Devolution of a Grossly Misguided Revolution

It has been very obvious to those of us who have been studiously watching events unfold from the skybox of the Elon-Trump or Musk-Trump Political Stadium, as it were, since January 20, that the unabashedly Neo-Fascist Trumpian Revolution - for all practical intents and purposes a veritable “devolution,” to be certain - was inevitably bound for Destination Failure and ultimately fade into the arid and the nondescript margins of one of those regrettable turns of historico-political anomalies that crop up during the normal course of an otherwise smooth-sailing socioeconomic and political progression.

Our history and political science textbooks are replete with scores of events and tragicomic cases like the Trumpian and the Muskian hallucinogenic hiccups. But that the widely alleged Architect of the Trumpian Revolution or Agenda-2025, the 40-Something-Year-Old Mr. Elon Musk, known to have either been born or mostly raised in the erstwhile Apartheid Republic of South Africa, for a Continental African-born author like me, made matters all the more at once quaint and preposterous. Indeed, in a reader’s comment that I emailed to the Almighty New York Times that was never published - not that I had really expected the same to be published - I described the role of Mr. Musk and the Trumpian Revolution as one that was eerily and strikingly akin to an Orwellian putsch, especially vis-a-vis the very concept and the programmatic command agenda and governance policy agenda called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE - mischievously pronounced as “DŌJ,” instead of properly and phonetically “DOJ,” as in “Dodge” or even “DOGGIE,” as Trump and Musk critics have resorted to calling the same).

The Neo-Fascist Trumpian Putsch got off to a swift and an apparently facile start because the so-called Fourth Estate of a democratic political culture, the media, had become so morbidly lethargic in its long-standing comfort and stability that took quite an unusually long time to literally wake the proverbial Giant Panda out of its seemingly comatose slumber, only to realize that it had almost already and completely been shackled by an oligarchy that had firmly and effectively taken hermetic grips of nearly every significant and/or major media enterprise or communications apparatus in the country.

Consequently, you had national and regional flagship newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times flatly refusing to endorse the presidential candidacy of career public servants and politicians like the most formidable contender for the Presidency, heading into the 2024 General Election, namely, Ms. Kamala Devi Harris, the extant incumbent Vice-President of the United States of America. There were several problems having to do with the abrupt and the highly likely but practically and historically unanticipated nomination of Ms. Harris, a former State of California Attorney-General and, just before her historically unprecedented nomination as a Vice-Presidential Candidate of the US Democratic Party, the junior of the two Senators from the State of California, much of which have already been extensively dealt with in previous columns and articles by the author and therefore we do not intend to rehash the same herein.

Suffice it to say, at least glancingly, to observe that a seemingly dithering and strategically indecisive and publicly doddering and embarrassingly fragile President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., did not help matters in ways that would have resolutely ensured that the the eerie and the sinister recrudescence of the Trumpian Menace would remain a pipedream of the psychologically unhinged, at least in the foreseeable future. Now, what is equally interesting to observe here is the monominded crudity with which a hitherto morally and archly noncommittal Mr. Trump has almost, overnight, become the most radical and fanatically implacable and foremost champion of the Zionist Cause and the interests and the human rights of Global Jewry.

Almost having expediently moved the pendulum 180 degrees from the vilely bitter and very public quarrels that the half-German and half-Scottish real-estate mogul had with New York City’s legendary Mayor Edward I. Koch, late, through much of the 1980s and the 1990s, a chameleonic Mr. Trump would now have himself redesignated as The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. Perhaps it may even be equally accurate to say that it was also during during this period in Mr. Trump’s so-called right-wing Culture War that former New York Governor, Mr. Andrew “Andy” Cuomo’s widely remarked “Anti-Homo” abuse of Mr. Koch also began. There are some strange bedfellows here, obviously.

But, of course, absolutely nobody is fooled when the twice, nonconsecutively elected President Donald John Trump so brazenly and almost amnesiacally attempts to scapegoat Mr. Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian-born Columbia University Graduate, to rather disingenuously prove his historically flimsy and decidedly nonexistent bona fides with Global Jewry, in general, but American Jewry in particular. Such strategic and political overdrive falls bathetically flat on its face because because even as recently as August 13, 2017, or thereabouts, during the so-called Unite the Right riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, the then newly elected President Trump made it categorically clear that his sentiments and sympathies were smack with the menacing brigades of Anti-Semitic Skinheads who took over the streets of Charlottesville with gory chants of “Jews Shall Not Replace Us.”

The President would also adamantly insist that there were as many morally chaste people among the Skinhead rioters in Charlottesville as there were among the Anti-Fascist (Antifa) Protesters demanding Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI) in American Society, one of whose members, a young white woman, was literally run over by a vehicle reportedly driven by one of the MAGA crusaders. As this author vividly recalls, at the time, the leadership of the pro-Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) vehemently condemned the terrorism of the Unite the Right MAGA-sponsored group and President Trump’s very public and cavalier endorsement of the same to absolutely no avail.

Which is why this author was not in the least flabbergasted when on Thursday, March 13, 2025, a critical mass of American Jewish Protesters were shown on live television barging into the cavernous lobby of the Trump Tower, in Midtown Manhattan to demand the immediate release of an ICE-detained Mr. Mahmoud Khalil and the latter’s immediate reunion with his family, friends and relatives.

*The writer is a former member of the Jewish Studies Committee at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York (NCC of SUNY), Garden City, New York. He is also the award-winning author of the essay titled “An Afrocentric Critique of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’” which stirred up a billow of controversy in the OP-ED Pages of the New York Times, for two weeks, in March 1999.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 13, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]