America has never had a president like Trump. A handsome, athletic paper billionaire who gives back less than a fraction of what he owes in taxes, an overweight who drinks Coca-Cola, plays golf and runs the policies of his regime on Twitter. He wilfully uses foul language, denigrates the media, uses utterances and body language that obfuscates the multi-racial outlook of his country. He has ripped into shreds global agreements and torn documents guiding global entente but yet soars in popularity.
Trump is a character from a fiction, except that for America and the rest of the world, this is a fictionalised reality. An American president who compares himself to Abraham Lincoln but takes pot-shots at the physically challenged; one who boasts of the exploits of the American military but picks and chooses the veterans to venerate and those to disparage because they were captured in battle defending the American ideal. All these from a commander-in-chief who wilfully dodged the draft but proudly takes the salute of his country’s heroes and enjoys the display of its weapons of war like a bloody despot.
This American president defaces every iconic milestone with the graffiti of his own.
Here is one president who openly expresses his hatred of Muslims but enjoys doing business with the lowest of the low, one who signs a presidential order banning Moslems but signs multi-billion dollar contracts with the same Islamic nations. Trump would deny a bed to those he disparages and closes his eyes to their global crime as he did with the Saudis and the state murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Until Trump became president, a Trump character as a storyline for an American movie or fiction would look implausible. But America has lived through four years of Trump, like an unending nightmare, watched as a once reverred country became the laughing stock of nations unworthy to tie the shoestrings of the behemoth. Worse still, it looks like in spite of the fall in polls, the worshippers of this tin pot dictator is set to ‘make America greater’than he has in the past four years.
To students of America’s style of democracy, some of whom have suffered and sacrificed no mean feats to bring their own system up to par to the global umpire, this has been an improbable hoax writ large. Most now look back in nostalgia of what they had sacrificed to get to where they were, wondering if what they once had was not destroyed by a nation, inherently jealous of that same thing. There are no easy ways to understand Trump as a man or the policies he represents.
The Washington outsider who rose to fame and political fortune promising to drain the swamp has become the tramp in need of a good makeover. A president whose grandparents were immigrants; one who is married to a woman whose entry credentials are itself subjects of open gossip signs exclusion orders banning immigrants and encourages his followers to make the country unliveable to ‘foreigners’.
It does not matter whether Trump recovers from COVID-19, if truly he has contracted the disease, the big question is – would America recover from Trump? For the better part of last weekend, America was on life support because Trump, its maverick leader suddenly announced from the blues that he has succumbed to an invisible virus; one that he has spent nearly a year, first denigrating, then denying, then blaming others for and finally deciding to ignore. It used to be the attitude of dictators to ignore something in the hope that it would go away, with COVID-19, Trump confirmed that all mothers have them.
The story that Number 1 is down took the world by surprise. As at the time of writing, only those who are habituated to the Trump maverick doubt what to make of the news. Is it true and verifiable, or is this chap taking the media he denigrates for a ride. Would he and his puppeteers emerge from this saying – we told you so, the media knows nothing? Or, would he come out four or five days after going back to his usual – it’s no more than the flu rhetoric?
Is it a deft move by an eccentric, an attempt to buy back dwindling support and sympathy after a shellacking from a debate in which he forced his co-debater to a pig fight? We would never know until the forthcoming elections have held. Already, Trump has joined the tradition of dictators denigrating the electoral process; he has rued the possibility of keeping on in power without holding the elections. In essence, if he decides to shut down the American electoral procedure, the skies won’t fall. He has enough standby foot soldiers ever ready to defend that decision should the venerated US military decide not to intervene or obey the unlawful orders of a deluded commander-in-chief.
If truly Trump caught the virus, he would be a significant fraction of the 7.4 million Americans traumatised by the virus he once described as a hoax but one that has killed 209,000 Americans mostly people of colour. Trump had foreknowledge of the danger of this virus but decided to play politics with it even as large swathes of the American state were locked down like other parts of the world. To Trump, a lockdown is an act of surrender to an invisible virus.
Gallivanting all over his country without protection as he inflames passions and stoke violence, Trump threw precaution to the winds and laughed at the science that protects, saying it is no more than the common flu. At different times, he suggests it was curable with hydroxychloroquine or by ingesting disinfectants. With a cult followership, some of his disciples took him up on his prescriptions and did not live to rue the experience.
But when he went down last week, Trump did not take Tamiflu, nor did he reach for Clorox; he was given the oxygen he denied some of his political rivals and airlifted to a military facility where he was managed with medical cocktails not available to his unwary citizens and unthinking supporters.
If Trump survives this onslaught, it would be because of the special privilege accorded political leaders. The experience is unlikely to alter his demeanour as the political brat or his disposition towards the virus and other people’s weaknesses. This is where nature could be a leveller and a partial arbiter. Nobody wishes Trump more than we wish ourselves when we are down, just that the experience touches something in his heart to make him understand that life is not always a bed of roses.
Get well Mr President, but more than that, get better! That’s the best wish for you, your nation and the heroes and heroines beyond who are inspired to make their shithole countries better buoyed by the American example as it was. If they recant on their dreams, they might unleash hot hell across the globe. Not that the world you inherited was paradise but at least it fuelled dreams that their countries could fare better.
