THE concluding paragraph of this column of July 17, 2024 serves as the departure point for this week’s piece. It references what Donald Trump’s abrasive rabble-rousing has made of America and of that country’s global status in the wake of his presidency. Here it is, quoted at some considerable length, with emphasis added: “From January 2016 to January 2020, he did all he could to make America great again in his own language by making racial minorities, especially the blacks smaller.

Ultimately, he led the onslaught on the Capitol and now a gun man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, probably a product of his hate rhetoric, has turned a gun on him and the whole world has rightly condemned the attack. Would Trump have done the same without equivocation had his opponents been at the receiving end? What did he do during the January 6, 2021 attack? Only three weeks ago we saw how he and Biden refused to shake hands (not the first time for Trump) and openly abused each other, each calling the other a liar, during a so-called presidential debate.” 

I have asked in the emphatic sentence of the quoted paragraph what Donald Trump would have done had Thomas Matthew Crook’s bullet been directed at Joe Biden. That was a rhetorical question that was answered with another rhetorical question in the same passage, asking to know Donald Trump’s reaction during the January 6, 2021 insurrection that he had both inspired and encouraged with his hate rhetoric. 

Need we be reminded of that infamous episode, just two weeks before he was due to leave office after his defeat in the November 2020 election? Donald Trump led his supporters who had been mobilised over the course of several days from across different parts of the US to attack the US capitol at the very moment the Congress, led by no other than his deputy, Vice President, Mike Pence and House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was in session to ratify the outcome of the presidential election that had taken place two months earlier. That election had been won by his Democratic Party opponent Joe Biden. 

The whole world saw in living colours how members of Donald Trump’s favourite attack dogs, the Proud Boys, among other noisy rabble, fringe elements all, sacked the Capitol and how the likes of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi ran with their hearts in the mouth from one part of the sprawling structure for safety as they were being chased around while Donald Trump sat on his palm back in the White House, rejecting the pleas of both his family members and associates to help save the life of these senior members of the US government and others trapped in the Capitol. Rather what Trump did was to urge these attackers to “stand by”, apparently for further attack on the Capitol until Mike Pence carried out his wish to overturn the result of the election he lost. 

It’s been two weeks since Trump survived the attempt on his life and so much has happened to transform the political landscape in America. The most consequential of these developments is the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the presidential race, leaving the field wide open for Vice President Kamala Harris to square up against Donald Trump. After his unimpressive performance at the first presidential debate of this cycle of elections in June and his final ouster by COVID-19, Biden had no other way out but to cave in to the pressures from his party to withdraw. 

The polls also did him no good. And above all of this, Trump turned the lemon of his survival of an assassin’s bullet into lemonade, milking it all the way as his numbers rose in the polls. He came out of the entire fiasco on his life stronger. A master of media theatrics, he rose defiant and screaming to his supporters to fight on, within seconds of his ducking Crook’s bullet while Biden increasingly grew weaker physically. It was an unexpected and dramatic turnaround in the political sphere. The sad news of the circumstances that surrounded Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race has elicited sympathy from politicians around the world. But not so for Donald Trump who, according to reports, was surprised by the genuine show of sympathy by Joe Biden during a phone conversation after the attempt on his life. But rather than the generosity of spirit that people would otherwise expect even from a  political opponent at a time like this, all Trump did was to double down on his attack on Biden, calling him the worst president America ever had. He shouldn’t ever have stood for president, says Trump. 

As things now stand, Trump has a clearer path to the White House but should he win, he would be returning a much damaged president, one whose moral authority would have been further greatly diminished with grave consequences for America’s own moral standing as the police man of the world. Not as if that matters to a man  who has survived all his life on the feline instincts of the jungle. His morality belongs with dogs and he makes no bones about this. Nor do his supporters who have remained mainly steadfast since he first won election in 2016. His candidacy presents America with a Hobson’s choice between, not just a woman (which comes with it own baggage ordinarily) but an African-American and an Asian-American woman rolled into one- and a convicted felon. 

At no other time and, perhaps, in no other place could Donald Trump have survived as a politician in this age and time of cybernetic worlding. But here he is, in the so-called bastion of modern democracy and democratic values, splurging, expanding and flourishing like a dung-fertilised vegetable. He may be disappointed that he no longer has to contend with “Sleepy Joe” or “Crooked Hillary” but fate has brought him face to face with another woman, a political opponent, in a contest that is bound to expose the soft underbelly of American racial and gender politics. All of this in the year Roe versus Wade suffered its worst setback after more than five decades. 

It’s apparent that for all its achievements, America is yet to truly break the glass ceiling of gender politics. Which should not be surprising for a country that only gave women the suffrage almost 150 years after independence. America is again being confronted with a hard choice, one which highlights and magnifies the weakness and, no doubt, insincerity of its liberal politics. 

Is it ready for its first female president in 2024, having opened the door for its first black president in 2008? America may have accepted Donald Trump; the world is not bound by that choice.