US President Donald Trump in Washington, DC. on December 8, 2020. PHOTO | SAUL LOEB | AFP
He is so fond of taking about ‘the Swamp,’ which is his way of describing Washington and its murky politics, but, honestly, out of what slimy, putrescent and fetid hole did this man crawl to insinuate himself into the America body politic so successfully that he has held it hostage and threatens to bring the whole edifice crumbling to the ground?
Donald John Trump, the 45th Potus (President of the United States) once famously said that he could shoot someone on high street and that would not diminish his popularity. Well, he has just done that and more.
In the coup attempt he organised last Wednesday, at least four people died, and the American Capitol, venerated temple of that country’s governance structures, was assaulted and vandalised.
Did all that dent his popularity with the Trumplicans, as CNN’s Chris Cuomo calls them? Hardly. Nothing he says or does ever causes so much as a flutter among his supporters, which must suggest that if we think the man is a loony we must go further and accept the proposition that about 40 percent of Americans are inmates of a huge lunatic asylum and that Trump is but a fugitive from the asylum loosed upon the political processes of the country.
Wednesday was a high watermark, but anyone could have seen it coming from listening to him since he took over power. He has a feud with the truth, and he clearly has no problem replacing a reality he does not like with an alternative ‘reality’ that he then acts on and wants people to reckon with.
When he failed to read the size of the crowd at his inauguration four years ago, I thought he had a problem reading pictures, just as some people cannot distinguish colours, but soon it was obvious he was evolving in a parallel universe where big is small, small is big, up is down and left is…abandoned.
To say he is delusional is to lack respect for all those delusional people who go about their lives deluding themselves without hurting anyone.
Last week he mounted a failed coup that killed four people; who is to say what he might do before January 20, something like, say, drop a bomb on Tehran?
He tried a coup because in his chosen reality he believes he won and got robbed. He could attack Iran simply because, in his mind, it was a job he was going to do in his second term and, since he was fraudulently thwarted, he might as well do it now before the usurpers evict him.
I hear CNN say this is a great embarrassment to the American people and their institutions, and I say to them, welcome to the club; this is what we live with on our continent, and this will perhaps serve to remind us that we are all united in our human frailties.
There is one major difference, though. The Americans created Trump out of their number by voting him in a ‘free and fair’ election, and when their essence is distilled, 40 percent of the juice will be made up the venom of those bandana-clad hoodlums we saw on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. In Africa we cannot even say we retain the right to choose our own Trumps.
Some commentators have likened Trump to Adolf Hitler and his attempted coup in Munich. The contrasts with the Beerhall Putsch in Munich in 1923 begin with the fact that whereas Adolf Hitler was an angry jobless man looking to overthrow the hated Weimar republic, Trump intends to overthrow a republic of which he is president. He has tried everything possible and impossible, and all has ended in ignominious failure. The man is a total loser, and a sore one at that.
Like the bully he has always been, he is kicking the family cat, first with the poor Georgia officials he wanted to get him some 11,000 votes ‘from somewhere’, and then his own vice-president, who he belittled as having been nothing before he made him a person (pity that sullen face of Mike Pence).
How can a man have such blind loyalty and be forced to emcee an event laying bare his debacle as deputy loser-in-chief when the chief loser had believed he could somehow save him from this ultimate discomfiture?
Ultimate discomfiture, did I say? This may not be over just yet. For one thing, Trump albeit badly wounded, could still spring another surprise, such as to pardon himself to avoid going to jail, for example.
In a slightly unrelated storyline, his comical attorney, Rudi Giuliani, warned him of a possible ‘orange jumpsuit’ if he played his cards wrongly.
Now, he could not have played his cards any ‘wronger’ than when he sent his goons to ransack the houses of Congress. He might have just earned himself the distinction of being the first ever former Potus to don the colourful apparel referred to by Giuliani.
For some reason, I look at the wiry figure of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and get this feeling that she is secretly licking her lips, seeing an orange jumpsuit? But again, I could be very wrong.
Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: jenerali@gmail.com
No comments :
Post a Comment