Adekeye Adebajo | Trump unleashed: Madness of King Donald

Newly elected US president Donald Trump resembles Britain’s Mad King George (1760-1820) who, ironically, lost the American colonies. George went through bouts of violent insanity punctuated by periods of senile lucidity. He foamed at the mouth, attacking his staff and doctors, used vulgar language, and his behaviour became increasingly erratic, hallucinating and talking to himself in his palace.

FIERY IMAGINATION

Trump’s unhinged inaugural address – full of half-baked theories and hare-brained schemes – demonstrated that he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing over the past eight years. A master of chaos, he is bent on violent vengeance and is driven by a bind rage. A speech traditionally designed to display magnanimity and unite a nation, was, instead, transformed into a deranged diatribe crafted to reassure his hateful MAGA (Make America Great Again) mob that he will vigorously pursue their mission to maintain a white supremacist Christian country. This was Richard Nixon on steroids, launching attacks against diversity, the disabled, women, transgender rights, and his political enemies.

Outgoing president Joe Biden’s dignified handover of power to Trump contrasted starkly with the petty and petulant losing president four years ago who mobilised a mob to storm Capitol Hill, refused to welcome his successor to the White House, and boycotted his inauguration. Biden and former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama attended Trump’s presidential inauguration out of reverence for this 250-year office and not for the man who is singularly unfit to occupy it.

An atavistic Trump described himself as a peacemaker even as he threatened to retake the Panama Canal by force. Despite the tendentious history of analysts like John Stremlau, a former US State Department official, that America was never an imperial power, this was part of the “gunboat diplomacy” and “Yankee imperialism” that Washington has historically practised in its hemisphere, annexing Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and Puerto Rico after 1898, while occupying the Philippines, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The 1823 “Monroe Doctrine” sought to keep European imperialists out of what America considered to be its backyard. The current paranoia about the Panama Canal is based on Trump’s unverified claim that Beijing operates the canal as well as concerns about growing Chinese trade across Latin America.

Equally antediluvian was Trump’s echoing of an American “manifest destiny” which had, from the 1840s, asserted a God-given right to launch a genocide against indigenous Indian groups, continue to enslave 450,000 Africans, and expand westward to the Pacific. In 1803, the US purchased Louisiana from France for $15 million, doubling its territory while Florida was forcefully seized from Spain by 1819, with Madrid also forced to surrender Guam and Puerto Rico while selling the Philippines to America for $20 million in 1899. Uncle Sam also threatened to annex Canada while pushing the Danes to sell the Virgin Islands for $25 million in 1917. These were the historical antecedents for Trump’s current musings about purchasing or seizing mineral-rich Greenland from Denmark and turning Canada into America’s 51st state. But Greenlanders (where over 4,500 Inuit girls and women were forcibly fitted with intrauterine devices by Danish doctors without their consent to control fertility in the 1960s and 1970s) and Canadians surely deserve their right to self-determination, free of American or Danish colonialists.

Trump also bizarrely announced in his inaugural address that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the Gulf of America without any sense of irony at the US having annexed 55 per cent of Mexico’s territory – the current states of California, Arizona, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah – stealing 1,360,000 square kilometres of real estate for a lump sum of $15 million following the 1846-48 war that Washington had launched against Mexico. Trump’s renaming of the Gulf was reminiscent, in its eccentricity, of a kryptonite-fuelled Superman flying to Italy to straighten the leaning Tower of Pisa in the 1983 movie sequel in which the drunken superhero momentarily turns villainous vandal.

PERPETUAL MOTION

In just three breathless weeks, Trump has made good on his threats, trying – like a contemporary King Canute – to roll back the waves of globalisation. He announced self-destructive archaic 25 pre cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, two of his largest trading partners in the US-led North American Free Trade Agreement (the Mexican and Canadian tariffs were soon abruptly suspended). Trump also announced 10 pre cent tariffs on his second-largest creditor, China, which retaliated with its own tariffs against American goods, triggering fears of the beggar-thy-nation mercantilism of the 1930s that resulted in the Great Depression and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, eventually culminating in the Second World War (1939-1945). An already dysfunctional World Trade Organization will now be even more ineffectual.

As if elected emperor of the world, Trump ordered OPEC to lower oil prices and threatened 100 pre cent tariffs against the BRICS+ bloc’s attempts to de-dollarise and trade more in their own currencies. He further vowed to cut US aid to South Africa in response to what he erroneously described as the black-led government’s illegal seizure of (previously stolen) white land and announced a bizarre plan for Washington to take over Gaza and displace its Palestinian inhabitants to neighbouring countries.

America’s closest allies in the European Union are terrified of Trump’s pledge to impose tariffs on the trade bloc, many of whose members have been freeloading off the US in NATO. Multilateralism is further threatened by Trump’s withdrawal from the UN’s World Health Organisation and the UN Paris Climate Agreement. Both NATO and the UN would be wise to reduce their financial dependence on Washington and establish more equitable funding arrangements.

MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN?

Trump is an aberration only in his assault on domestic democratic institutions. Abroad, he is merely playing out two and a half centuries of American imperial hubris more crudely than his predecessors while unleashing the latent racism that has always been part of America’s DNA. The vaingloriousness involved in trying to make an already great country great again is simply astonishing. A rabble-rousing, aspiring monarch and his MAGA storm troopers are bent on a nihilistic mission, declaring a golden age that never was. These are locust people who will leave death and destruction in their wake. Trump’s attacks on diversity in the federal civil service mirror president Woodrow Wilson’s resegregation and purging of blacks from Washington-based ministries between 1913 and 1920. The irony of his brutal mass deportation of migrants who he often dubs “criminals” and “rapists” – preparing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for them, where terror suspects were abused under George W. Bush in the 2000s - is that Trump himself is the son of immigrants, with only his father having been born in the US, and his grandfather having emigrated to America from Germany in 1885.

The new King’s court is full of sycophantic jesters, pliable sex scandal-ridden Cabinet ministers, and courtiers like the highly prejudiced bureaucracy-slashing Elon Musk, and his fellow spinelessly avaricious, socially inept tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. They are complemented by the vengeful and vitriolic non-entity, Kash Patel, the FBI director nominee. Trump’s Second Coming is most eloquently captured by the Turkish proverb: If a clown enters a palace, he doesn’t become a King. The palace, instead, becomes a circus.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.