they have accused the Republicans of and done much worse. Perhaps, apart from the various attempts to keep Trump off the ballots (a completely un-American thing), in November 2024 through manufactured conspiracies, and spurious indictments by power crazed and klieg-light seeking D.A’s in Democrat-controlled cities, the greatest evidence of the wilful or unconscious attempt to destroy America from within, is the deliberate and unprecedented open borders to over eight million illegal aliens into America in a space of just three years.
It is no wonder that minorities like blacks and Latinos, once the mainstays and bastions of Democrats’ voting blocks are shifting their votes and numbers to … wait for it – Donald Trump.
All of a sudden, it would seem that the travails of Trump have woken up something in them. They are now asking questions that they dared not ask in the past for fear of being called Uncle Tom. They are now having the temerity and gumption to get off the plantation. Most importantly, they have seen a difference between the attitude and misrepresented speeches of Donald Trump and his policies and accomplishments as erstwhile president. They were in a better place. They have not forgotten.
Is MAGA (Make America Great Again) on the wane in the United States as suggested by TiKo Okoye?
I would think not. Rather, the opposite seems to be the case. It is on the rise and the reasons are obvious.
Ichie TiKo Okoye obviously got his characterization of the Trump phenomenon wrong by failing to properly interrogate the nature and character of today’s American politics and understanding the nuances therefrom.
Aside this, I want to believe that TiKo Okoye is a noble man.