The power of institutions: Lessons from the United States

Donald Trump, the amoral former United States President, spent the last five to six years bullying the entire Republican Party to submission. It basically became the party of Donald Trump and the ruling ideology was Trumpism and anything Trump believes in. Anyone within the Republican establishment who disagrees with him is tagged a RINO (Republican in name only) and banished. With Trump firmly controlling the base of the party, many principled Republican congressmen and women and state elected officials that had dared to disagree with him have suffered crushing political defeats. Trump became the Republican Party and the Republican Party became Trump.

Of course, Trump was on a high. He thought the 2020 election will be a walk in the park; and he was right. He was in total control of the Republican party; has had a record total of 234 ultra-conservative judgeship nominees appointed and confirmed by the United States Senate, including three associate justices of the Supreme Court, 54 judges for the US courts of appeals, 174 judges for the US district courts, and three judges for the US Court of International trade. Delivered a huge tax cut in 2017 (corporate tax was cut from 35% to 21%) that boosted the economy and the job markets with unemployment figures crashing to 3.5 percent, the lowest since 1969. What was more, the Democrat party seemed to be in disarray since the defeat of 2016 and didn’t seem to know how to effectively confront or checkmate Trump.

Despite Trump’s immense popularity and his absolute control of the Republican party and its base, he could not succeed in any of the elaborate schemes to get the results of the election overturned

Then Covid-19 happened and Trump correctly diagnosed it as bad news. He thus initially ignored it, downplayed it, peddled in or indulged conspiracy theorists and touted bogus cures for the virus. As his polls numbers plunged he got more desperate. He began selling the idea that he cannot lose the election except it was stolen from him, and accused Democrats, without evidence, of a grand scheme to rig the elections especially through mail-in-voting.

In any case, he believed he will successfully have the election results tossed out and reclaim another mandate through the Supreme Court (he successfully nominated three of its six conservative members and they must remain loyal to him) or get the state legislators, board of electors, board of canvassers or even congress reject the results of the election thereby clearing the way for his election by Congress, where Republicans control a majority of states.

Of course, we knew how it played out. He lost the elections, started projecting the big lie that he won the election but it was stolen from him, got his lawyers to file over 64 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in multiple states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Almost all the suits were dismissed in all the states – even by Trump appointed and conservative judges as baseless and lacking in evidence or merit. The Supreme Court also dealt the Trump election lawsuits a death blow when it refused to even entertain one of the bogus lawsuits brought by a fawning Taxes Attorney General (later joined by about 18 Republican states) to overturn election results in key battleground states where Biden won.

Despite Trump’s immense popularity and his absolute control of the Republican party and its base, he could not succeed in any of the elaborate schemes to get the results of the election overturned in any of the states involved, including in Georgia where ultra-conservatives control all levers of power and are unapologetically Trumpian.

Aaron Van Langevelde, a 40-year-old lawyer and loyal Republican in Michigan exemplified the challenge Trump faced but never expected. Van Langevelde is a staunch Republican. He works for Republicans in the statehouse, giving legal advice to advance Republican causes and win Republican campaigns. He represented the kind of Republican with ambition and future in the party. As a reward, he was appointed by the party into the Michigan state’s board of election canvassers (made up of two Democrats and Republics each) – the body that certifies all state-wide elections in Michigan. His mandate – as handed down by the state and national party chairs and by Donald Trump – was to delay or even outrightly refuse to certify the state’s election results, which Biden won, even if all 83 counties in the state have certified their results.

But at the meeting of the state board of canvassers on November 23, Langelvelde damned everyone and everything and voted to certify the state’s election result with the following statement: “We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have….As John Adams once said, ‘we are a government of laws, not men.’ This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.” Georgia’s governor, secretary of state, and states’ board of canvassers, and even Trump’s ultra-loyal Vice President, Mike Pence, when faced with the prospect of breaking the law to do Trump’s wish, simply refused.

Unlike what most Nigerians and Africans were thinking and arguing, the ultimate test of the maturity of a democratic system is not the conduct of individuals, but the capacity of the system to constrain such behaviours. As James Comey, former FBI Director, argued recently in an Op-ed; “since the beginning, the United States has built a system with bad and incompetent leaders in mind.” Frederick Douglass puts it better: “Our government may be in the hands of a bad man…We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.”

Clearly, the American system has passed a critical stress test. That is the lesson African democracies should be learning and not focusing on the bizarre conduct of Trump!