Unusual Politics in America Will Continue

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Unusual Politics in America Will Continue

By Bunmi Makinwa

Twenty presidents have been elected into office in the United States of America (USA) during the twentieth century and to date, and only six of them served for one term of the constitutionally provided two terms. President Donald Trump is one of them. He will leave office evidently as a furious, bitter and unhappy president.

On August 9. 1974, disgraced President Richard Nixon flew out of the White House in an official helicopter and returned to his home in California, the first and only US president to have resigned from office. Republican Party’s President Nixon lived most of the rest of his life struggling to redeem some dignity within American politics until he died on April 22, 1994.

Nixon was a central figure in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington D.C.  Watergate Office Building. The offences included spying and bugging enemies and opponents during the presidential campaign between Nixon and his Democratic nominee rival Mr. George McGovern. Nixon covered up the scandalous incident, more well-known simply as Watergate. His resignation was to escape a certain impeachment as his own party’s House of Representatives and Senators had turned against him.

President Trump will leave office on January 20, 2021 under a cloud of allegations of misconduct at personal and official levels. He is being investigated on his business, political campaign financing and personal activities before he became president. His management of family and personal matters as president will also come under more scrutiny. His critics would like him to be tried and perhaps punished.

Unlike Nixon, Trump is not repentant and apologetic about his actions. Trump has many leaders of the Republican Party, including a good number from the House of Representatives and Senate, in his camp. He also has millions of supporters who are solidly behind him.

Judging by his past and current attitudes, Trump will not fade into the shadows. Nor will he step away from the unusual politics that he has championed in a new USA.

Preceding his election in 2016, President Trump said that he could shoot a person dead on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York, and it would not affect the adulation that his admirers and supporters had for him. Not many people took seriously such an obviously ludicrous statement especially by a presidential candidate.

But he was right. During the campaigns, despite several potentially self-destructive statements by Trump, and in spite of unusually damaging issues that could diminish his support, Trump became even more attractive as leader of his conservative base. Trump was a magnet for Americans who were against political norms, racist, angry, anti-immigrant, far-right, discontented, religious extremists that would not look beyond his rhetoric to examine his business and personal life which were at odds with what he professed.

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His defiant refusal to disclose his tax returns which could have dealt the hardest knock on his election was shrugged away by his adherents. He became the face of a new Republican Party that did all his biddings. Very few party leaders spoke against his populist, in-your-face, caustic, relentless appeal to some sordid sides that were latent within his base. He was elected president, much to his own surprise. Although he lost the popular vote to his opponent, Ms. Hillary Clinton, he won the electoral vote handily.

For four years in office, Trump fought the mass media especially the so-called liberal media which he constantly labelled fake news. He disagreed with the long-held USA policies on engagement with traditional allies such as the European Union.

He refused to continue the financial commitments of the USA with NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that started as the Western military hegemony against then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Trump cared little about Western interests or unity as he faced-down China and Iraq, and diverged on policies with Canada, France, Germany and Japan. He cultivated a personal, chummy relationship with leaders like Russia’s President Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, who Americans love to hate.

Most probably, Trump’s good record of economic performance, until Covid-19 appeared, gave him a comfortable level of confidence to win re-election in 2020. Blinded by the sole aim of being returned for a second term, he minimized the seriousness of the new Corona virus. He underestimated the terrible impact of the disease on Americans, directly and indirectly leading to the deaths of more than 350,000 people and still counting.

President Trump does not avoid a fight, he relishes it. He never surrenders but maintains his position no matter the facts or evidence. He is a champion of relentless verbal war and ceaseless Tweets. They have all served him well until they did not – he lost the election for a second term.

Trump out of office will not change his ways. Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, in her book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”, characterized President Trump as a driven egoist compelled by upbringing and lifestyle that makes everyone and everything expendable to fulfil his delusional feeling of self-importance. “The atmosphere of division my grandfather (Donald Trump’s father) created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else,” she wrote.

The portrayal of Donald Trump is similar in many other books, such as: A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig; Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff; How Trump Thinks: His Tweets and the Birth of a New Political Language by Peter Oborne and Tom Roberts; RAGE by Bob Woodward; The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton; Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House by Omarosa Manigault.

Trump wanted by all means to be elected president for a second term. He needs the cover, immunity and authority that the office conveys to suppress his opponents, get protection from his pursuers and build his financial strength. He has lost the possibilities. He refuses though to accept it – mentally, emotionally and truly.

He would not accept to cooperate with President-elect Joe Biden. He would not organize a smooth transition of power. He called for protests, urged the House and Senate to change the election results, went through numerous court cases, and asked directly the Georgia State’s Secretary of State to get him votes in any way to upturn the results. All the efforts have failed.

Trump has damaged the democratic process in the USA. He will leave office as a desperate, disappointed person.

He is said to have accumulated over 200 million US dollars recently in post-election fund-raising and will continue to look for more money. He will count on over 70 million votes that were cast for him in the 2020 election and on members of the House of Representatives and Senate who support his bellicose stance.

The impressive resources at his disposal will serve him well as he doggedly fights for personal survival and seeks political relevance. He will deploy his means to disrupt the in-coming Biden-Harris administration. He will continue the unusual politics that he has introduced and championed at least for the immediate future. Politics in the USA will not be the same as it was before the sad entry of Trump.

Bunmi Makinwa is the CEO of AUNIQUEI Communication for Leadership

How Trump Will Deal With Post-Election Loss

By Bunmi Makinwa

Donald Trump will go through post election loss syndrome, also known as PELS, and his party will undergo transformation that will shed a new light on the United States.

PELS is characterized as anger, denial, blame. PELS includes impulses of public tantrums and claims of victory, lower self-esteem, self-doubt, shock, depression and anxiety. It is doubtful that Trump will handle PELS well by accepting responsibility for the results of the election.

Several pointers can show how Trump will handle his PELS, both at personal and relational areas. Over the course of the U.S. political campaigns, there are many reports that assess Trump’s personality. The reports are based on books, interviews, statements and activities that he has engaged in. Also, his future life can emerge through a comparison of Trump with what happened to some past losers of U.S. presidential elections, and the after-election life of the only independent billionaire presidential candidate, Ross Perot.

By understanding Trump’s personality, it is possible to have a fair glimpse of his PELS, which will also affect both his politics and business.

Seeking a deeper understanding of Trump, The Atlantic, a news magazine, featured an article recently by Dan P. McAdams, a professor and specialist on personality psychology. It had as its central idea “to create a psychological portrait of the man. Who is he, really? How does his mind work? How might he go about making decisions in office, were he to become president?” The article relied on concepts, tools and a body of research in psychology, psychoanalysis and similar studies.

Absent a clinical visit by Trump, the McAdams examined the presidential candidate in four major areas, namely, disposition, mental habits, motivations and self-conception. It summed him up as narcissistic, disagreeable, grandiose, and consumed with a streak to win at any costs in personal business matters, and in anything else that he was involved in.

“Trump’s personality is certainly extreme by any standard, and particularly rare for a presidential candidate… Across his lifetime, Donald Trump has exhibited a trait profile that you would not expect of a U.S. president: sky-high extroversion combined with off-the-chart low agreeableness…Prompted by the activity of dopamine circuits in the brain, highly extroverted actors are driven to pursue positive emotional experiences, whether they come in the form of social approval, fame, or wealth. Indeed, it is the pursuit itself, more so even than the actual attainment of the goal, that extroverts find so gratifying.” The article explained further that, “People low in agreeableness are described as callous, rude, arrogant, and lacking in empathy.”

Some reports state that Trump started his political quest for the presidency only as part of his relentless marketing and showmanship. He only probably wanted to get himself well known and

push his business frontiers. He was his explosive, rude, lying, attacking usual self. It worked more than he ever thought possible.

By the end of a few weeks of the primaries campaign for the Republican party’s nomination, more people in America and the world would have heard the Trump name more than they ever did. It would mean more money coming through so many products that will carry the Trump label. This is how Trump has always done it. To his surprise, getting rid of the political elites of the party proved much easier than Trump ever expected. He knocked the 16 other contestants off by poking and jabbing them, and messing them up in language that they had never heard used in such an arena.

Each day as the party’s primaries went on, Trump must have wondered why he was a superstar whilst all he wanted to do was have fun. Suddenly, he could see himself as potentially president of U.S. He decided to go for it. His abrasive and aggressive style of campaign continued to baffle many as it attracted a growing flock of followers.

Now that the immediate political quest is over, what will become of Trump?

Over the past 20 years, eight presidential candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties have lost elections. They are Walter Mondale (1984), Michael Dukakis (1988), George W. Bush (1992), Bob Dole (1996), Al Gore (2000), John Kerry (2004), John McCain (2008), and Mitt Romney (2012). All of them were practicing politicians and had held elective political offices. All of them have continued to play some roles in their political parties, and some continued to occupy public offices either by elections or appointments for some time. Most of them took up teaching either as full or part-time professors in universities and colleges.

Trump has not been in politics until his run for presidential election. He has been a businessman. He appears to fit more into the mould of Ross Perot, a billionaire who ran as presidential candidate twice, in 1992 as an independent and in 1996 as a candidate of the Reform Party which he formed. Perot lost both times and continued his life in business with occasional involvement in politics by endorsing candidates. He has not spoken much on political issues and he was the 129th richest person in the U.S. in 2015.

Trump has, perhaps inadvertently, achieved several things that no recent presidential candidate can claim. His anti-immigrants, anti-hispanics, anti-blacks, anti-handicapped people, anti-media, anti-women, anti-party rhetoric has bruised the Republican party and revealed fault lines that will not go away. A new Republican party is likely in the near future, and some writers said that it would be a culmination of the “Trumpism” effect, a “revolt” of predominantly white blue-collar workers, seeking a strong political platform for their agenda. It is doubtful though that Trump will find a comfortable room to advance such an agenda given the enmity that he created within the party’s leadership.

According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of campaign donations, a third of the topmost Chief Executive Officers supported the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, during the 2012 election. However, none of the 100 top CEOs supported Trump, and 11 have backed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 election.

Hotel bookings for Trump hotel chain has plummeted by as much as 60 per cent compared to last year’s figures whilst similar hotels show rising clientele. Trump’s businesses generally are showing decline performances and the Trump brand has not attracted significant sales, according to business reports.

Clearly, Trump will have to spend time to shore up his businesses and make efforts to harness whatever goodwill may remain to rebrand his name.

The Republican party will go through surgery and resuscitation and neither the party nor its arch rival, the Democratic party, will stay the same. Nor will the U.S. be seen the same way from now on given the portrait of Trump as its possible leader.

Bunmi Makinwa is the CEO of AUNIQUEI Communication for Leadership. Formerly, he was Africa Regional Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Donald Trump: Not Good for America, or the World

By Bunmi Makinwa

Abrasive, accusative, aggressive and abusive, Donald Trump at initial stage of primaries for a Republican Party nominee for president of the United States, seemed a joke. He was notorious for having insisted that President Barack Obama was not born in the USA. As the number of contestants increased in the primaries, Trump was expected to drop out. Surprisingly, he kept on waxing stronger. Unopposed, he was nominated as presidential candidate of the party. He had sent his 14 rivals crashing out one after the other.

Donald Trump & Senator Ted Cruz (via slate.com)

The primaries witnessed unforgettable profane language, mainly dished out by Trump against his opponents. For example, he characterized former Governor Jeb Bush as having “low energy” and was “Dumb as a rock!”. Senator Ted Cruz did not know whether to laugh or cry when Trump posted an unattractive picture of Cruz’s wife, Heidi, juxtaposed against that of Melania, his supermodel wife. To Carly Florina, the only woman in the group, Trump said: “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that as the face of our next president?” Senator Marco Rubio had taken to calling Trump “Big Don” whilst he was “Little Marco” to Trump, a thinly veiled reference to their exchange earlier on sizes of their masculine organs. Trump’s supporters hailed him as authentic, straight and not corrupted by the establishment. But around the world, media reports and many world leaders could not comprehend how Trump could be America’s best candidate for any office, least of all aspiring to become president of USA.

In December 2015, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron disagreed with Trump’s comments on London police, and called them “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.” Then Mayor of London Boris Johnson said that they “were ill-informed”. Sadiq Khan, who later became Mayor of London, said Trump “can’t just be dismissed as a buffoon – his comments are outrageous, divisive and dangerous”. Britain, the closest ally of USA is hardly known to express such official views on American presidential candidates.

But Trump was unusual and his personality draws ire, as it attracts unwavering following. “A person who thinks only about building walls — wherever they may be — and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis said of Trump. “His discourse is so dumb, so basic,” said Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. Mexican President Enrique Pena said, “That’s the way Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived.” “Trump is an irrational type,” said Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei. The numerous world leaders who admonished Trump included French President Francois Hollande, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Isaac Herzog, Israeli opposition leader, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, Germany’s Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, Prime Minister of France Manuel Valls, and Danish Foreign Minister Kristian Jensen.

Somehow, those who cried,”No” were drowned out by the “Yes” noise. Trump’s increasing high opinion poll in the USA was surprising, to put it mildy. Fawning crowd filled his campaign gathering.

Donald Trump at a rally in Dallas, Texas (via decodedc.com)

How could a country that has so much to offer be imprisoned by such limited viewpoints? America has produced more breakthrough research findings, more discoveries, more knowledge in almost any field of human endeavour, than the rest of the world combined. It is the country with the largest foundations, charitable organizations that give to causes and people in lands that some of the donors have no idea whether they actually exist. It is the land of refuge for most people where needs and hopes are met in more ways than they ever imagined. Yet Trump was against outsiders, tolerance and collaboration.

America is a democracy. It was founded and built on the notion of freedom, unfettered and unlimited, except by agreement in areas that are institutionalized. It is a country where to be yourself is real. And what is different is right…unless it is wrong.

The tension between theory and practice of democracy finds all kinds of expressions in peoples and places all over America. Trump is the “kick-arse” American. Loud, brazen, daring and with a must-win compulsion. Even when he loses he makes it look like he wins. Tony Schwartz, co-author of Donald Trump’s autobiography, said in The New Yorker magazine that if he were writing The Art of the Deal today, he would have titled the book The Sociopath. “Lying is second nature to him…More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true,” said Schwartz.

It is not what the world says or thinks that will stop Trump. The strongest opponent of Donald Trump is the phenomenon that Donald Trump represents, and that he champions. Among his unhinged believers it is necessary to be daring, angry, even obscene and, why not, fascist.

American Presidential Candidate Donald Trump (via thehawkeye.com)

There are many reasons why Trump’s election as president of USA is a major problem for America’s leadership position in the world. Here are five reasons his victory cannot make America great again.

Firstly, beyond the notion that a character of his type can emerge from a most admirable country, it would confirm that through a democratic expression of votes, such a leader could indeed be accepted. Trump, repulsive as he may be, would become the face of “real” America.

Secondly, it would legitimize the use of crude, abusive language in American campaign politics at a level never witnessed in the modern era, and perhaps ever before. Trump as presidential candidate during TV broadcast denigrated a female journalist, Megyn Kelly; mocked a handicap journalist at a campaign rally; dismissed the service of a most respected veteran of the Vietnam war, Senator John McCain; and disrespected parents who lost their son fighting a war for his country.

Thirdly, it would confirm that being a bully is normal, accepted, even admired by most Americans.

Fourthly, it will undermine the two-party system which is the basis of America’s politics. Trump has fragmented the Republican Party. His victory would help him consolidate the division and effectively he would re-mould the party as his new empire. Such a situation would render very difficult coalescence around the middle range where balance is attained; where neither far left nor far right can dominate, and where both right and left converge in elections that have been won in turns over time almost rhythmically by Democrats and Republicans..

Fifthly, Trump as president would put to rest the belief that a woman could reach the highest political office in the USA. Despite criticisms of her, Hillary Clinton has had the best preparation and experience that can be required for the presidency. Absent Clinton, the political horizon is not replete with strong possible female contenders. Not only would Trump’s triumph, if it happened, kill the enthusiasm generated by Clinton as a possible next president, it will send a message that the country is not prepared for such a change.

The 1920 presidential election was the first in which women were permitted to vote in every state, more than a century after men had dominated political life of the country. It may then take about two centuries before a woman would emerge as president.
Within the Republican Party, many have dissociated themselves from Trump and would like to see the end of the phenomenon that he extols. His attackers call him “insane”, “reckless”, “unfit”, “temperamental”, “racist”. He is seen as lacking patience, curiosity, knowledge, character, and balance. The surge against him from within is the force that can destroy the Trump phenomenon.

The view that Trump and his views represent America is not false, nor is it correct. This is the crux of the matter. In fact, it is the paradox of the country’s democracy. America is like the pendulum of grandfather clock. It swings between two tendencies, right and left. But it does not hit the walls of the clock.