By Tiko Okoye
President Donald Trump has practically set aside any semblance of governance as he continues to hunker down in the White House – amidst tantrums and meetings with conspiracy theorists pushing him, like the biblical King Rehoboam, to abuse the power of his office.
White House adviser Peter Navarro has urged President Donald Trump to appoint a special prosecutor to smoke out details of how Democrats stole his election victory before inauguration day, in order to stop Biden from taking the oath of office as “an illegal and illegitimate president.”
Steve Banon, who was sacked from his post as senior advisor, was recently seen visiting the White House. He later told the press corps that he “impressed it on the president to immediately appoint special prosecutor for election fraud and voter fraud because they are two different things entirely.”
Two days to the date he was asked to step aside from his post, Attorney-General William Barr gave a rare press interview, where he emphatically stated that the election is very credible and that there is no need to appoint a special prosecutor. Observers believe he was simply trying to provide a basis for his successor, Jeffrey Rosen, to successively resist pressures in this regard from Trump in order to fast-track his confirmation, but would he be able to say ‘No’ to a rampaging Trump?
On his own part, Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), jailed for lying to Congress, and recently pardoned by President Trump, bragged that Trump could use “military capabilities” to grind out a different set of results in the swing states by suspending the Constitution under martial law and deploying military personnel to conduct a fresh election in each battleground state. “People out there talk about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done (before),” he gushed, “(but) martial law has been instituted 64 times!” Really? Fascism being freely bandied about in the hallowed office of a US president? Richard Nixon must be turning in his grave for allowing himself to be shooed out of office just for wiretapping the Watergate Hotel where Democrats held their national convention in late 1971!
Flynn’s kite was immediately shot down by the military top brass. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Army Staff Gen. James McConville issued a joint press statement in which they unequivocally emphasized that, “There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election.”
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany revealed on Fox News that there is every likelihood that Congress would decide to ratify the GOP-coordinated “alternate electors” in the swing states, thereby overruling the Electoral College and throwing the election to Trump.
And as if taking his cue from McEnany, Mo Brooks, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Alabama immediately pledged to object to the counting of electoral college votes when Congress reconvenes on January 6, 2021. All it would take to trigger a vote in both chambers of Congress is the support of one senator. And Tommy Tuberville, a Republican Senator-elect also from Alabama, has publicly declared that he would support Brooks’ motion. While tweeting that Tuberville is “a great champion and man of courage,” Trump asked more senators to join him to overturn the official election result, even as he equally urged hundreds of thousands of his supporters to turn up for a march on Capitol Hill when Congress reconvenes.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who only recently acknowledged Biden’s victory, would be hoping that Tuberville and his co-travellers have a change of heart, otherwise the motion would be defeated on the floor; but not before needlessly portraying both the GOP as a divided house and Senate Republicans as being anti-Trump. Trump’s dangerous machinations are raising serious doubts about the future of the Republican Party as the battle for its soul post-2020 promises to be a very bruising one between political survival and dominance.
President Richard Nixon had defiantly clung to his post in the first two years of the Watergate scandal that was tearing the Republican Party and the nation apart. On August 7, 1974, three top GOP leaders in Congress – Sen. Barry Goldwater (AZ), Sen. Hugh Scott (PA) and Rep. John Rhodes (AZ) – paid him a solemn visit at the White House and declared: “Mr. President, it is time for you to exit office in the interest of the nation and the Republican Party.” Nixon announced his resignation the very next day!
Unfortunately, Trump has remade the Republican Party after his own image and turned party leaders into ‘house boys’ on his way to becoming more of a cult leader in the mould of Adolf Hitler. The Republican base is strictly loyal to him and not the party establishment; plus he has a firewall in Congressmen who see more harm to their political careers in opposing him than supporting him, no matter what he says or does. No one was surprised when Trump tweeted a response to McConnell’s congratulatory message to Biden: “Stay with me or there would be no Republican Party”!
Not too long ago, the Trump legal team publicly disowned Sidney Powell after she floated fantastical conspiracy theories linking late Venezuelan Head of State Hugo Chavez, some ‘disloyal’ Republicans and the CIA with ‘malfunctioning’ voting machines – fables that even members of the Trump inner caucus considered too wild! But Trump is reportedly mulling over appointing her a special counsel for voter fraud – recall Navarro’s forewarning on Fox News! He subsequently tried to douse rising tension in the polity after the plot was leaked to the New York Times by tweeting “Martial law = Fake News,” but many attribute his volte-face partly to the leakage and partly to the strong rebuff by the military when the kite was first publicly flown.
Trump still has a joker up his sleeves. The Supreme Court – in a 6-3 split decision along ideological lines – voted to give him a few days’ respite to implement his determination to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census that would establish the numbers to be used to decide the reapportionment of Representatives among the states as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funds.
It is generally believed that the policy is primarily targeted at blue states such as California and New York with extra-large proportions of the popular and Electoral College votes; they stand to lose big time in terms of House seats and federal funding. Still, red states like Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and Texas with relatively high numbers of undocumented immigrants could equally suffer.
Two major factors are providing the oxygen Trump needs to continue to rain on Biden’s parade. The first is the solid support of Evangelicals. Many leading members went the extra mile of prophesying Trump’s election win, and must remain in cahoots with him in his increasingly mindboggling attempts to retain power in order to save themselves from ridicule. The mindless adulation can only be reversed if and when Evangelicals finally realise that the man who pleases God is not the self-righteous ‘talker’ in Luke 18:9-12, but the humble ‘doer’ in Matthew 25:34-40.
The second factor is the docility of the Biden team. The harsh reality of being excluded from the pantheon of second-term presidents – a revered class that includes the likes of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush that he condescendingly considers as inferior to him, has caused Trump to – as the popular American idiom goes – lose it! Show me a man willing to cut his nose in order to spite his face and I’ll show you a mentally deranged individual.
In every democracy where due process and the rule of law are enthroned, every losing candidate is allowed to have his day in the courts. But the dispute comes to an end whenever the highest court pronounces a judgement. Trump, who still has an opportunity to mark his last days in office with a victory lap vis-à-vis the game-changing Covid-19 vaccines his warp-speed project crystallised, is pitiably turning his back on age-long processes and conventions and resorting to self-help – the very hallmark of a Hobbesian State! His sole obsession is seeking to stop Biden from being sworn in at any cost!
“No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” averred 32nd US President Franklin Roosevelt. “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb” – which is what Trump has become. If Biden fails to very proactively checkmate his bullying antics, a vengeful and ruthless Trump won’t hesitate for a moment to – very much like the biblical Samson – bring down the roof on all his perceived enemies who ‘conspired’ to deny him a second term, including the ravaging Coronavirus pandemic, Democrats, erstwhile GOP allies such as Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp and Republican Secretaries of State in the swing states who certified Biden’s wins, among many others!
Tiko Okoye is a Boston University Hubert Humphrey Fellow and wrote in from Abuja (08054103468 – SMS only)