Early Wednesday morning on January 20, 2021, Donald John Trump, the 45th US President, brought his four-year premiership at the White House to an abrupt and ignoble end. Abrupt because the former United States president failed to win another four-year term as he had wished, making him the third president in US political history to serve only one term.
Trump suffered a humiliating defeat in the November 3 election yet he never conceded to President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, the man he ridiculed and nicknamed “sleepy Joe”.
As destiny would have it, the 2016 election result repeated itself in 2020 to hand candidate Biden Jr of the Democratic Party the White House.Candidate Biden Jr obtained 306 Electoral College votes to beat Trump, who got 232 votes. Trump won 306 votes to beat Hillary Clinton, who had 232.
Four years ago, Trump inherited a united America, but he has left office as a leader who would be remembered for the most part, his divisive rhetorics, racial slurs, conspiracy theories, hate speech and rising crime rate.
No doubt, Trump’s rise from an “apprentice show host” to political prominence still amazes many people. And it is no wonder that the shenanigans that characterised his leadership is unprecedented.
Trump is gone but remnants of his unmitigated disaster leave a scar on America’s democracy.
Throughout his tenure, Trump exacerbated racism, xenophobia, hate speech and bigotry.
By every measurable metric, Trump has left the United States and the Republican Party with it, in a worse state than when he found it.
He has remarkably little to show for his time in office otherwise; except, if any, few domestic achievements related to draconian immigration laws and stable economy.
History may be kinder to Donald Trump than we are today, perhaps seeing him through the lens of a tragic figure.
Practically, every misstep was one of his own doing, from his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic to inciting his supporters against the government after losing the election.
For instance, the attack on the Capitol building on January 6 by home-grown ‘terrorists’ who were fed lies by Trump that the election was stolen and the subsequent attempt to overturn the election results using moribund legal technicalities were testimonies that Trump did not have the interest of the country he once led at heart.
Many who entrusted the nation in his care thought Trump would distinguish himself in the political establishment.
Unfortunately, this was never to be because president Trump had a mind of his own.
From the day Trump took office till the last day, it was one drama after another – not forgetting the payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels through his former Attorney Michael Cohen, as well as the prosecution and conviction of some of his friends and appointees, Steven Bannon, his former chief strategist, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, who lied under oath to the FBI over his contact with Russians before the 2016 election and Roger Stone, his longtime friend and Republican fixer.
Trump himself carries huge criminal liability for the many criminal and offensive activities he superintended over in the last four years.
AMERICA’s IMAGE
Never in the history of the United States had its image sunk so low than in the last four years. Thankfully, President Biden is making good his promise to restore the country’s lost dignity and respect among the comity of nations. And in the last few weeks, the flurry of executive orders signed by Mr Biden were indicative of his administration’s commitment to building back fast and better to make America greater again.
In his first foreign policy speech on February 4, Biden proclaimed quite powerfully that “America is back, diplomacy is back.” This message offers some relief to the millions who look up to the new administration to move away from Trump’s policy of siding with autocrats and dictators.
At least, the relationship between the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia won’t be business as usual- the Biden administration would play tough on Russia and its allies, especially China.
The first and most important step toward attaining that international recognition and respect is for President Biden to hold the killers of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi to account. This would send the strongest signal yet to dictators that their actions come with consequences.
Equally important is the need to get justice for Alexei Navalny, Russia opposition leader and Putin’s vile critic who was poisoned and currently serving a two-and-a-half year jail term.
ATTACK ON DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
One of the cardinal principles of good governance is the respect for democratic institutions.
As a journalist with special interest in international politics, I have observed on numerous occasions a clear and desperate attempt by former President Trump to discredit state institutions on the altar of cheap partisanship and self-aggrandizement.
A classical example is Trump’s insistence that Russia never interfered in the U.S 2016 election when the report of Central Intelligence Agency suggested otherwise.
IMPEACHMENT
Mr Trump is the first United States chief executive to be impeached twice, both in office and out of office. In the first trial, which was politically motivated by his political rivals, only one Republican Senator, Mitt Romney of Uttah, voted along with the Democrats to convict him in spite of the egregious offence he committed by asking a foreign leader to investigate the Biden’s for political advantage.
In the second Senate trial regarding the invasion of the Capital building on January 6, Senators Romney, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Pat Toomey were the only five out of the 50 Republican senators to vote along with their Democrat counterparts to set the trial in motion early this month.
The irony is that Trump’s accomplices and ‘blind loyalists’, some of whom cried wolf over Hillary Clinton’s emails in the Benghazi saga, and called for her prosecution, saw nothing wrong with Trump using his office for undue personal advantage.
These illustrate the kind of nugatory polarity of polity, arising from hypocrisy and bad faith. Otherwise, why should the Republicans rebuke Mrs Clinton for a crime she has committed and wilfully ignore similar or worse crimes committed by Trump?
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
I had always considered the Republicans as fearless, hardcore patriots who put their country first above any other considerations. And I believe there are still Republicans who put the nation above everything though, which is why the McCains, Senator Romney and John Kasic, the former Ohio Governor and one time Republican presidential hopeful, never allowed Trump to get away with his excesses.
Unfortunately, only a handful of them are fighting this cause, leaving a good number of the support base in cultism. Believe it or not, Trump has established a strong foothold in the Republican Party, which now forms the nucleus of the party. You dare not criticize Trump, even as he said on January 23, 2016 that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
The only way the Republicans can get rid of Trump is to follow the letter and spirit of the American constitution and hold him to account.
The senate trial would go down to the wire but I expect the Republican senators to overwhelmingly vote to convict and stop him from holding public office in future.
It is clear that any move away from Trump in the initial aftermath of January 6 is beginning to dissipate, most likely because polling is showing that Republicans are still deeply supportive of the former president.
An Economist/YouGov poll released few weeks ago, showed 57 percent of Americans believe Trump had a lot or some responsibility for the riot. But 58 percent of Republicans said he was not responsible at all.
This is not good for the Republican Party and the United States of America.
It behooves Americans to support the course of addressing systemic racism and the scourge of white supremacy, the two biggest threats to America’s democracy. If Trump gets anywhere near the White House in future, he would run the Oval Office aground.
The writer is a journalist and climate change activist.
BY MALIK SULLEMANA
His email :sullemanababa@gmail.com
