Trump: The perils of bad manners – The abiding question now is: how does the world recover from the vast damages done to America and the world in the wild days when democracy went unguarded under the rampaging assault of an unrepentant autocrat who was however elected by a democracy. An elaborate repair job stares America in the face with a menacing urgency. The guardrails of democratic civility need to be rebuilt. Washington needs to re-cultivate decent political manners and rhetoric. Above all, America needs to unlearn the kind of vulgarity in the presidency that elevates Mickey Minaj’s bum into a subject for a presidential public utterance.
By Chidi Amuta
The United States midterm elections have come and gone. They have left an untidy rubble with an ill-mannered despotic president, a badly injured Republican party and badly damaged institutions of the American state. The ultimate outcome of a toppling of the Republican majority in Congress may be a salvaging of American democracy and the institutional framework of the nation. But if Trump remains in the White House, the threat to America’s democracy may persist as he resorts to endless vetoes to plough his way forward.
At the worst, Donald Trump could be impeached and sent packing from the White House.
At the best, his presidency could be tempered by the norms of democratic civility. The latter possibility, Trump will cease to be Trump. Less bluster. Fewer audacious lies. There may be less strategic blunders and playing with dangerous war planes, missiles and drones. Hopefully, there will now be greater respect for the rules based international order and more respect for the international community of nations and its leaders who have endured two years of Donald Trump’s unwarranted insults and habitual diplomatic bad manners. But the US constitution still leaves a sinking Trump with a desperate life line: the power to veto whatever Congress decides and he disagrees with.
The impending relief is systemic. Just when both Americans and the wider world had lost hope in the survival of the show place of democracy, the American electorate hit the reverse button. The just concluded midterm elections into governorship and congressional seats has begun the reversal of the draining of Donald Trump’s Washington swamp. A president who initially swore he was out to drain the swamp in Washington became himself a personification of the swamp. He rode rough shod on Congress, exploiting his party’s congressional majority in both houses to literally run the United States more like an authoritarian banana republic. He tested the American judiciary by putting nearly all his authoritarian whims to judicial test. The Supreme Court just managed to retain a precarious integrity by reserving interim rulings on virtually everything from demolitions of sections of the White House to erect a controversial Ball Room or a laughable ‘reflective pool’. Even tangential ego driven skirmishes like renaming the Kennedy Centre and every street corner after himself became subjects of unrelenting litigations and contentious judicial pronouncements.
Over and above his many domestic excesses, Donald Trump saw the rest of the world as an adolescent playing field to test his many illusions of power and illiterate readings of power, politics and international affairs. He invaded nations within reach, imposed silly tariffs on literally every nation in the world and talked down on virtually all respectable leaders. He spoke to and about the United Nations in condescending language unheard in its chambers since after its formation in 1945. And because of America’s considerable economic and military strategic prowess, most of the world looked on in consternation and awe as the great American democratic Olympus tottered and towered over all in unsightly apparel and unbecoming language.
Matters would have been easier if the effect of Donald Trump’s wrecking ball autocracy was limited to the United States and its immediate neighbourhood. Not quite. Under the illusion of being thought strong but actually afraid of his own weakness, Trump launched a hazy war against Iran. Egged on by his cabinet of adolescent secretaries especially a certain infantile Pete Hegseth, Trump has in the last eight months hurled any number of missiles, bombs and drones at Iran with questionable impact except a pro-Zionist propaganda of conquest. Iran is of course far from being humiliated or defeated in any sense. Instead, US allies in the Middle East have all been dragged into a war they never prepared for or envisaged. Unlikely places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Aman, Riyadh and other previously peaceful places have become targets of Iran reprisal drone and rocket attacks. An entire region has been plunged into war at the behest of President Trump and his partner, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a man wanted abroad by the ICC for myriad human rights abuse crimes and at home for many corruption charges. Even far off places like Europe bore the brunt of Trump’s tactless foreign escapades.
At home, President Trump is alleged to have exploited his office for corrupt ends. His family is known to pursue multiple business interests all around the world where the US has interests. The president has himself engaged in insider trading in companies that have business with the US government. Not to talk of multiple rackets in crypto currency and murky deals in Venezuelan oil.
Donald Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and compulsive corruption would have paled into insignificance if the US domestic economy under his presidency enabled the ordinary American to enjoy an affordable normal life. On the contrary, the endless war with Iran has turned the strategic Strait of Hormuz into a death bed for ships of all nations and made oil cargo traffic a nightmare for strong and weak nations. Global oil process have since shot through the roof. Gasoline pump prices in America have shot up from a little over $2 before the war to more than $4 in the midterm week. Prices in grocery shops have taken a similar hike. In general, all those who voted for Donald Trump two years ago are all writhing under the pain of economic hardship. Therefore, the outcome of the midterms was very predictable. That is the reality that has unfolded before our very eyes.
All that was left to save the world from the Trumpian ultimate nightmare was a test of the democratic core of America through the midterms. It was a historic test of the democratic state. The American voter was once again called upon to use the power of the ballot to tame the autocratic inclinations of the president through a revalidation of the mandate of members of Congress as representatives of the people. Here lies the import of the midterms as an instrument for the revalidation of the popular will in America’s democracy.
In the delicate balance between the individual leader and the institutions of the democratic state, Trump weighed too heavily as an elected leader. He literally overwhelmed the state and disorganized it. Congress, the judiciary, law enforcement, the federal bureaucracy, were all bent and twisted to conform to the wishes of an authoritarian “king” Trump. In the post midterm reclamation period, there will be stresses and strains between the president and the institutions he has already mangled. The major one will be the clashes between the rescued institutions of state and the stubborn idiosyncratic tendencies of an authoritarian president. Trump will remain recalcitrant, belligerent, abusive, defiant of rules and inclined to lawlessness. Under the guise of applying the rules of business deal making, Trump will try to flout the rules of diplomatic negotiation and structured engagement for his personal advantage and the benefit of his family, friends, associates and cronies. The remaining Trump tenure will remain a terrain dominated by the Elon Musks of this world.
By way of a general backdrop, the thrashing of the Trump presidency in the just concluded midterms is a consequence of the wider implications of Trump’s political misadventure and historic displacement. For over two centuries, it was a dream that attracted all from every corner of the world. The pull of America was in its diversity, the freedom of its society, its robust spirit of enterprise that made every one that lived in America a partaker in a legacy of prosperity in a free society. The American dream came to be a shared dream of everyone that was born in or moved to live in America. Simply put, the American dream boiled down to the right of everyone in America to join the race for the pursuit of happiness through hard work, focused aspiration and an entitlement to the fruits of honest labour.
But under our very eyes, in our own life time, the American dream has turned into a nightmare. The land where everyone fled to as a last resort of freedom and safety has become an unwelcome hellhole. So called illegal immigrants are being hounded and chased around major American cities and shot on the streets in broad day light like mad dogs by untrained and bigoted immigration hounds. In the name of anti-immigration, innocent settlers some of whom have lived in America for upwards of 3-4 decades have been hounded down, loaded into war planes and deported to countries that they left many years ago without memories.
The reign of Donald Trump as a second term President has witnessed the systematic erosion of everything that distinguished America as a civilizational force. It is now a dark force, a force of ill both at home and abroad. America under Trump has become an anti-Islamic force but a Zionist champion, a bigoted white supremacist bastion. Its society is divided along racial, perception lines.
The US midterms may have come as a much needed check on authoritarian drifts of the system. The president now has to obtain the authority of a more diverse congress to engage in further flirtations. But the damage that Trump’s authoritarian flirtations have done to the world and the US system is considerable. He has waged wars without congressional approval. He has killed people in open seas without caring to prove that they committed any crimes. He has levied war against sovereign states without anyone’s approval but only his instincts. He has deployed aircraft carriers into the seas of the world, ordered precision bombings, allowed the deployment of advanced missiles systems and aircraft only by a phone call to his adolescent Secretary of War.
The abiding question now is: how does the world recover from the vast damages done to America and the world in the wild days when democracy went unguarded under the rampaging assault of an unrepentant autocrat who was however elected by a democracy. An elaborate repair job stares America in the face with a menacing urgency. The guardrails of democratic civility need to be rebuilt. Washington needs to re-cultivate decent political manners and rhetoric. Above all, America needs to unlearn the kind of vulgarity in the presidency that elevates Mickey Minaj’s bum into a subject for a presidential public utterance.
