• Ponmala

America, a nation that boasts of being the greatest democracy on earth, has heralded the return of monarchy. Donald Trump has the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the popular vote and the absolute power to commit any executive crime as President with immunity. Hail Emperor Trump the Great who’ll make America great again!

Even before his swearing in as President, Trump is browbeating friend and foe alike into submission with the threat of high tariffs and outright conquest. Paradoxically, resistance to his predatory moves could end up teaching the world that it can very well do without America. Even as Republicans vow to reestablish America’s strength and standing in the world, that country will, under him, join the exclusive club that it disparagingly calls pariah nations. The dictates that Trump trumpets reveal his hidden ambition to go down in history as a monarch of all that he surveys. Before he will have progressed much on that path, America will realise it is staring at a lonely future. Bereft of friends, what greatness can a nation boast of? Gone are the days when vast conquests made rulers or their nations great. America would be great only if the world looked up to it for the democratic values it upheld, for the Christian values it practised and for the exemplary character of the men who run it. Have no doubt, none of them will be true of the America led by Trump.

The world is aghast thinking how on earth Americans of all people could elect a shady character like Trump as their president. It was like a replay of the scene where Pontius Pilate asked the crowd to choose between Jesus and Barabas. The Americans have shown that they would have chosen Barabas. And why? Just because Trump is their mirror image. From the moral high pedestal that they once occupied, they, including the 55% of Catholics who voted for characterless Trump, have sank to his level. They have traded off Christian and democratic values for cheaper grocery and an immigrant-free country.

Modi had as good as lost the recent parliament elections as he failed to get an absolute majority. Imagine what Americans would have said about Indian democracy if Modi had refused to accept the results of the elections and sent RSS cadres to attack the parliament house in an attempt to prevent the new Lok Sabha from convening. And what if India were to elect Modi five years later with a thumping majority? They would have given no second thought to calling India a banana republic.

The devil tempted Jesus, who was dead hungry after forty days of fasting, to turn stones into bread. Jesus rebuked him saying, ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ Here, Trump promised the not-so-hungry Americans to turn stones into bread if they voted for him, and they took him on his word, rebuking Jesus saying, ‘Man lives by bread alone.’ In them, the needs of the flesh have established victory of the needs of the soul. For the comforts of cheaper bread and a secure cage with fool proof borders, they – more so their youths – have discarded the values their forefathers had fought hard to acquire and uphold. Trumpism has drained them of the will to fight and the capacity to make sacrifices for a greater cause.

The MAGA brigade achieved Trump’s victory by burying Americans under an avalanche of lies and unworkable promises, aided by the mind-boggling expansion of information pathways that modern technology has laid out. Trump’s election has conclusively proved AI powered media is depriving people of the capacity to make considered choices, which is the backbone of electoral democracy. And with artificial intelligence joining hands with the quantum chip that Google has just unveiled, we might soon have a scary situation where we are unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong… where we are made into machines that run on a software that is implanted in our brain by manipulated media.

The greatest challenge we face now is to remain humans who enjoy independent thinking and free will. Media brings us lies and fake news in very attractive packaging. Besides a deep commitment to truth, it now also requires hard work to dig through the high mountain of falsehood created by fake media to get to it. Unless we remain at it, we will become machines that run on softwares created by the technologies in which we invested so much of our effort and ingenuity to create. Latinos would not have otherwise voted in large numbers for a man who vowed to deport their own people, separating children from their kith and kin. Neither would have factory workers voted for him overwhelmingly after he had told them in no uncertain terms that, under him, they would be stripped of their labour rights, nor would have Americans in general failed to understand that raising tariff on imported goods would raise prices in tandem. Trump’s electoral victory should serve as an ominous warning.

The world spends huge amounts to protect animals and birds that face extinction. But the American elections that brought Trump to power tell us that the species that faces the greatest threat of extinction is humans who are capable of thinking and acting independently.