by FELIX OGUEJIOFOR ABUGU
Donald Trump won his first presidential election (2017 -2021) on the strength of his promise to ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’, “at first a reference to some mythologized national past but now, in 2024, a nod to his first four years in office as well,” as The Week put it.
“In that vein, most of the ‘agenda items’ in Trump’s current slate of campaign promises ‘aren’t brand new,’ NBC News said. “On immigration and other issues, Trump is making a lot of the same promises he did during his 2016 campaign that never came to fruition due to a lack of congressional support or limitations on his executive authority.”
In other words, Trump would have done much better were he allowed to act outside the confines of America’s democratic governance processes – dishing out orders in exercise of executive authority without the checks and balances of the legislature. To all intents and purposes, no other American president in history had shown so much inclination towards dictatorship.
But, to be sure, this time around, Trump will finally accept that America’s democracy is, indeed, great and works because he has won. In 2016 when he beat Hillary Clinton to win, he did also believe in the American-style democracy, which became fraudulent and driven by ‘vote steal’ only after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
There is still debate as to what Trump’s real achievements in his first term were. But what is easily remembered is that he became the first US President to question the credibility of US democratic processes, creating, by doing so, doubts in the minds of the global community about America’s real democratic credentials. Unflaggingly, Trump denounced America’s electoral system as fraudulent, called electoral officers ballot thieves and manipulators, claimed that his votes were stolen everywhere he lost to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election; indeed, up until now, Trump still claims the 2020 election which he lost fair and square to Biden was rigged.
Matters came to a head in Trump’s anti-democratic exertions when on January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of Trump’s supporters in what became an attempted self-coup d’état two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Simply put, former President Trump wanted to supplant American democracy with autocracy, with him as the autocrat, simply because he lost an election delivered by the redoubtable centuries-old American electoral system.
The point must be made that since the advent of Donald Trump in American politics, democracy has become like a joke across the world, in the sense that there is little or no care any longer anywhere about the sanctity of the ballot box or paper. There is no weighty, moral voice any longer for democracy in the world, or canvassing the expected above-board social, economic and political standing of the candidate. Trump and his MAGA mob (called hoodlums and thugs in Nigeria) almost burnt the American legislative house, the Capitol Building, in one moment of self-righteous madness and yet the system has rewarded him with a return as president.
And what a return! A felon convicted on all of 34-count charges, Trump is coming back to the seat of the American president with a lot of moral baggage. But he stares down such niceties about character with so much disdain! Is it any wonder that criminals have taken over as presidents in many of the world’s ‘democratic’ countries, as America stands by, sometimes even helping such rogues to ascend to power, because Uncle Sam has also lost its hitherto authoritative voice on the relationship between democracy and good character. What exactly are the Americans telling the rest of the world about democracy? That it is a system that lionizes brigandage?
It takes years, even generations, to build institutions but only one moment of madness to destroy them. Just four years of Donald Trump and the world is wondering whether America, the world’s otherwise democratic compass, was ever democratic at all. These days, following Trump’s denunciation of the principle of universal adult suffrage, few seem to care about elections elsewhere. In developing countries especially, whether it is Nigeria, Rwanda or Benin Republic, democracy has come to be practiced only in name. Votes don’t count. Voters are not even allowed to vote where they want to vote. Ethnic thugs chase away compatriots who dare to vote in parts of the country other than theirs. Religious leaders mount the pulpits to preach against the non-faithful seek election. At the instance of local politicians, police and other law enforcement agencies frustrate voters and make it difficult for them to exercise their democratic rights. In some of the places mentioned, they simply purloin the system with resources stolen from the commonwealth or just allocate figures as votes, write the presumed results and declare themselves winners of the mostly non-elections. A lot of these malfeasances worsened after Donald Trump entered and messed up American democracy and no one had America to learn from any longer.
With Donald Trump, the world’s system as we know it is imperiled. Of course, the international system itself has always needed some twerking. And with America leading, part of that twerking subsisted in both covert and overt campaigns to make most of the world go democratic, including the Arab world. But where is the moral authority to preach to the rest of the world that the choice that democracy gives us to make of our leaders is still the best leadership recruitment process when such choices are no longer freely made and accepted?
The return of Trump may well be good for America – they have made their choice anyways and thank goodness no one is talking about stopping the ‘vote steal’ this time around. But its implication for the rest of the world, especially in the developing democracies of the world, is that the impunity of seize, grab and run as an electoral philosophy, has been legitimized. It (Trump’s redefinition of who is qualified to be president), may, then, explain why Joe Biden, unable to persuade the system that Trump was too characterless to run again for president, chose to overlook the Nigerian worse version of Trump when he practically pulled out all the American stops to make Bola Tinubu President of Nigeria. If Trump, a convicted felon who even plotted to supplant American democracy with autocracy, could return as president, why not Tinubu whose only offence is that he used his money, stolen or not, to buy off the system and get himself installed as president?
Nigerians who support Trump because the two Democratic Presidents of Barack Obama and Joe allegedly Biden had hands in the ‘election’ of Buhari and Tinubu as presidents miss the point. For them, what has happened is like the difference between six and half a dozen: Tinubu may no longer have the back of the Democrats in 2027 but will Trump be bothered by whatever he decides to do to win a re-election? Would Trump give a jot about happenings in sh*th*le countries like Nigeria? Think about it.
There is something to recommend Trump’s victory, though: it may portend America’s non-interference in Nigeria’s electoral process, going forward. Rather than fearing or hoping that America may interfere in and affect our electoral process one way or another, Trump’s presidency may well be the impetus needed to make our electoral process truly ours, not one imposed or dictated by external interests. If that is what Trump’s triumph has achieved for Nigeria’s fledgling democracy, , so be it. After all, as non-Americans, we are expected to be interested in the American democratic process only to the extent of its impact – positive or negative – on our own process.
Meanwhile, although there is no official announcement yet, with 277 electoral votes and 71m popular votes to Vice President Kamala Harris 224 electoral votes and 66m popular votes, Republican’s Donald Trump has effectively secured an effective win over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for a second term as the 47th President of the United States.
And, perhaos, thanks to Trump’s effect, the GOP has also taken control of the State with 52 seats to Democrats’ 42. It is not yet clear who will control the House as the tallies were still being collated as at the time of this report. But whatever the final tally, Donald will be just fine as president.
Trump is returning to America’s highest office four years after losing the 2020 election, attempting to overturn the results, facing two presidential impeachments, a criminal conviction and many other criminal charges, becoming only the second president to win two nonconsecutive terms, according to the CNN
In a speech before the race was called, Trump, who made the economy and immigration a focus of his campaign, many times pushing false claims, promised to usher in a “golden age of America.” Good luck to him and America.
Harris is expected to speak later today.
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