“Donald Trump is the most anti-science and anti-environment president we’ve ever had.” – Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian, Rice University.
What a careful observation of the Nigerian social media space would reveal is that there is a silent, simmering and sentimental support for the American President, Donald Trump, as he prepares to slug it out at the polls with Joe Biden by the end of the year. The support comes from two flanks. On the one side are some South-Easterners who – wrongly – assume that Trump is a Biafran champion, and is working hard to help them actualise their dream of an independent Biafran nation.
On the other side are uncountable Pentecost-minded Nigerian Christians, who are convinced that Trump is a die-hard Evangelical, on an end-time mission of taking America back to its Great Awakening past – when the fire of Pentecostal revival, ignited at Azusa Street, California, in 1906, spread to all the corners of the Earth. These believers see the American president as a tool in the hands of God, who drove out the assumed anti-Christian Obama/Clinton camp in order to re-establish the US’ battered Christian values.
As if in agreement with the faith-based disposition of the Charismatic/Evangelical folk, Trump has always exhibited a high propensity for “magical thinking”, right from day one. He seems to believe in miracles more than in science. He refuses to look at hard evidence; but constantly follows his intuition. Naturally, the opposition latched onto this and labelled him a promoter of conspiracy theories. But Trump, undaunted, keeps on shooting down long-established empirical systems. The environment took the most fatal shots: He says climate change is a hoax!
But as COVID-19 rages through the United States, the scientific world has begun to fight back. The latest battlefield is the hydroxychloroquine debate. The malaria drug has been officially declared as unsuitable for the treatment of COVID-19 patients, but Trump has declared that it effective, and said he was taking it himself. The US Food and Drug Administration had revoked its emergency-use authorisation for hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 after several studies cast doubt on the drug’s effectiveness. By way of validation, the leading public health expert on the White House coronavirus taskforce, Anthony Fauci, rubbished claims that the drug is a useful treatment for COVID-19.
“The overwhelming prevailing clinical trials that have looked at the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine have indicated that it is not effective in coronavirus disease,” Fauci said.
But Trump continues to defend it. Last week Tuesday, at a presidential briefing, he said: “Many doctors think it is extremely successful, the hydroxychloroquine. Some people don’t. Some people, I think it’s become very political. I happen to believe in it. I would take it. As you know, I took it for a 14-day period and I’m here, right? I’m here.”
The truth is that what is at stake here is not hydroxychloroquine; it is the age-old battle between science and religion. President Trump – a politician who had tactically chosen the religious bandwagon as the populist highway to power in a country that prides itself for its rich Christian heritage – represents those who believe in miracles and God’s eternal ability to use any element as a healing wand.
On the other side of the divide are American scientists who believe that America’s greatness is not in divine interventions, but in the ability of her leaders to galvanise the citizenry into creating timely innovations that would save the world at every troubled epoch.
Ironically, the American society is so sophisticated that Trump can no longer find easy disciples for his Christian crusade. Many of his compatriots believe in the transcendental abilities of the human mind and the empirical outcomes that flow out of libraries and laboratories. They are believers in the hi-tech capabilities of the American machine, and the boundless opportunities to be harnessed by any diligent American as a tool to join other global American brands to rule the world. In short, every living soul in “God’s own country” believes in the American Dream.
This is the reason why some of his own staff seem to be against him. And, yes, most Americans even prefer to work with his “more reasonable” aides more than Trump himself. Last month, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that 67% of Americans trust Fauci, who is also the country’s top infectious diseases expert, for accurate information about the coronavirus, whereas only 25% trust Trump.
In reaction to the poll, the president mused: “He’s got this high approval rating. So why don’t I have high approval rating with respect – and the administration – with respect to the virus? We should have it very high. So it sort of is curious, a man works for us, with us, very closely, Dr Fauci and Dr [Deborah] Birx also, very highly thought of – and yet, they’re highly thought of, but nobody likes me? It can only be my personality, that’s all!”
To me, it is not about Trump’s personality or anything. Americans are simply taking sides in the perennial conflict between science and religion. They refuse to be hounded into the atavistic train of precarious survivalism, from where their grandparents and founding fathers emerged – all the way from the Religious Wars-battered Europe. The modern American recognises that religion is a good way to start; yet, they know that the best of religions still wield the power to raise a tyrant more than the worst of science.
It is only in Africa, and, perhaps, other poor regions, that Trump could still find people to follow him in a faith-based campaign. And, had he realised this from the very start, he would not have called Africa a “shit-hole” continent. (Of course, then there was no COVID-19 to warn him of a sour political future.)
This is the reason why he found it hard to acknowledge the country of origin of Dr Stella Immanuel, the African woman whose hydroxychloroquine-promoting video went viral last week. The woman had wrongly dismissed the use of face masks to combat the coronavirus. In the video, recorded in Washington, she was surrounded by other American doctors who were conspicuously not wearing any face mask – an evidence that they supported the religious side of the debate. Immanuel is also a pastor; founder of Texas-based Pentecostal church, Firepower Ministries.
The US president tweeted a version of the video, while his son, Donald Trump Jr., had his Twitter account restricted by the company for 12 hours after calling the video a “must watch”. At a White House press conference, Trump described Immanuel and her anti-face mask team as “America’s Frontline Doctors”.
While reacting to a journalist who pointed out to him that the pastor-doctor is also a conspiracy theorist, an agitated Trump replied: “Maybe it’s the same [person], maybe it’s not, but I can tell you this. She was on air along with many other doctors. They were big fans of hydroxychloroquine and I thought she was very impressive in the sense that, from where she came – I don’t know which country she comes from – but she said that she’s had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients… And I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her.”
Interestingly, the woman – a full-blooded black African – clearly mentioned, in the viral video, that she was raised and trained in West Africa, but Trump did not want to acknowledge this because of what he had said about the continent in the past. With his palpable superior stance on intellectual matters, it was obvious that the journalist who asked the question was waiting for Trump to concede that Africa was offering to help.
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