The flaws, virtues, persecutions and final triumph of Donald Trump
By Achike Chude
They say that lightning does not strike twice. Or to put it better, lightning does not strike the same place and the same time twice. It will be an anathema, an uncommon and impossible phenomenon. It will never happen.
What a lie!
It did happen.
In America.
In 2016 and 2024.
A few days ago, Donald Trump, perhaps one of the most divisive figures in modern American history defied the ‘science of gravity,’ hyperbolically speaking, and like the phoenix, the legendary immortal bird, literally resurrected from the dead. In both instances, he destroyed establishment politics and the powerful people who run it. But most importantly, he took on the mainstream media, one of the most powerful institutions in the world, demystified it, exposed it, and ridiculed it, turning it to a spectre of crass propaganda and derision.
What an unbelievable and incredibly beautiful farcical twist of fate!
What a momentous, joyous, incendiary, and tempestuous beyond-the-pale occurrence that last happened over one hundred and twenty years ago in America when Grover Cleveland became president the second time non-consecutively.
No politician has ever been his own worst enemy than Donald Trump. And yet, no politician has ever been his own greatest asset than Donald Trump – a paradox that defines the extreme love-hate relationship people have with him. He repels with great force and yet he attracts with even greater force.
He is rich, extremely rich. He is a billionaire. That automatically should make him an establishment figure with enough motivation to protect the establishment under which he has thrived. But no! His words and deeds make him an anathema to the protection of the status quo. He belongs. Yet he does not belong. How is that even possible? That is the sweet, bitter enigma and contradiction called Donald Trump.
They impeached him twice. He refused to stay impeached.
They tried assassination twice – he cheated death both times.
They had him arrested on multiple occasions and subjected him to the humiliation of a mug shot – he walked out each time, his head held high. They brought him before the courts and judges whose only motivation was the hatred they had for him. That could not keep him down. Eighty-two percent of mainstream media coverage of him was negative. He became even more popular. They cooked stories about him in the cauldron of misinformation and disinformation. The people got tired of the repetitions and malignments against him that had endured for a decade when he first announced his intention to run for president.
READ ALSO: The Orange Man cometh again: The Trump phenomenon
They called him degenerate – The people said “No one is perfect”.
They called him a loose cannon – the people said “we are used to his idiosyncrancies. We sometimes do not like everything he says but our lives were better under him. Besides, they said, look at what the other side has done to our country in four years”.
And the day came, when it was time for them to pass judgement on the political class and their institutions, the American people chose the orange man as their 47th president.
And they did it in style, and in a breathtaking and overwhelming manner. They gave him the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. To boot, they even gave him the popular vote – a first in two decades for a republican. And to put the icing on the cake, he did it across all races and genders, men, women, minorities, whites, blacks, Latinos, young people, old people, and suburban folks.
His support among 18 to 29 years old was the highest for any republican in 20 years. Among blacks, his support was the highest in 48 years for any republican. The Latinos also got into the act as they gave Trump a once in 52 year high support. Women, long seen as the natural enemies of Donald Trump especially due to Kamalla Harris’s false narrative on abortion and their alleged negative treatment by Trump showed that other things other than abortion were also important to them. They gave the Orange man forty six percent of the votes.
How did this happen? His traducers had done everything in their book to cage him and consign him to the dustbin of history. Part of the conspiracy against him produced the magic word, ‘FELON’. A combination of a corrupt DOJ, FBI, and morally deficient lawyers and, of course, judges, worked together in the labyrinth of deception and manipulation to label him with that horrible, unconscionable word that was supposed to make him anathema to the voters in other to isolate him and to finally destroy him.
It did not work.
And did I forget the media, that nest of unconscionable, fanatically driven ideologues pretending to be journalists? Perhaps they were once journalists – and good ones at that. But not anymore. The American media, especially mainstream, is a disgrace today on matters of politics and the culture wars. Facts and the journalistic ideals mean nothing to them.
And to think that in Nigeria and Africa, we once eulogized them for their ideals and practice of journalism.
Not anymore.
Though the media in Africa and Nigeria also have their many flaws, we have nothing to learn from them on the ethics of journalism except in the area of technology and its use.
The American media drew the line on Donald Trump and made of him an implacable foe that must be destroyed at all cost because of the almost irredeemable damage the Orange man did to them with a two word description that has stuck and haunts them for their truth. ‘FAKE NEWS’, two words that tell us that all over the world, standards have fallen. It is obviously time for a reset especially given the ascent of podcasting that is now taking the world by storm.
As for the Orange man, the saying still holds that sometimes keeping the peace after a war is the difficult part.
Here is wishing the 47th president of the United States lots of luck and blessings. He needs them.
It would be deliciously revealing if he could still learn a bit of diplomacy though.
But you know the saying:
You cannot teach an old dog new tricks.
And the Orange man is one old dog.