Former President and Republican candidate in November’s election, Donald Trump, is seeking a return to the White House to continue from where he left off in 2020 when he was ousted by Joe Biden . His third shot at the presidency makes him the most regular face in three back to back US elections. He has participated in seven presidential debates, the only nominee to have done so in US history.
Donald Trump, a property and business mogul, made his foray into US politics in earnest in 2008 as the voice of Birtherism, the movement that questioned Barack Obama’s American citizenship because his father was a Kenyan. His otherwise fruitless efforts to find Obama,’s “real” birth certificate gained him notoriety and credibility on the extreme right of American politics.
Eight years later, he would launch his own presidential run under the mantra, “Make America Great Again,” which insinuated that the Black presidency had tarnished America’s perceived greatness. Sarah Palin who applauded Trump’s ‘detective’ ventures, searching for Obama’s birth certificate, is one of his most prominent supporters. Others include members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a movement founded on the ideology of white supremacy. Historically, the Klan is associated with lynching African-Americans soon after emancipation and the American civil war.
Most of the media and the political class ignored Birtherism or treated it as a joke. That’s why its offspring, Trumpism, baffles media pundits who now shake their heads and claim not to know what to make of it. Trumpism is a reflection of all the entwined but sometimes contradictory strands and values embedded in the very fabric of American history and culture. The most obvious is racism whose formative roots are found in plantation slavery. Reference to America’s past greatness alludes to an empire built on slave labour. American capitalism developed on absolutely free labour but Trump promises to approximate it by ensuring low wages and less taxation on profit.
Trumpism also pledges to deport thousands of undocumented workers. Some people joke that Trump may end up deporting himself since all Americans, except Native Americans and African-Americans, are children of illegal immigrants. The threat has sinister echoes of American history where, following the 1830 Indian Removal Policy, native populations were forcibly removed from their lands to Oklahoma in what is now known as the “trail of tears.”
Trumpism also draws from the morality of reality shows where treachery, even against a supposed friend, is good as long as it leads to a win. Reality shows may blunt people’s moral sensitivities. Trump has also learnt from modern television and music video where a screen image does not last more than a few seconds. Similarly, he moves rapidly from issue to issue, providing catchy, if reckless, sound-bites to dominate the news cycle. To add to Trump’s rhetorical devices, he lampoons his opponents by appending labels to their names: Low Energy Bush, Little Marc, Lying Ted, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe and currently, ultra radical liberal Kamala . Having numbed his followers with moral negatives, Trump then calls upon them to trust him in order to bring them heaven.
When he first declared his candidacy for the US presidential election in 2016, it was assumed he was doing so for enhanced media coverage. At first, nobody gave Trump much thought. In fact, many wrote him off. But no sooner did he declare his candidacy than many people woke up to the reality that Trump could actually be the Republican nominee. And as he gathered momentum, alarm bells began ringing. What followed was disbelief, panic and resistance. But resistance from the “stop Trump” movement wasn’t enough to stop him. This, because Trump has maintained the image of a tough guy. When this has bordered on being too coarse, he has been advised to be “presidential.” He has disregarded this advice and publicly laughed it off. It has paid dividends as he has vanquished his opponents, and astoundingly so. And none more than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. “His experience, temperament and, character make him (Donald Trump) horribly unsuitable to being the head of state,” declared The Economist, a respected news magazine, before the election. Yet, as the votes streamed in showing the Republican candidate was on his way to be the 45th President of the United States ahead of Democrat Hillary Clinton, it was evident the voters had defied popular expectations and that a political tsunami had swept through America. “This is painful and it will be for a long time,” were the words of Hillary in her concession speech after losing the election. What many thought was a far- fetched pipe dream had become a reality. In the early morning of November 9, 2016, Donald Trump crossed the threshold of 270 electoral college votes to be President-elect. A woman with over 40 years of experience in politics and governance won the popular vote but still lost the election to a man who had no experience and no plan; just a four-word statement: “Make America Great Again.” But Trump’s four -year stay in the Oval office made America everything but great. Anand Giridharadas, the author of “Winner Takes it All: The Elite Challenge of Changing the World,” describes Trump as the worst President in modern American history. Many people around the world are convinced this is indeed the case. His determination to radically reverse with impunity what Obama had built in favour of liberals, his messed up management of the covid-19 pandemic, his overt bigotry and hatred for Africans and third world immigrants, coupled with his dalliance with white supremacy in the guise of “Making America Great Again,” is unparalleled. Trump, after casting himself as lord, Americans, especially the grand old party (Republican) stalwarts became ‘Trumpier.’ The theory of power and influence has it that you cannot have both simultaneously, but Trump shared this ceiling.
Trump would be sanctioned by American voters at the next polls in 2020 that restricted him to a one-term President. But he would not give up without a fight. He fell out with Vice President, Mike Pence, who refused to endorse the then President’s bid to overturn his election loss to Biden. Then happened the mother of all insanities. The successful and unbelievable invasion on January 6, 2021 of the DC Capitol, the holy of holies of American national institutions, by Trump’s insurrectionist supporters, was a new low even by the standards of the most despicable despotic regimes. They went beyond Trump’s earlier admonition to manually help their President achieve the sinister goal of forcefully thwarting the congressional certification of election winner, Joe Biden. In the aftermath, five people lay dead. Equally gasp-inducing was the failure by law enforcement to stop the breaching of this most sacred monument and reverential symbol of the American government; a building whose cornerstone was laid by no less a person than George Washington himself. The deadly Wednesday riot was so crude that speaker, Nancy Pelosi’s laptop was stolen.
In spite of these well known antecedents, Trump is again in the presidential race after bullying his way to pick the Republican ticket. Trump, 78, is now the oldest major party nominee in American history and scrambling to reorient an election against someone two decades his junior, having expected to face an 81-year old incumbent Joe Biden beset by concerns over infirmity. His restrained approach against an imploding Biden in their debate in June proved brutally effective. Biden was forced to drop out of the White House race less than a month later.
In his current campaign for president, Trump has been parading the same playbook of lies, name calling and insults for which he’s been notorious. The Harris campaign has adopted “weird” as a new catch-all for describing Trump’s rhetoric. Nor has there been any shortage of anti -immigration rhetoric. At the September 10 debate with Harris, Trump (he again) talked at length about a debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants have been eating local people’s pets in Ohio. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, “he said, before being corrected by the ABC News moderator that the authorities in the town of Springfield have said this did not happen. The CNN’s instant fact checking showed Trump made 33 false claims during the debate. Yet, Trump said: “It was my best debate ever.” That’s the quintessential Trump, more concerned about megabytes than the content or veracity of his utterances. Don’t look for consistency in policy or inspiration in his thoughts. The man confronts, then backtracts in a manner that makes you wonder if he is bi-polar. The Washington Post exposed his tendency to lie or mislead when they revealed that in his first year in office, he made 2140 false or misleading claims. That works out at 6 untruths per day. No American president has lied that much. When lies are exposed, rather than apologize, he continues to lie until such a time as lies and untruths have become the norm for him.
Trump has vowed he would continue with outdoor rallies after being wounded in an attempted assassination at a campaign event in July in Pennsylvania. He has made the shooting a key part of his campaign, telling his supporters he “took a bullet for democracy.”
Dogged by scandals, Trump, has been convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with an adult film star, found liable for sexual abuse and also faces charges of trying to jettison the 2020 election.
Trump, who has not committed to accepting the results of November’s election if he loses, has warned of “long prison sentences” for all those he said were planning on “cheating” in November. White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, responded by saying: “That kind of rhetoric coming from a former President is dangerous.” No doubt, Trump is widely viewed as an existential threat to democracy.
However, the most recent polls show the race between Trump and Harris remains neck-and-neck, particularly in the six or seven battleground states likely to determine the election winner. Herein lies the enigma in American politics. As the saying goes, a people get the leader they deserve. May Americans get the leader of their choice, even if it means being the world’s laughing stock.