At noon on Wednesday the world will heave a sigh of relief when Donald Trump packs his bags and vacates the White House. Having long abandoned all pretence at playing by the rules, the 45th president won’t be at his successor’s inauguration.
No surprise that Trump threw a big-boy tantrum and will slink off to Mar-a-Lago where he can engage in a favourite pastime. Cheating at golf with impunity.
The debris of malignancy, bile, hate and spite this cancerous president leaves behind, though, is another matter. By several measures he is the worst president in US history.
This all matters to the rest of us because of the huge influence the US still has on the rest of the world. The Texas economy alone at $1.6-trillion (R24-trillion) is roughly the same size as that of Russia. The US gross national income is 80 times more than SA’s. California’s GDP is larger than all of Africa combined.
Before the Ugandan election this Thursday, Nobel laureate and Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka lamented that the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington would divert attention away from President Yoweri Museveni’s repressive tactics to stay in power at all costs.
“Attention is going to be taken away, even the little attention it has received. When America stumbles, it is a big blow to democracy in other parts of the world. Dictators take courage from that.”
POST-MORALITY ERA
By being impeached twice, Trump’s record equals all the previous impeachments in US history. Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton were the others to face this sanction. Richard Nixon resigned before he could be pushed.
In this post-truth, post-morality era, Clinton’s dalliances with Monica Lewinsky seem utterly trivial compared with what Trump was accused of: trying to strongarm the Ukrainian president to find dirt on Trump’s presidential rival’s son and inciting sedition.
For four years Trump dragged the US into uncharted swamps of filth and shame. Ahead of Wednesday’s inauguration security forces erected a ring of steel around Capitol Hill unlike any in modern US history. Soldiers of the National Guard, with masks, guns and military fatigues, were photographed sleeping in the hallways of the Capitol. The last time troops were quartered there was during the US Civil War. There were more US soldiers patrolling the Capitol than were stationed in Afghanistan. Americans are still coming to grips with the size of the wound January 6 inflicted on the nation after Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the confirmation of president-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump had summoned the faithful for a “StopTheSteal” rally to reverse the result. “Be there, will be wild!” he promised. Tens of thousands made the pilgrimage from around the country. Texan real estate broker Jenna Ryan arrived on a private jet with a group of friends, saying she was on the way to “storm the Capitol”.
Trump had said he would accompany his diehards to the Capitol but left in his motorcade for the 100m drive back to the White House.
READY FOR COMBAT
Most of the mob marching on the Capitol were neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other scum. Police officer Brian Sicknick was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher. One of the rioters shouted “Execute the traitors!”
There was the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt. Two women held yellow signs saying “Women belong in the kitchen” and “Fake Christians Go to Hell”. They came ready for combat, wearing helmets, armour, and with black masks covering their entire faces. One militant carried a semi-automatic weapon and 11 Molotov cocktails, ready to go to war for a president who had never served in the military.
A crowd erected wooden gallows. Police discovered two pipe bombs. Rioters “were in open-handed combat” with police and some used teargas against law enforcers. They scaled walls and smashed windows.
On sites such as TheDonald and Parler, Trump agitators had been plotting the attack for weeks, threatening violence if Congress did not overturn the results of the election. According to the Daily Beast they discussed which lawmakers they would hang first. “I’m thinking it will be literal war on that day,” one posted on TheDonald.
“We’ll storm offices and physically remove and even kill all the D.C. traitors and reclaim the country.” The Washington Post reported that back in the White House, the president and his aides were transfixed by the unprecedented scenes they could see on their television screens.
The Post cited an aide as saying Trump was “bemused” by the spectacle. He saw the rioters as fighting for his cause but found them aesthetically distasteful and “low-class”. The grifter-in-chief couldn’t even be faithful to his own stormtroopers.
Justice officials are sifting through 100,000 pieces of digital media to hunt down the guilty. Some could face 20 years in jail.
“We’re looking at and treating this just like a significant international counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence operation,” a justice official told reporters this week.
The FBI is also looking at the possibility of placing right-wing extremists on the no-fly list, one usually populated by militant jihadists. The president’s deputy was the target of much of the hate. “Hang Mike Pence,” some chanted as they stormed the Capitol as Vice-President Pence oversaw the confirmation process.
“I heard at least three different rioters at the Capitol say that they hoped to find Vice-President Mike Pence and execute him by hanging him from a Capitol Hill tree as a traitor,” Jim Bourg, news pictures editor in the Reuters Washington bureau, recalled on Twitter.
Just before the attack. Trump tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
Just before Pence headed to the Capitol to oversee the electoral vote count, Trump warned him: “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
Secret Service agents evacuated Pence and his family to the basement. While his deputy faced the danger of being lynched, Trump tweeted out an attack on him rather than calling to see if he was safe.
After three years and 11 months, Pence, one of the enablers in the moulding of the monster, was finally coming to terms with what he had helped create.
Well, not fully. On Tuesday, Pence refused to act after the House of Representatives gave him an ultimatum: invoke the 25th amendment or Trump will be impeached. The 25th gives the vice-president the power to remove the president with the support of the cabinet.
So on Wednesday Congress delivered its historic vote. Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered an impassioned speech, calling on members to support impeachment. “He must go. He is a clear and present danger to the nation we all love.”
NOT GOING ANYWHERE
Ten Republicans voted with the Democrats. One of them was Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican and daughter of Dick Cheney, the hawk who served as vice-president to George W Bush. Trump loyalists immediately called for her resignation. “I’m not going anywhere. This is a vote of conscience,” she replied.
Another Republican who voted for impeachment said he was one of several who had bought body armour and changed their routine after receiving death threats.“It’s sad that we have to get to that point, but you know our expectation is that someone may try to kill us,” Michigan Republican Peter Meijer told MSNBC.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen next. We weren’t expecting for the Capitol to get overrun for the first time in 200 years.” Stage two of the impeachment process is a trial by the Senate. This will be largely symbolic because it will take place after Trump has left the White House.
White House insiders paint a portrait of an isolated and erratic figure increasingly divorced from reality as former loyalists jump ship. In just three days Trump will no longer be protected from a string of legal battles by his office. A wounded and frightened animal is the most dangerous of beasts.
Trump already faced the prospect of criminal charges before January 6 when he was recorded in an hour-long phone call pressing Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,000 votes to make him the state’s winner in the electoral college. Now there is even more pressure on justice officials to go for broke. If they go ahead, this would be the first prosecution of an ex-president.
NO SUCH IMMUNITY
The justice department has long maintained that a president may not face criminal prosecution while in office because it would interfere with his duties. But constitutional experts say a former president has no such immunity. Would it be legally OK if the president sold the White House, pimped the army and looted the Treasury as long as he committed the crimes while he was in the Oval Office?
“The facts currently known warrant a criminal investigation of the president and others who were involved in inciting the insurrection at the Capitol,” Mary B McCord, a former justice department official and Georgetown University law professor, told the LA Times. “Accountability is important in the face of such grievous and dangerous abuses of power and privilege.” Long before these latest outrages, Trump was reportedly considering granting himself and his family pardons for any crimes committed. Many legal scholars believe such a move would backfire. If you’re going to pardon yourself for a serious crime it means you know you’ve committed a serious crime.
And then there are accusations of tax fraud against Trump.
The New York Times published a stunning exposé in September alleging Trump had paid only $750 in federal income taxes in the year he was elected US president. “Trump taxes show chronic losses and years of tax avoidance,” the newspaper said.
“Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television,” the Times reported.
Trump responded that it was totally fake news.
The New York Times reported in December that the Manhattan district attorney’s office was intensifying its criminal investigation of Trump’s tax affairs and had ramped up its scrutiny of his company’s real estate transactions.
In a letter to his friend Jean-Baptiste Le Roy in 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Our new constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Like Al Capone, could it be his tax affairs that finally nail the mobster-in-chief?
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