Donald Trump the invincible, or a stranger America getting born?

Dar es Salaam-based political and social commentator

Donald J Trump has pulled off a most rare political comebacks in American presidential elections by being the first one to have won two non-consecutive presidential terms, that is to say, having served one term, then lost, and then come back again, since 1893. Comeback kid, really, or never-say-never bully?

But however rare that may be, it is perhaps not any stranger than the fact that Trump is almost surely the only presidential candidate to have been elected after being indicted and found guilty on a score of criminal charges.

That is to say, almost nothing they threw at him stuck. I now believe what he said some time ago about his ability to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and nothing happens to him.

Also, think that he has managed to pull this one off despite the American media being on his case for being a pathological liar who seems to tell lies even without wanting to, simply because he can’t help himself, and he will lie even when telling the truth would get him out of some trouble.

Trump was confronted several times by his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris about packing American top lawcourt with judges inclined to outlaw a pro-abortion law (which they duly did) and during the campaign he was assuring American women that he would be their “protector” and they didn’t have to worry about any legislative protection.

When Ms Harris chided the man as being an abuser, saying she knew the type and had spent half her legal practice time prosecuting the type, his followers seemed to take that as a compliment, almost as though they were saying (to paraphrase a well known Americanese “The man may be a horrible scoundrel, but he sure is our own horrible scoundrel.” Simply nothing they threw at him stuck.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, came to Trump’s campaign rallies with tons of dollars, and dishing out lots of it to whoever won some raffle he had created, and of course there were takers, and Harris supporters cried foul, suggesting there was some kind of electoral irregularity but it didn’t seem to stick either.

The whole tribe of FOB’s (Friends of Bill from the Monica days) smelled a rat, things were not going well, they sensed, especially with hints that African American males were not with Kamala.

I found it strange, because my little understanding of African American society tells me that all those big Black boys one sees on the streets of Washington, Chicago or Atlanta are mamas’ kids, having been raised by single mothers after dad had gone gallivanting. No, these particular Blacks were not buying into this because, apparently Trump did something in his four years he spent in the White House that created jobs for them somehow.

This is voodoo economics that I understand little of, but apparently it works, and I could discern this sense of frustration among the FOB’s, especially in the tone of Barack and Michelle Obama as they struggled to stay civil while trying to tell their Black crowds that they just didn’t understand what they were witnessing. They clearly had come to a gunfight with a knife and Trump and his band were shooting away with abandon.

The FOB’s, it was clear, had lost it. Bill was clearly ailing, and his voice had gone huskier than last we saw him, and he had slowed down somewhat, and he had been hit with something he had not known in the days when he was competing with George WH Bush. This was Donald J Trump, wrecker of the GOP and the Democratic party machine in one fell swoop. Things have changed, what you see is not what you get, and the earth is flat!

Talk about this being the end of democracy in the US did not cut ice with Trump or Steve Bannon and the other ideologues. You could not even bring up the issue of the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6. You see, when Trump was in his 20s in 1973, down in Santiago de Chile, the people elected a socialist president, Salvador Allende, but the Americans disagreed with the Chileans and the CIA sent in operatives and money for the Chilean military to topple the elected government, simply because it was socialist. General Augusto Pinochet took over, and the rest is history.

Trump must know that American politicians have never respected people’s wishes, so why should he, Trump, respect such wishes when they don’t sit well with his desires? Did the Americans not kill Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the first elected leader, because he was Moscow leaning? Or South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, supposedly an ally, because he was becoming ungovernable?

He may not look like it, but Trump is a good student of history, although Rex Tillerson, once his secretary of state, famously called him a moron. He wanted to do a Pinochet-type of putsch back on January 6, and he would have tried it this time round too, but luckily he won, and Kamala did concede.

Ulimwengu is a Dar es Salaam-based political commentator. [email protected]