Trump in our living room

In my family, we took doctors’ advice to avoid unnecessarily depressing news and information since COVID-19 made its intention known to take over our lives. Foreign media initially served the useful purpose of alerting us over a distant and unlikely threat, so we hardly changed the channels from CNN and BBC. Eventually, these channels began […]

In my family, we took doctors’ advice to avoid unnecessarily depressing news and information since COVID-19 made its intention known to take over our lives. Foreign media initially served the useful purpose of alerting us over a distant and unlikely threat, so we hardly changed the channels from CNN and BBC. Eventually, these channels began to count victims in thousands, and experts and politicians fell over each other over an unknown phenomenon. When just about everything on TV news channels became only about depressing statistics and arguments over how many millions of humanity are in danger, we decided to avoid them altogether.

It was a big decision, shutting out CNN in particular altogether, because my family is intensely political and passionate about American politics. It said a lot about how much the virus affected our lives that for two months,  no one thought of peeping in to see what the world outside looked like. Well, not entirely. Every once in a while someone will switch on, and switch off immediately. It was always worse than  last. Numbers  of infections were rising daily in thousands. The whole world was being swamped by the virus; two million, three million, five million, and no end in sight. Economies were crashing, jobs were disappearing and politicians were looking bad. We had moved into a world we did not know.

On those rare occasions when irresistible curiosity demanded that we saw how the most powerful nation on earth, the USA, was not coping with the pandemic, the news was all about how Trump was being Trump even in the face of a disaster; in your face, belligerent and divisive. Our compliance with doctors’ advice was reinforced when we observed the sorry state of the CNN. You have always known about the mutual dislike between President Trump and the CNN, but it appeared to us that Trump won their many battles when he reduced the CNN to the status and stature of Fox Television, his cheerleader and the medium that had no pretensions for pretensions.

Our family resumed our patronage of CNN after the killing of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that followed. For a few weeks, we saw flashes of old America that you thought had been buried by Trump. Even during  those angry days that brought out a section of America that still had faith in change, Trump re-focussed attention to himself, using the Church and the Bible, creating reality tv out of national outrage, denigrating the Black Lives Matter protests and outcomes, and drawing firm lines around what is or is not allowed on law and order matters. When the protests died down and sportspeople learnt to kneel before matches, we switched off CNN and  the depressing figures of infections and deaths in US and around the world that took up the screen.

In our small circle, we thought there was unlikely to be a Nigerian who will be passionate about the return of Trump for a second time. Well, not really a sensible, informed and patriotic Nigerian. We know of a few prominent fringes that root for him, but only to solidify their local brand as rebels against all standards of decency and propriety. A few days  ago, we discovered how wrong we were, although even this had its own surprises. In our home, we looked forward to the Democratic National Convention as a benchmark on the prospects of a one-term Trump. A major power failure in our area brought to our home a large number of informed and articulate neighbours who wanted to watch the commencement of the Convention. There was additional excitement over Joe Biden’s decision to nominate a female, Black/Asian running mate, Kamala Harris.

The very long night was not spent watching the DNC. Trump was in our living room the whole night, triggering the most passionate debates I have been involved in for a long time. It turned out that quite a few people here, at least in our locality, want Trump to win the November elections so that he can have an additional four years to irretrievably wreck the USA they hold responsible for all the ills of the world. He has been doing a good job at it, but such is the power and influence of the USA, he will need more than four years to finish the job. With an additional four years, he will further divide America along racial and ethnic lines, vandalise its core values beyond recognition, damage its key institutions, demystify leadership, create a hard right and left on the political spectrum that will take decades to dislodge, elevate poverty, hate, fear and hopelessness into a status that defines the basic character of America, and plant doubt in the minds of Americans over the capacity of their democratic system to keep other Trumps out in future.

This group believes that another four years will give Trump the opportunity and encouragement to complete the dismantling of global and regional institutions that took decades to put together, and recreate a world of countries without leadership or standards. He will create more enemies for the US, and more enemies for its allies. He will make the world a lot less secure and stable. Poor nations will have choices to submit to China, Russia or other powers that will take America’s position in demanding loyalty and compliance in return for handouts. Former allies of the US will have to recreate a world without huge powers and resources of the US. Wars and conflicts will intensify in the Middle East, in Muslim countries, in the far-east and in Russia’s neighbourhood as the US chooses to let the world sort itself out, or puts out new versions of friends and enemies. Coinciding with the disaster that is the COVID-19 pandemic, another four years of Trump will destroy a globalised economy. Then, a new world order will emerge, they argued, one that is not designed and superintended by the US.

The other side of the debate was calmer but no less passionate. Why does the world need to go through all this when Americans now have an opportunity to stop a wrecking process which already threatens to make the whole world  its casualty? Enough damage has been done by Trump, both to the US and all it stands for, and to a world that either admired it, feared it, or sought to avoid. There is enough anger in the US to defeat Trump and begin a rebuilding process. Those who think eight years of Trump will badly damage America and usher in a new world order are guilty of underrating the strength of the US economy, its political institutions and its military might. They are also ignorant of what it will take to build a world order with a substantially-weakened or isolated America. They insist that the Americans that voted Obama in can vote Trump out.

We have not had a night as heated as we did in our home for a long time. The Democrats are attempting to rouse a nation with a combination of passionate refrain of America’s core values and scare tactics over another four years of Trump. America will decide, the same America that bears the scars of Trump and the America that cheered him on. For now, my living room is quiet.

Jamila Abubakar, [email protected]