Trump: going, going, not yet gone...

‘Horrified’ is a word that falls far short of expressing what I felt when I heard that Hillary Clinton had lost the US presidential election in 2016, and that a creature like Donald Trump was going to occupy the Oval Office for the next four years. Unlike the vast majority of Indians, I have known something about him since the time he tried to build a casino called the Taj Mahal, you see, and along the way somehow became a billionaire most of whose businesses had failed.

‘How much must even American women voters hate Ms. Clinton?’ ‘What has gone wrong with their electoral process that this kind of candidate can be put up by either party and this kind of result produced?’ ‘Has a large part of America become so stupid, so vulgar, so violent, so embittered with their lot that they actually think a dirty rich, nearly uneducated (his vocabulary could give many of my current pupils a superiority complex), boorish hustler/con-man/thug with zero political experience will solve all their problems by waving some sort of magic wand?’ These were some of the questions that stormed through my mind when I first heard about it, even as I hunkered down to endure the next four years, gloomily aware of the sad fact that an American president can not only mess up his own country’s affairs but still seriously affect the rest of the world for better or for worse.

And I have not been disappointed, though I’d have been glad to be. This man has reduced the image of the US presidency to the dust (compared to him, earlier fools, duds and manipulators like Dubya Bush now look like sages and saints), predictably failed to solve any of the problems he had promised to solve (echoes of New Delhi since 2014?), and nearly demolished the whole edifice of American democracy as we knew it before losing out on a second term. I guess we should be glad that he did not precipitate a third world war: but maybe we have only his instinct for self-preservation at any cost to thank for it.

For the whole world, he has set new standards of in your face arrogance, shamelessness, mendacity, self-serving, and total deafness to the most reasonable and valid of criticisms. Also, about how to live perpetually in an echo chamber, listening to his own endless self-congratulation* over every fictitious or petty success (even stooping to highlight Modi’s campaigning for him!) when he is not gorging on the blind, ignorant adulation of his small but noisy cohort of fanatical, mostly redneck or wheeler dealer tycoon-supporters. The whole sorry fiasco of a term ended with a resounding defeat (70 million plus more Americans voted for Biden!), which, like a pathetic, very badly brought up child throwing tantrums he refused to concede in the face of the clearest of facts (or harking to ‘facts’ that only he and his ragtag army of devotees seemed to be aware of!), even in the face of a reprimand from as august an institution as the Supreme Court (loaded with a Republican majority of judges, too, some even of his own choosing), simply refusing to quit until very serious anxiety began to mount whether he would try to thwart the Inauguration of his legitimate successor and would become the first ever President to be physically arrested and dragged out of the White House by the police or the military – and maybe thrown forever into an asylum for the pathologically insane or feeble-minded.

At last, as many millions like me I’m sure were praying, he went too far. On the day the Congress was to meet to vote on whether to put the most sacrosanct stamp of certification on Biden’s election, he egged on a gang of armed goons calling themselves Republican supporters to besiege Capitol Hill and browbeat the legislators into stopping the certification process. There was some violence, some policemen and I think Congressmen were hurt or badly rattled, at least one person was killed by a police bullet while rioting, and then the vast majority of lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, closed ranks to condemn them and ‘(the) injured pride of a selfish man’ (Republican Mitt Romney’s words) who had provoked them, unbothered about the momentous likely consequences. The Constitution and democracy were in danger, they decided promptly – democracy too easily degenerates into mob rule incited by mad demagogues, they remembered – and that was a far bigger concern than what Donald Trump wanted. So the rabble was taken care of, and the stamp of certification granted. In the face of that final ignominy, compounded by a sharp rebuke from his own vice President Mike Pence, the nut still in the hot seat has said there will be an orderly transition on January 20, though, like all losers who know they deserve to lose and cannot bear to face it, he says he still ‘totally disagrees with the outcome of the election’. Believe it or not, even Modi in a tweet has condemned this attitude, and twitter has locked his account in response to his latest barrage of flagrant lying claims of victory. (see this news article).

Now we can only hope he at least knows what a promise is, and that it is important to keep promises. I won’t be surprised if he forgets it completely by tomorrow, or threatens to hang himself from the White House front balcony instead of leaving – he is that sort of animal, he’d be thrilled to know that he made one final front-page-hogging splash before he vanished into richly-deserved oblivion. Also hope that, since it has been said that Trumpism, that hodgepodge of mad dreams of the sullen white trash in an economy in slow but terminal decline, will long outlive Trump, I pray that Biden will be at least halfway successful in bringing some peace, reconciliation, the spirit of decent compromise and collective enterprise with common goals back to America.

And for us, half a world away, it is high time to reflect on this sordid drama, and on what lessons we should learn from it before it is too late, in an India that is increasingly Bharat…

[P.S., Jan. 09: *Despite everything that has transpired lately, he has publicly called his own tenure 'the greatest presidential first term in history'. Of course, his followers are probably apes who could never have heard of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts or Kennedy, and he talks only to them. He has also firmly demanded in his last days in office that no 'disrespect', meaning arrest or prosecution, should be shown to the vandals and looters who had stormed the Capitol: in his eyes, only they are true patriots. Remember someone saying that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel?]