The second coming of Donald Trump as the president of the United States is turning out to be more phenomenal than most people ever imagined. The man has, in less than seven days, taken the world by storm. He is trying his hands on the most unexpected. Even Trump himself is acting as if he is operating from the White House for the first time. He is in a hurry to rewrite American history in this new dispensation.
The first time he was here, Trump shook neither his country nor the watching world. He was just one erratic, loose-mouthed president who didn’t seem to care a hoot about public perception. He believed so much in his capacity to make things happen, for good or otherwise. He had a cocky disposition that bordered somewhat on the all-knowing. Yet, he lost power, regardless of his accustomed braggadocio. He, obviously , did not expect that premature exit from the seat of power. That was why he embarked on all manner of protests, including the near invasion of the Capitol, by him and his supporters. In the end, all of that amounted to nothing. He remained ousted.
Then he launched a comeback bid. He probably would not have gone far in his fresh quest for power but for the sudden loss of mental acuity by President Joe Biden. Given that Biden no longer had verve or vibrancy, he dropped out of the presidential race. But the timing was inauspicious. It did not leave the Democrats with ample time to come up with a well-considered option. Kamala Harris, Biden’s quick pick, was good for the job. But her coming created room for Trump. She fell by the wayside on account of race and sex. She was female. And she was black. This double jeopardy turned out to be the Achilles Heel of the Democrats. But whatever the Democrats lost, the Republicans gained.
Trump is back and he is acting as if he is on a revenge mission. He seems to be in a hurry to obliterate the Biden presidency from the annals of American history.
Like all racial purists, Trump has the feeling that the United States is being polluted by unbridled racial mix. The Democrats do not mind that. If anything, they encourage racial interplay in the affairs of their country. That racial liberalism threw up a Barack Obama, a man of mixed races, as president of the United States. It was also what gave impetus to the presidential run of Kamala Harris, a black woman. Americans of the purist bent, would have none of that. For Trump therefore, stopping the possible rise of a semi-black or non-white president of the United States in future is a project he must bring to fruition. That explains his crackdown on birthright citizenship. It is an integral part of his America First policy. Trump, as it were, is poised to free America from baggage. We are told that suspected irregular immigrants are being rounded up for scrutiny and possible deportation. The Trump Presidency is out to return America to white Americans.
If Trump sustains his purist disposition to statecraft, there will be a radical shift in inter-racial relationships in America before he leaves office in four years. His regime could take America back to the age of racism and sexism. In antebellum America, there were innumerable pseudo-scientific discussions which portrayed blacks as species of human beings different from and lower than whites. Pro-slavery writers of the period held that the black lacked beauty, intellect and imagination and that his essence constituted in crude sensation.
Segregationist feelings were so rife in America of the era that a certain Judge Sewall of Boston posited that negroes cannot mix with whites and become members of the American society. All this belonged to America’s degraded past. But Trump appears set to take his country back to the age of racial segregation.
But all things considered, Trump’s mission is straightforward. He wants Americans to assume preeminence and occupy a pride of place in their own country. When Trump threatens, for instance, to pull America out of certain international organizations such as the World Health Organisation, the overall objective is to serve the interest of America first. It is a classic case of putting your money where your mouth is. For the new Trump, it is America for Americans.
But will those countries, particularly from the third world that will be worst hit by Trump’s racial approach to governance learn any lessons? Will the experience bring about a new thinking in Africa? What about our own Nigeria? Does the Nigerian government have any sense of direction that is aimed at making the country a livable one? This is the crux of the matter.
Anybody who makes Nigeria a subject of discussion will always have a hell of time trying to put the country in a straitjacket. Everything about Nigeria is too protean to admit of easy definition. But no matter what we say about the country and its people, the bulk of the problem lies with the leadership.
Today, Trump has stepped forward to take America to where he wants it to be. He is enunciating policies and programmers to actualize that objective. That is strategic planning. It is the responsibility of the leadership to point the way so that the people can follow. Sadly, Nigeria is very hollow in this regard. The leadership we have here exists for its own sake. It is not in the service of the people.
Let us consider the present leadership in Nigeria. The Bola Tinubu Presidency came into office without a national plan of action. There was nothing salubrious that the president set out to do for the country. What he had, instead, was an ethnic agenda. Rather than think about how to better the lot of the country and its people, Tinubu came with an ethnic grand plan, to wit, to position his Yoruba tribe to assume and take preeminence over other ethnic nationalities. This, naturally, has bred resentment in the land. Non-Yoruba Nigerians are suspicious of him and his undefined policies. This suspicion is what is stalling the tax reform bills that he came up with. The north, that part of the country that is used to being pampered, is jittery. It is suspicious of Tinubu and his agenda. No country can succeed or make progress in this mood of suspicion.
Much more regrettable is that we lie to ourselves at the expense of the country. The few who are benefiting from Tinubu’s corrupt regime are busy telling us that he is taking Nigeria to the promised land. They are not talking about the hunger and hardship that the administration plunged the country into. Nobody wants to say it as it is. If we all keep dodging, we are, invariably, encouraging the leadership to remain irresponsible. But no matter how evasive we choose to be, we will, sooner or later, begin to draw parallels between Trump’s America and Tinubu’s Nigeria.