• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Trump is gone – but Trumpism may never die

Trump

Back in my previous iteration as a semi-serious journalist-cum-comedy writer, I once had an online altercation with an irate supporter of former U.S. president Donald Trump in 2017. It was a simple disagreement about annual U.S. immigration numbers, but that is not the important bit. What I do remember about that conversation is the confusion I felt when what would normally have been my “finishing” move simply didn’t work.

In response to an obviously false claim he made about the U.S. welcoming “tens of millions of 3rd world immigrants every year,” I pulled up a link from the U.S. government’s 2016 yearbook of Immigration Statistics – showing total arrivals at just over 1 million – and tweeted a screenshot of it at him. Ding ding ding! I win again! Of course I won. How could I not? Me, the slinger of scrupulously verified facts and wielder of said facts in a deliberately condescending tone, versus some guy wearing a red hat in his photo who didn’t seem to be able to spell correctly. It wasn’t even fair on him.

Except this time, it didn’t happen like that. In response to my smug screenshot backed by a link he could visit to verify the fact himself, he simply responded with a message along the lines of “I don’t have to listen to anything you say when you’re quoting the fake news media!” I felt extremely confused because a) The idea that any country on earth takes in “tens of millions” of new immigrants annually is grounds to be committed to a facility and b) The link was from the U.S. government itself, not from the “media.” What on earth was going on?

Trump’s complete disregard for expert knowledge, experts themselves and the very idea of objective, incontestable facts has positively lit a fire that resonates among a large number of global discourse-havers

4 long years to learn one short lesson

It took many more of such interactions with a very disparate selection of people over a wide array of topics before the point began to slowly make its way into my cranium – the reign of facts and data was over. This was Trump World now, and in Trump World, people were allowed to believe absolutely whatever they want to and act as if what they believe is objectively and universally true – with zero reference to facts, proof, data or any kind of joined-up, logical reasoning.

It did not take long for this lesson to make its way across the Atlantic as it so often does, and infect the public discourse in a country, which already had a fairly tenuous relationship with facts and objective truth. Soon Nigeria’s government was predictably aping the most convenient Trumpisms, including labeling critical journalism as “fake news” and actively bullying segments of the citizenry for the entertainment and applause of others.

While many of us – not least of all yours truly – spent much of the previous 4 years trying to warn the Nigerian public that the government in Abuja as well as some of its state vassal fiefdoms were abandoning the civil discourse arena and going after journalists and civil society personalities, we generally missed a larger issue. That issue was the fact that even in a scenario where a Nigerian government no longer murders protesters and forces journalists and human rights activists to flee for their lives, the very foundation of civil discourse has been fundamentally compromised.

Donald Trump has been nothing short of a gift to Africa’s existing and budding dictatorships, not least of which is Nigeria. While in public, they were happy to pretend to be afraid of Mr Trump’s penchant for cosplaying a 3rd world strongman in charge of the world’s biggest military and industrial machine. I was privy to several private conversations where prominent Nigerian government figures used many colourful descriptions for him, none of which especially denoted anything in the way of fear or respect.

His treatment of the U.S. Department of State – previously the single most important institution providing any kind of pushback against dictatorship in Africa – led to purges and mass resignations of experienced career diplomats. In the absence of these highly experienced staff, U.S. missions in Africa watched as a new wave of iron fisted dictatorships in civilian clothes took or consolidated power across Africa. This included Tanzania’s John Magufuli, Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame (who took a presumably believable 97% of the vote in 2017), and most shamefully, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who essentially thumbed his nose at the U.S. Mission amid his recent show of shame.

It took 4 years of suffering through Mr. Trump’s erratic behaviour and conversion of the U.S. Presidency into his flying monkey squadron, but for me eventually the message sank in with the events of the D.C. Capitol on January 6 – going forward, America will not be the force for democracy and freedom it once was. This means that those of us who care about such things in Africa are on our own in a way we have never been in living history.

Trumpism lives on – maybe forever

The other long term consequence of America’s first single term president in 28 years is that in everyday discourse – even non-political discourse – the rule of facts, figures, data, proof, evidence and logical reasoning is well and truly over. Something that was central to Trump’s phenomenal (and continued) loyalty among a very large minority of American voters was that he absolutely validated them. It would seem as though this sense of validation once again escaped the American laboratory and into the global wild.

Trump’s complete disregard for expert knowledge, experts themselves and the very idea of objective, incontestable facts has positively lit a fire that resonates among a large number of global discourse-havers. The fact that he managed to hold fort for 4 years as the most powerful person on the planet, while being visibly less informed on many issues than your average 1st year university political science student was not met with horror, but with jubilation.

Rather than repel people, his bloviating ignorance and absolute pride in expressing it appealed to a rich seam of forbidden desires in a very wide demographic section of people around the world. The worst mediocre, petulant, overconfident, contrarian, bigoted and proudly ignorant parts of people that were normally kept under wraps or sidelined due to social norms suddenly had a coming out party for 4 glorious years. The very worst human instincts – once correctly termed ‘deplorable’ by a woman you probably know – no longer needed to be hidden. Trump was president so “F**k your feelings!” was the regular refrain.

None of these attractive bits will want to go back to a lifetime of being unacknowledged. A few people like notable right wing YouTube grifter Mike Cernovich have made efforts to distance themselves from the nastiness of the Trump brand, but the vast majority of people and discourses that have been shaped by Trumpism are not in fact going to change significantly.

Donald Trump has changed the world of civil discourse and interpersonal relationships, possibly forever. You could argue that this was not the change he was looking to spark, but here we are nonetheless. So what on earth comes next? At this point, I’m every bit as confused as you are.