Trump’s crash: An American correction

By Iboro Otongaran

The market metaphor is irresistible. Why not! Politics is a market too. But market correction is a more familiar usage for describing a stock market crash, or more correctly, a significant adjustment in stock prices following a bubble. 

A political correction is less familiar but no less true. America has just undergone one. The defeat of Donald Trump brings with it so much relief; it was such a desperately awaited correction needed to stop the chaos of the last four years, and bring an end to the industrial-scale corruption of his presidency and his never-ending lies. Americans were taken in by big talk, mega boasts laced with Goebbels-type lies. The throwback might have been lost on many: by DNA Trump is German. Who knows whether his ancestry would not lead back all the way to Goebbels!!! Trump’s helpless inclination to lie and his visceral hatred for blacks and others he regards as inferior reek of the ruling philosophy of the Third Reich.

And so it was that with big but empty talk and fat lies Americans boarded a one chance bus in 2016 and Nigerian pastors completed the cast as conductors. 

Trump in the White House represented a complex symbolism. At one level, it seemed to me a divine visitation to bring Americans down to earth and end the hubris of American exceptionalism. There is nothing exceptional about America; it’s another piece of humanity, warts and all.

Trump and his presidency actually served as a living testimony to William Golding’s thesis in the _Lord of the Flies_ that humanity is the same.

At another level, the entire Trump nightmare helped to repudiate the hypocrisy, hubris and hogwash of Nigeria’s political gospel, a new brand of mercantilist piety that intrudes in our private and public spaces with strange assortments of declaration, advocacy, proselytization and dubious extra-mundane powers.

Nigerian faith leaders had blared their love and marketing of Trump to the utter irritation of decent and discerning people. The pastorpreneurs obsession with Trump is actually a classic study in the abnegation of their “calling” and abject failure to understand and appreciate the grundnorm of the Christian faith, which holds that all are equal before God. How these pastors were able to reconcile their love and touting for Trump, a rabid racist, with the biblical tenet of the equality of all men before God, is what I haven’t been able to wrap my mine around for the past four years.

Each time I asked individual pastors their defence was freshman in logic and history. They would say by rote that they fell in with Trump because he came to end “Obama’s promotion of same sex marriage,” a claim that betrays a sad lack of knowledge of history, which clearly shows that by defending the right to exist of people with minority sexual orientation, Obama was doing what he had sworn to do on his inauguration day as president of the United States and what his people gave him a mandate for, namely, to protect and defend the American constitution and uphold the rule of law. The American Constitution forbids discrimination against American citizens for reason of sexual orientation.

This Nigerian clan of Trump lovers excused all his excesses. They brushed aside his predilection for porn stars, which by their action they treat as abnormality that is cleaner than same sex marriage; they overlooked his unpatriotic act of dodging his tax obligations; they even waved off his inhuman act of wringing children from their mothers’ arms and tossing them into cages at the US-Mexico border, 550 of which children have now been orphaned, because their parents cannot be found.

Trump’s chronicle in bestiality cannot be exhausted. Yet his Nigerian admirers remained unyielding, impervious to reason and worldwide outcry against the putative dictatorship sprouting out of the soil of the world strongest democracy.  

Americans took all this into account, plus his rank incompetence in deciding that another four years for Trump could mean the end of civilization as they know it. Another four years for Trump could have meant an end to the world order of predictability and civility in international relations. Those who may be tempted to think the last statement is a piece of indulgence in hyperbole need to be reminded that Hitler in 1939 similarly came to power in Germany through an election also on the platform of populism. The rest, as they say, is history.

The world should be thoroughly relieved that it’s been rid of a gigantic incubus.

I am happy that Trump ended his infamous reign as a failed one-term president who allowed, by conscious choice, a controllable disease to destroy his country.

Otongaran, a media consultant, lives in Abuja