Trump and dismantling America

By Uche Onyebadi

CELEBRATED Guyanese scholar and historian, Walter Rodney, published a 1972 masterpiece book titled How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. If I were to write a book about the U.S., it would be titled, How Donald Trump Dismantled America. And the theme would be how the former Soviet Union over at least seventy years tried but failed to dismantle the existential, philosophical and institutional adhesives that held the United States together, yet it only took Trump about four years to inflict mortal wounds on those institutions.

In spite of losing the presidential election last month, Trump refuses to face reality, and appears to have resolved to burn down America before he vacates the White House, peacefully or forcefully, on January 20, 2021. Or, how else might you describe his objective in attempting to use the courts to nullify millions of votes Americans cast for president-in-waiting, Joe Biden? Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has now told Trump it is over in a 9-0 decision on the frivolous lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general.

How did Trump plot his dismantling of America? First, he concocted the empty rhetoric about making America great again and ran on it to win the most powerful office on earth. Make American Great Again (MAGA) was a carefully crafted and visibly innocuous mantra that was hard to oppose. Who would not support the patriotic march to make America great? But, very few people paid attention to the operative word, again. Trump, the consummate snake oil salesman, had created the compelling illusion that America was neck-deep in some cesspool and needed to be washed with hyssop in order to be made great again. From there, he marched on to create the more confounding yet alluring abracadabra that he was the messiah ordained to rescue America from the impending Armageddon.

Thus, Trump commenced his litany of absurdities. He dismissed scientists as idiots and science as fiction. For a man who dodged the draft, he claimed knowledge of military tactics and the art of war beyond what accomplished army generals could understand. He asserted that destiny had brought him to save Christianity. No one knew about diplomacy, technology, governance as much as he did. No one knew anything about everything more than he did.

Perhaps, his only credible assertion was being a grandmaster of how to game the system and pay negligible amounts in taxes. In addition, he carefully built the strawman persona of a successful businessman and billionaire, notwithstanding that real billionaires like Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote can buy up all of Trump’s assets and liabilities worldwide and still have enough to retain their status as billionaires. Last September, Forbes magazine put Trump’s net worth at $2.5 billion.  

It appears that history might record Trump as someone who succeeded in hoodwinking the people who elected him to the White House. Even as it is clear that he lost reelection, he continues to claim victory and has hauled in over $200m from those who are still gullible enough to believe that he will magically reclaim his lost presidential paradise. 

Trump was not the person he claimed to be when he ran for office in 2016. But, once in office, he realised he had to live the quixotic role he had created for himself in order to have people continue to believe the hype. So, he brazenly claimed everything his predecessors had achieved. He was always the first to do something or did so in gargantuan proportions. Anything you could imagine to be good about America was because of him. On the other hand, he outsourced his lagoon of failures.

Trump had to rely on lies to bolster his image and hide his emptiness, as he routinely urged his compatriots not to believe whatever they heard or saw in the news but to only believe what he told them. He invented the ridiculous concept of fake news to dismiss unpleasant truths about him and his administration. That was when the White House shenanigans unabashedly lectured the world about the kill-the-truth novelty known as alternative facts. Just as truth is the first casualty in any war, truth became the first victim of Trump’s battering of the American psyche. According to the Washington Post newspaper that keeps track of Trump’s ocean of lies, the man was on track to exceed 25,000 lies and misleading statements from the time he became president 2017 to election day on November 3, 2020.

Trump’s targeted destruction of America saw him subvert all credible institutions in the country. The security agencies, from the FBI to the CIA and others, were characterised as corrupt and inefficient. He flagrantly dismissed all branches of the military as shambolic. The post office, America’s pride, was brutally savaged as incompetent because he wished to sabotage the presidential election. The man decreed that teaching civics, history, diversity and inclusion and other progressive ideas in schools was antithetical to the survival of his vision of America.

When people protested in the streets, as it is constitutionally guaranteed they could, Trump used the camouflage of violence and security to introduce military force to kill free speech and freedom of assembly. When he saw the proverbial handwriting on the electoral wall, he unleashed unrelenting volley of attacks on democracy and voting and preached that unless he won, the elections would have been rigged.

I find two crucial areas most appalling in Trump’s quest to debilitate America and massage his narcissistic ego. One of them is the savagery with which he attacked the credibility of the world’s renowned Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and rubbishing any belief in medical science. He kept telling some of his gullible supporters that Covid-19 was a phantom that would magically go away. Not even contracting the diseases and being given the best medical care in the world, could stop him from disparaging medical experts and insisting that Coronavirus was a hoax that was manufactured to hurt him politically. He kept holding super spreader events across the nation, leaving a trail of Covid-19 casualties everywhere he went, including the White House. He has nonchalantly continued to do so even after his loss at the polls. No one can actually tell why this man insists on providing as many avenues as possible for Covid-19 to ravage America.

Another unforgivable area is fanning the flames of racism in America by indirectly providing some tonic to white supremacists to wage their wars against all people who do not look like them or share their ancestry. Trump did not create racial tensions and animosities in America. But like all dictators in history, he found in racism an effective and useful tool to consolidate his power. Thus, he was reticent about police brutality and the unjustified killing of black lives, but was quick to denounce and shout himself coarse about the miscreants who took advantage of the protests against police action to loot and destroy property. While campaigning for reelection, he brazenly courted white, suburban women to like him because he had preserved the racial homogeneity of their areas of abode.        

It will certainly take several years to reconstruct the fragments of America Trump would have left behind. His place in history will ultimately be that of a callous leader who opted to play golf as the malevolent corona virus killed over 300,000 of his compatriots and left over 16 million of them afflicted. Like Cambodia’s notorious Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge henchmen, Trump has remained unconcerned about the mountain of human suffering and calamities around him. The only thing he appears to care about is making a mockery of himself as the world’s most laughable man-child, crying about a presidential election everyone knows he lost, including  most of his pusillanimous aides and GOP backers.

Onyebadi an Associate Professor and Chair of the Journalism Department, Texas Christian University, USA and former Director of the School of Journalism, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA (2014-2016), is a member of the of Naija Times Editorial Advisory Board.