No Tears For Trump

“For those of us who fasted our sleep to follow the American elections to the early hours of Wednesday, the appearance of a fatigued, agitated, visibly shaken Donald Trump in the White House alleging unproven fraud and threatening to go to the Supreme Court for no obvious violation, was another display of farcical valor, desperation and trepidation associated with monarchical regimes.”

I thought my heart missed a few beats Wednesday morning when President Donald Trump declared himself the winner of the elections at a time vote counting was still going on in earnest. Not only was the announcement unprecedented, it also sent shock waves to the rest of the world. The idea that an American president can unilaterally truncate a whole national electoral process in a superman style is severely distressing!

It had been rumored several weeks before the elections that the President was preparing to do something ridiculous that could throw the election into chaos. For those of us who fasted our sleep to follow the American elections to the early hours Wednesday, the appearance of a fatigued, agitated, visibly shaken Donald Trump in the White House alleging unproven fraud and threatening to go to the Supreme Court for no obvious violation, was another display of farcical valor, desperation, and trepidation associated with monarchical regimes.

Here was the leader of the so-called free world agitating and threatening to go to court because he did not understand why legitimate votes of Americans who voted by mail as a precaution against the coronavirus were being lawfully counted!

Although President Trump performed creditably in the elections, contrary to the gangsterism of polls that predicted his perilous humiliation, the President’s ill-advised strategy to throw the election into legal theatrics is not only embarrassing, it smacks of sour grapes.

As the President’s lead in Georgia and Pennsylvania dissipates and with Joe Biden leading in Nevada and flipping Arizona for the Democrats, it is a wonder what Trump is seeking to achieve with his frivolity of a lawsuit clearly designed to steal the elections in broad daylight.

President Trump will go into history as the leader who cried wolf when there was no wolf and sought to use the law as an instrument of autocracy to overturn the will of the people and cling to illegal power.

However, winning the elections by the narrowest of margins would not stop or obliterate Trumpism in America. Neither would it unite or heal divided the divided country. When Biden eventually wins the elections, he would have a monstrous time seeking the cooperation and collaboration of the GOP controlled Senate. The acrimonious divisions would fester and possibly play out more sharply and egregiously than ever before.

On the international front, however, a Biden administration would struggle to restore America’s lost pride in international relations, restore its place of respectability among its allies, and hopefully provide some coherent leadership in a troubled world.