Trump’s annulment efforts

Those who expected President Donald Trump to win re-election were extravagantly optimistic.  What they expected was nothing short of a miracle.  But since the days of Our Lord’s ministry on earth, miracles take a little longer and, often, they require greater effort.  To Donald Trump’s credit, he actually did the impossible which ought to be enough gratification for a man so unqualified and so poorly prepared to be president.  Of all American presidents in history, he seems to have the least qualification, the worst preparation in terms of knowledge, morality, competence, and temperament.

At the period Richard Nixon was slated for impeachment and removal, “Tricky Dick,” as he was known, had read the handwriting on the wall.  Actually, he did not need to read the handwriting.  Elders of the Republican Party went to him to give him the bad news.  They did not have the votes to save him in the Senate.  His indictment in the House was assured.  Nixon then resigned.  Today’s Republican Party is so feckless. So cowardly, it cannot even dare tell the king he had no clothes.  Forty years ago or thereabouts, Donald Trump would not have survived one year in office.  He was crisis-prone.  He is recorded to have told 230,000 lies in less than four years; he committed impeachable offences almost once every week, the truly egregious ones occurred at least twice each month.

American presidents tend to pretend not to be racists, which is okay, underlining the fact that racism is evil.  Trump was different.   Everyone knew that his father, Fred Trump, was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.  But in the liberal American tradition, you don’t hold the sins of fathers against their sons, and, so, it was not held against Donald Trump that his father was arrested in 1926 in New York City in full regalia of the KKK, the grandfather of American domestic terrorism.  We all know an apple does not fall very far from the tree. 

So, Donald’s love for white supremacists, was appalling, but not surprising; but‘palling’ around with Steve Bannon and David Duke, consolidated that evil alliance, and legitimized it whereas it ought to be automatically disqualifying, and it always was when the Republican Party was the Republican Party.  Alas, the party had become a shadow of itself, a fake contraption devoid of principles and morality shorn of ideals or even ideas.  It has become a political tool that no longer bothered about right and wrong.  All the Conservative Thinkers from David Frum to Joe Scarborough and others left the party.  Founders, fathers of American conservatism like Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley would be turning in their graves.  As would Ronald Reagan. But I digress.

It is utterly dishonest for Donald Trump to pretend that he could have won the election because he became president in the first place purely by accident.  In 2016 he lost the popular vote by three million votes.  That was the good news.  The bad news was he got stuck in a 37 per cent to 45 per cent in the opinion polls throughout his tenure; he never went beyond that because his vote was dependent on the white vote, and he could not expand the vote.  To Trump, a great America is a white America.  If he peeled off 13 per cent of the black vote, this means there were 87 per cent of black people who voted against him.  He did much better with the Hispanic vote which was a surprise and the $100 million invested in Florida to deny him a victory in that state became a waste of money.  It is still a riddle how anyone could mildly associate Joe Biden with Communism. 

But if we should start at the beginning, the day after Trump was named winner in 2016, millions of American women went on a nation-wide demonstration against him, citing his disrespect for women, his misogyny and poor morals. Less than a fortnight to the November 3 election the women returned to remind the country how bad Donald Trump was for America.  Women decide the vote all over the world, and especially so in the United States.  Of course, white women sold on white nationalism would vote for Trump, the great white hope, but their number would not be enough to lift him across the finish line.

Trump knew he had no chance against Joe Biden.  So he did everything including throwing the kitchen sink.  The Ukraine plot emanated from an evil mind.  It was not that Trump wanted Biden investigated, he knew that nothing would be found.  All he wanted was to raise that shadow of doubt, the veneer of suspicion, that Biden was not entirely honest. 

The failure to convict Trump in the US Senate following his impeachment was a clear indication of America’s decline, a historic decline; the nation had lost its ideals, it motivation, its righteousness. Its superiority in terms of ideas of right and wrong.  After it, nothing else mattered.  Trump operated unfettered.  He did more egregious violations. Sacked directors-general he did not like, ordered the justice department to investigate his critics, refused to show his tax receipts, and the more you contemplate the coronavirus fatalities, the more you knew Donald Trump did a poor job quite apart from his war on science.

American elections are free of manipulations.  Seeing the impossibility of his victory Trump began preparing for how to explain his defeat.  He could only lose if the election was rigged, he said six months to the election.  He must win or else the election was rigged.  His niece, Rd. Mary L. Trump, the psychologist, warned the nation that Trump was incapable of taking a defeat because he never won anything honestly in his life.

Trump’s last roll of the dice was to annul the election in the manner of the Babangida junta in 1993.  He had some but not all the infrastructure.  He did have a background noise of Fox News.  The Republican Party was morally bankrupt just like the Social Democratic Party, which was ready to mortgage the party’s victory for some cash from Aso Rock.  Trump never had the Association for Better Nigeria, the actor-turf which went to kangaroo courts to procure all kinds of judgment. 

Trump’s Attorney-General was just like Babangida’s Attorney-General, echoing his master’s voice.  In the end what held together was the institution of government. Trump had packed the courts with his acolytes, including three Supreme Court justices.  Not one of the cases could get to the Supreme Court because the cases had no legs, no evidence, and no proof.  It didn’t help because American institutions insist on doing what they are set up to do.  To choose the nation’s leadership, it’s the polling booth.  To interpret the nation’s laws, it’s the courts.  To write the nation’s laws, it is the legislature.  Trump lost, at last count, about 39 court cases.  Even the judges he appointed said ‘no, sir, allegations of electoral fraud are serious and need proof.  We see none here.’