Revelations by the American media a fortnight ago that US President Donald Trump alluded to African countries and Haiti some as “s— countries” created shock across the world and reinforced the belief in many international quarters that Trump is an American leader of a very different quantity. Trump made the derogatory comment at a meeting with legislators and top officials of his administration, where he was expressing his personal, racist inclination to reverse the official accommodation of the US for immigrants of different status and from different countries.
Trump’s remark elicited condemnations from all around the world for its odiousness, vulgarity and latent racism. Although he half-heartedly denied the report and claimed that he was quoted out of context, almost no one believed that the remark did not reflect the inner feelings of this mercurial man and a revelation of his real intentions for immigrants in the US. Later events in the US soon proved that Trump’s unfortunate comment was more than a slip of tongue. This is partly because the White House failed to deny or repudiate the comment. Not long afterwards the Trump administration led the US into an avoidable 4-day shut-down of the government when the Congress failed to approve government spending over disagreement between Trump’s Republican Party and the Democratic Party over matters including funding for immigration policy.
Trump’s racist aversion for immigrants and non-whites in the US which he was concealing with double-speak was exposed by the wrangling between the parties in Congress. The shut-down has at least revealed the assuring fact that not all Americans are on the same page with Trump. The truth therefore is that even if his political base being the race-driven elements in the US Congress and on American streets still wallow in the illusion of their supremacy based only on the colour of their skin, there exists a more realistic cross-section of the country which identifies with the imperative of the country’s progress materializing only through the cumulative enterprise of all stakeholders in the country as in the rainbow.
That is why the world especially the targeted African countries and which have expressed their reservations over the Trump gaffe, should proceed beyond lamenting over the development and address the bigger picture of tackling the factor which informed Trump to exercise his right to play the ‘basket mouth’ in Nigerian parlance. This is the failure of governance in their domains which has predisposed their citizens to try to escape to brighter parts of the world at grave risks to their lives. Hence even if the man Trump may have characteristically descended to the level of using uncouth language like a gutter snipe, what he was referring to is not new, as far as the political establishment of the US is concerned.
In spite of several decades after the abolition of official racism in the US, and the glaring landmark contributions to US society by immigrants from all over the world, that country’s political establishment still has racist tendencies which Trump had the indiscretion to ventilate. Incidentally the direction of his administration with respect to the relationship between the US and the rest of the world was clear from his campaign for the country’s Presidency. Even after the victory the Presidential Inauguration occasion was also hijacked by Trump to underline the direction of his administration which as he put it is ‘America First’.
Little wonder that even as he blunders with each new day in the US Presidency he still enjoys the support of a minority core base of supporters who are urging him into further hard line positions, many of them tinged with racism. With deeper introspection and appropriate responses Trump’s ‘s—countries’ of today can make him eat his words in the course of time.