In a few days time, America’s
meritocratic political system will present a bulky casualty. Mr. Donald
Trump will in all likelihood fail the examination of a system that
really scrutinises those who aspire to lead the nation. As the various
polls indicate, the American electorate have largely scored Mr. Trump
badly. All that showmanship and posturing will end up in a concession
speech which Mr. Trump’s elephantine ego may be too reluctant to make.
But the prospect of a President Trump is dead on arrival. In about one
week, the first Woman will ascend the most powerful political leadership
position in the world.
Perhaps all this was a
well-choreographed drama of heightened expectations by a consummate
businessman with eyes set on profit than on political supremacy. In a
revealing expose in summer 2015, The Times of London disclosed that the
last person whose counsel Trump sought by a phone call before he decided
to run for the presidency was Bill Clinton. All that now belongs in a
past that prepared the world for this moment.
The unlikely prospect of a Trump
presidency was minimally nightmarish and even apocalyptic. In his
ill-digested bid to ‘make America great again’, Mr. Trump spent a whole
campaign year regaling his countrymen and women and indeed the whole
world with glimpses of a tragedy foretold and a disaster in the making.
He was going to build a wall at the US-Mexico border at Mexico’s expense
to keep illegal Mexican immigrants- a cocktail of assorted criminals-
away. He would shut out unwanted aliens especially Muslims from the
United States and subject those who must enter to a series of
ideological pre-entry tests. An anti-immigrant task force will come
knocking on nearly every door to fish out and deport undocumented
immigrants from the US irrespective of whether their off spring are bona
fide US citizens.
His prospective international menace was even more frightening. He would let
nations with the means — South Korea, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia etc. —
acquire and use nuclear weapons if only to reduce America’s financial
burdens abroad. He openly admired Vladimir Putin and regretted the
liquidation of Muamar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein! It is of course true
that America’s foreign policy for a good part of the 20th and early 21st
centuries has not been too rewarding to others. In pursuit of its
national interests abroad, America has blundered variously. It has
felled bloody dictators only to vicariously erect dangerous armed
bandits in Iraq and Libya for instance. It has destabilised whole
regions and upset traditional balances of power in Vietnam while
problematising territorial disputes like over the South China Sea. But
on balance, the United States in the post World War II period has been
more an agent of global order than that of instability.
On the domestic front, Trump may have
had a few disjointed welcoming sound bites about bringing back American
jobs from Mexico and China. He probably forgot that US manufacturers
shipped their operations abroad in search of cheaper labour and lower
production costs following the aggressive unionisation of labour in the
Ronald Reagan days. He could be excused for appealing to the popular
sentiments of the unemployed for political advantage.
But the revelations about his moral
indiscretions especially in his relationship with women are inexcusable.
In the life of a normal male, it is perhaps healthy to stroke some
breast here, thump some buttocks there or steal a peck over there, if
done with mutual consent behind closed doors. But for a wealthy man to
abuse his power of money and celebrity to prey on women as a sport is a
reckless assault on and debasement of womanhood. To proceed therefrom to
seek the most powerful office in the world is arrogant insensitivity
writ large.
Mr. Trump’s singular qualification for
seeking to lead the free world is his credential as a businessman. He
endlessly brandished an unverified net worth which he personally put at
over $10 billion. Subsequent scrutiny suggested Mr. Trump might be worth
only about half that figure when you factor in all manner of accounting
and exposure inconsistencies. He is still rich by any standard but his
endless bragging about his wealth is very un-American in many senses.
That is the nation of Sam Walton,
founder of Wal-Mart whose choice location was behind the shop till and
whose favourite vehicle was a pickup truck. That is the nation of Bill
Gates, easily the world’s richest single individual who still drives
himself to work and who resisted that Microsoft should buy a business
jet just to ferry him to and from meetings around the world. Not to talk
of the great Warren Buffet who has lived in the same modest apartment
almost all his life in spite of a net worth that is over five times that
of the egocentric loud-mouthed Trump. Let us not talk of the younger
really wealthy Americans like Mark Zuckerberg with his $38 billion, who
is so enamoured of his jeans and T-shirts that he hardly varies the
colours!
In a nation that has long been greeted
as the bastion of global capitalism, the minimum expectation is that
anyone who hoists a business credential would at least pass the minimal
tests of compliance and relative transparency. Not for Trump. He refused
to disclose his tax returns and the brief details that the media
sneaked out indicated that the man had not paid personal income tax for
close to two decades while the maids and janitors in his gleaming high
rise hotels sweated to pay personal income tax from their starvation
wages.
For capitalism and American business,
Trump remains a sad advertisement. Inherent in the crisis of global
capitalism today is a certain moral crisis. The crisis is inherent in
the global inequality, which the triumph of the capitalist free market
has engendered all over the world. While capitalism has created immense
prosperity for the top 2% of Americans, it has left the vast base of the
pyramid frustrated, impoverished and dejected. Capitalism is therefore
under severe moral pressure to don a more human face, to show greater
social responsibility and indicate that the end of profit can still be
served if employers of labour show a greater compassion for the welfare
of their employees. I am not sure Mr. Trump understands these higher
truths.
Not for Trump the nuanced refinement of
political rhetoric. Not for him the depth of knowledge on policy issues
or indeed the higher ideals of diplomatic candour. He shot straight from
the hip or groin whichever prompted him first. I doubt that he
understood the imperative for the future leadership of the United States
to provide leadership in mitigating capitalism’s risk of latent
self-destruction. Instead, he would pursue policies of protectionism,
shutting out immigrants and competitive trade arrangements with other
countries, agreements that enabled American business to embrace global
competitiveness. He would erect trade and tariff barriers against China,
Japan, Mexico and practically every other nation that his narrow
perspective saw as a threat to America’s economic supremacy. For the
United States, this meant a recourse to the early 19th century populism
of Andrew Jackson who appealed to ‘the common man’ or the protectionist
isolationism of the 1930s associated with men like Smoot-Hawley and
Charles Lindbergh.
Even if Trump were to be the finest of
businessmen in America, the contest that he waded into remains first a
political one. The rules of business and those of politics are
divergent. A businessman who decides to go into politics must first
learn the idiom, methods and idiosyncrasies of politics and politicians.
Trump began to fail the moment he decided that he would introduce the
methods of his brand of business to change American politics and
politicians. He said he wanted to straighten out Washington. He would
get Congress to rubber stamp his whims, caprices and prejudices; he
would make ‘great trade deals’ on behalf of the USA, the way he had done
for Trump Incorporated. He would deliberately overdraw on the national
debt and then default (or declare serial bankruptcies as in his own
businesses) in order to negotiate a discount later etc. In short, he
would bring America back to ‘profitability’ or greatness a la Trump
Incorporated.
But alas, no one in his nebulous
campaign had the courage to tell Mr. Trump that nations are not
businesses. They are political entities that exist to manage the
expectations and meet the needs of the greatest majority of diverse
peoples. Nations are successful not when they make a ‘profit’ but only
when they are managed by politicians to meet the greatest expectations
of the greatest majority.
By their nature, nations and their
governments are wired to do things that would look stupid to business
leaders and the boards they serve. Governments build big houses that no
one would live in or asked for. They waste big money on silly elaborate
ceremonies that feed the pomposity of state occasion and sate the idiocy
of officialdom. If you subtract the foolish things governments pay for
from the sensible few things they do, nearly every government in the
world would return a profit in a business sense. But government is
government: a carefully structured and universally licensed and accepted
foolery.
Of course Trumpism as a decadent variant
of conservatism has had its followership not just in the United States
but elsewhere by other names. Its primary appeal is the urge to
constrict national spaces and resources to a native square. The nation
state becomes more or less a tribe of narrow-minded demagogues, a
playground for opportunistic troublemakers and part time political
rascals intent on hacking down the traditional establishment. The
rhetoric is a drive for ‘change’ from politics as usual to political
anarchism. It demolishes but has no plan to reconstruct.
The ready and lazy excuse is that global
recession with its attendant unemployment, inequality and declining
opportunities has made it imperative for nations to retract inwards in
the direction of primordial, even nativist reflexes in order to protect
their own. Unfortunately for the likes of Trump, the strategies for
pursuing Trumpism would necessarily include racial intolerance,
anti-immigration, xenophobia, torture of terror suspects and a regress
to legitimised authoritarianism.
In the case of Trump and the United
States, however, the pursuit of policies and rhetoric that promotes
these negative values run counter to the bedrock of the founding vision
of America. America was founded as a nation of immigrants, a place of
great diversity and immense opportunity for those ready to work. Its
strength and purpose derive from these fundamental values, which have
catapulted it in a quarter of a century from an experimental nation into
a global civilisation. It was designed as diverse, expansive and
inclusive force for global good, not as shrinking bastion of smallness
and meanness.
Trump and his brand of conservatism
represent a threat to America’s founding principles. He put forward and
spent one year canvassing this ideology of shrinkage and meanness to the
pleasure of a minority of unschooled Americans most of whom have little
or no idea of global geography. This was rather to the discomfiture of
the vast majority of decent Americans: Women, Latinos,
African-Americans, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists and persons
with college education whose demographics overwhelm Trump’s misguided
malevolent crowd.
There is therefore a larger sense in
which the imminent US presidential election can be seen as a referendum
on Trumpism. The imminent rejection of Mr. Trump at the polls would be a
loud rejection of his decadent brand of conservatism. Already, the
reversals in the British economy as a result of Brexit are lesson enough
that xenophobic rascality of the sort that has come to be associated
with politicians like Trump and his friend Nigel Farage of UK’s UKIP
have no place in a world that shares common misfortunes and seeks common
triumphs. THIS DAY
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