Valson Thampu

Trump has won. Those who thought Kamala would make the grade proved themselves seriously deluded. The reason? Well, the ethos of America. What else?

In a real sense, America is paying for being the unrivalled Super Power of the world. Power has a genius for excess. Nothing is less congruous with the Golden Mean of Buddha and Aristotle than the craving for power. Especially, when power is unhinged from the moderating influence of love. Power, we need. But, if it is only power that we care and crave for, then we Trump ourselves.

It is not to Trump that Kamala Harris has lost. It is to the American taste for power. To the voters, Kamala seemed too gentle and nice to fit the bill. Imagine a gentle lady as the Supreme Commander of the most powerful army in the world! Sounds utterly incongruous, doesn’t it? So, the more Kamala projected herself as the gentle alternative to the blustering, belligerent Trump, the less attractive she seemed to the US voters. Trump hit the right note: Kamala, you are fired! She became the American counterpart of the Iranian general, Suleimani.

The problem with falling in love with power is that you develop an instinctive preference for excesses. Old-fashioned Americans still wonder: How can a man, who instigated the 6 January 2020 anti-democratic mayhem be favoured by American voters? After all, don’t they have a tradition of valuing the ethos and ethics of liberal democracy distinguished by the rule of law? Perhaps they do; at least in theory. But, as regards the practicalities of realpolitik politic, the American taste has changed decisively. It is the immoderate, the assertive and the macho -not the cultured, civil and the statesman-like- that strike a chord with a typical American today.

A question that has emerged in the wake of Trump’s electoral windfall is: Has Trump changed America, or has he merely revealed it as it really is? It happens sometimes that, in the curious logic of history, mega popular processes project individuals to prominence who are a mirror to the society that spews them up. Trump is as much a product of America, as America will be, henceforth, a projection of Trump. It is like in the Creation. God created man in his own image. For that every reason, human beings have been, ever since, creating gods after their own images. So, Americans have renounced the right to complain if, going forward, Trump shapes America after his own image.

Trump has his finger on the pulse of his fellow Americans. Look at the team he is putting together. What manner of persons are they? What are the criteria by which they are selected? Merit, America being, in theory, a meritocracy? Far from it. It is the raw randomness of power that ripples through every major nomination announced so far. The same is true of the agendas as well as the manner of pursuing them. Trump will go after ‘illegal immigrants’ from ‘day number one’. Heavens will fall, if the war on immigrants begins only the second day. It is the emotional, not demographic, dimension that is being sold to the American people. They want a heady fix of actions and agendas that exude power. Trump will make America ‘great’ again, because he is the iconic rough-and-tough, in sync with the creed of America today: strength is the soul of greatness!

Characteristically, Trump’s formula for making American great again is: ‘America first’. And ask any American Evangelical who is the ‘saviour’ of America? You will get the precipitous answer: Trump, who else? So, the new American Gospel is a total inversion of the teachings of Jesus: Deny yourself, treat others as you want to be treated, and so on. The Gospel According to Trump prescribes, ‘Do them, before they do you’. It is the philosophy, as Charles Dickens puts it, ‘of looking after the number one’. America must thrive, even if the whole world has to bleed for it. I wonder, what the Galilean would have thought of this.

Trump’s victory, together with the total control of the Senate and the Congress he is in line to attain, has invested him with mythological overtones. Right now, he is only the President-elect of the US. It won’t be long, if present indications are proleptic, before he emerges as the de facto leader of the world.  All those who, languishing in oppression and frustration, will turn to him by way of wish-fulfilment. Given how the psychology of power operates in the lesser mortals of the global village, the Saviour must come rather in the garb of a Trump than as ‘the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world’. The Lamb of God is too outdated to be the icon of America today. Even the rest of the world is reduced to choosing between Trump and Putin for a Vishwa-guru. Fortunately, there is a third option: our own Modi ji -a complex amalgam of Swami Vivekananda, Putin and Trump.

Trump is poised to America great again. Several decades ago, Lyndon Baines Johnson too promised to transform America into a ‘great society’. We know what has happened. I remember a dinner-table conversation I had with a distinguished American friend in a hotel in Kampala, Uganda in 1994 when we were invitees to the Pan-African AIDS conference. ‘We created a great society,’ he said. ‘But today, I am scared to think that my fourteen-year-old daughter has to live in it’.