Lost the White House
Lost the Senate
Lost the House
Lost the popular vote
Lost Electoral College
Lost 60 suits in an attempted coup
The end of a pathetic Trumpian era.
Watching the Trump mob took over the United States capitol complex evening of Wednesday, 6 January ’21, will go into the history books as a spectacle, one which film makers must do everything to permanently etch in our minds, forever. And should they need a title , any of these should do: As an Infantile Trump Goes Gaga, The Day Mobocracy Took Over America, The End Of Trumpism, or The Day Of The Jackal 2.
And know what: the event reminded me of a Dr Charles Arnade, my immaculately dressed, fast talking, Visiting American Professor of History, teaching our American History class in the late ‘60’s at the then University of Ife, Ile – Ife, trying so hard to impress it on our young minds that Americans were a master class – a people who quit religious persecution in Europe, thought nothing of traversing thousands of kilometres, just to begin a new life in the New World, regardless of whatever the danger.
How a rabid, unthinking President Trump rubbished that brand?
This mobocracy was long in coming, especially since the coming of that big man with little hands into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 4 November, 2016.
Asked in a Presidential television debate ahead of the 2016 Presidential election if he would accept the result of an election in which he was defeated, he had replied: ”I will look at it at the time. I will keep you in suspense”.
Hilary Clinton, her opponent and candidate of the Democratic Party, had observed, fulsomely, as follows:
“Well, Chris, ( the host) let me respond to that because that’s horrifying.
You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going his direction,
He claims that whatever it is , is rigged against him.
He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary and said the Republican primary was rigged against him.
Then his Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering. He claims the court system and the federal judge are rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV programme three years in a row, and he started tweeting that the Emmy was rigged against him”.Then the bombshell: “this is a mindset. This is how Donald thinks. And it’s funny. But it is also troubling because that isn’t how our democracy works”.
That, however, was only the beginning.
In 2018, Anonymous – author of a White House tell-all book, later revealed by himself to be Miles Taylor who had served as Homeland Security chief of staff in the Trump administration, and would later launch a group called the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (or REPAIR for short) made up of “former U.S. officials, advisors, and conservatives under the Trump administration, had organized themselves silently working towards a leadership change in the White House and seeking to repair the Republican Party. They tried to lay bare, all the happenings in the Trump White House which showed that the President was totally unqualified for high office. He it was, who revealed, in a withering 2018 New York Times op-ed, that there was such a “resistance” within the Trump administration. After the op-ed was published, an irascible President Donald Trump had blasted it as “gutless,” tweeting, “TREASON?” and writing that “If the GUTLESS, anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once”.
While outing himself in 2020, Taylor wrote: “Why I’m no longer ‘Anonymous, is that my book was “a character study of the current Commander in Chief, and a caution to voters that it wasn’t as bad as it looked inside the Trump Administration — it is worse.” He wrote further: “Much has been made of the fact that these writings were published anonymously. The decision wasn’t easy, I wrestled with it, and I understand why some people consider it questionable to levy such serious charges against a sitting President under the cover of anonymity. But my reasoning was straightforward, and I stand by it. Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling. I wanted the attention to be on the arguments themselves.”
By the events of Wednesday, 6 January, ’21 during which the U.S Congress was completely shut down by insurrectionists who Trump had personally promised to walk down to the capitol; with four Americans dead, congress effectively shut down, and the office of the House Speaker turned completely upside down, President Trump has shown, conclusively, that a pig will always remain a pig, no matter how dressed up.
But Annonymous was not the last, either, as it has been followed up by several other books, among them: ‘UNHINGED’, by Omarosa Newman and both ‘FEAR’ and ’RAGE’, by the incomparable Bob Woodward, a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. All the books had been critical of Trump but hardly would anything match what his own mother was alleged to have said of him.
Though of a rather dubious source, it claims that his mother, Mary Anne Trump, once said of the future President: “Yes, he’s an idiot with zero common sense, and no social skills, but he is my son. I just hope he never goes into politics. He’d be a disaster”. Even if the mother never said any of those words, whoever ascribed them to her must have been truly prophetic. He would, indeed, be lucky to end his only term.
President Trump, like his father, who wont let apartments to blacks, is a narcissistic racist bigot, and God being ever so good, has ensured that he will be shamed out of office. I wonder if you, the reader, has seen the video of President Trump and his family watching that attempted ‘Nazi’ takeover of congress on TV, with his equally racist son so happy, his girlfriend was dancing and Ivanka doing a high five.
When the President talks about making America great again, he is thinking only of a return to a slave owning America, when he says stop the steal, or that the country or the election was being stolen, he was only mouthing shorthands for the votes of Blacks and other non white Americans who he believes are illegal because, for him, and his ilk, who predominate non college graduate white Americans, these people are less than human.
Recall that in his absolutely shameless telephone calll to the Republican Georgian secretary of state, he was hammering on votes from mostly Black populated areas of the state like Fulton.
However, if anything shows how dark Trump’s inner mind is , it must be the shambolic manner in which Omarosa Newman was shoved off from the White House.
Always on the lookout for a fall guy, Trump got Kelly, his then Chief of Staff, to do the dirty job of separating the black woman from him , her friend of 15 years, going back to the APPRENTICE, the TV programme that shot him literally to the strastophere.
A normally brusque man who had never shown he even saw Omorosa who was Trump’s Director of Communications for the office of Public lisison, Kelly had sent for her to meet him at The Situation Room, normally reserved for talks with world leaders. Without as much as any courtesies, he brusquely told her: “We’re going to talk to you about leaving the White House. Its come to my attention there have been significant integrity issues related to you. They are very serious. If this were the military, it would deserve a court martial. I’d like to see this be a friendly departure. But it’s very important that you understand there are serious legal issues that have been violated…”.
Completely taken aback, she asked if the President was aware of this? The brash man, like his boss who he is now vigorously badmouthing unlike those days when he played sissy, though a retired general, Kelly would only tell her: “the staff works for me, not for the President. So when you are gone, I’ll tell him”
It took a brilliant Omorosa, a former professor, to put two and two together even though she had played no role in what led to it. Like the infamous ACCESS HOLYWOOD TAPE which showed Trump at his most lurid, sexually perverted, another tape was about being outed, dating back to APPRENTICE days. Called the N-word Tape, it has shown Trump’s utter depravity when it comes to race. Bill Pruitt, a former Apprentice producer, had tweeted that there were tapes far worse than the Access Holywood Tape, telling the NPR it contained “unfathomably despicable words about African Anericans, Jewish people and, of course, his whipping boys, the Mexicans.
Though Omarosa says she hadn’t heard Trump use those words or would have promptly resigned, she was now getting pissed off especially with Trump’s silly phone call to the wife of a killed soldier as well as what she described as Trump’s and Kelly’s racially charged attack on Representative Fredrica Wilson, who heard the call and told the press about it. To be sure she wasn’t playing the fool, being ‘herself a Black, she decided to try lay her hands on the tape to hear what it contained. She told a friend, who most probably told another, who must have told Kelly. Knowing how neck deep in racist bigotry Trump is, Omorosa had to go but it was cleverly presented like Trump knew nothing about it, and with a coterie of lying Trump staff linking her offence to a so- called mis- use of her official car.
I am sure President Trump’s travails have only just begun.
Credit: Femi Orebe, TN