There was always something unsettling, repellent even, about Donald “The Donald” Trump, who was officially crowned presidential candidate of the Republican Party (GOP) last week.
The activist and film maker Michael Moore has called him a “wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath.” I suspect that Moore used the term “wretched” not to denote Trump’s net worth – he advertises himself as a billionaire and lives like one – but as a more genteel synonym for “odious” or “despicable” or “loathsome.”
Those attributes were so much on brutal parade at the GOP’s recent National Convention, that many media commentators, seeing how tangentially the GOP figured in the whole thing, have called it the Donald Trump National Convention.
In an angry and embittered acceptance speech that galvanised the raucous crowd into a frenzy, Trump situated the United States in a frightful dystopia of strife and violence and decay and decline, with police officers being killed in the line of duty and illegal aliens and radical Islamists overrunning the country.
“I alone can fix it,” he said of the dystopia he had conjured up. That is a measure of his delusion, evocative of President Charles de Gaulle’s après moi, le deluge strategy that won him election after election until 1968 when progressive forces in France called his bluff.
Trump said not a word, by the way, of the rampant killing of unarmed black citizens by police officers, some 320 so far this year, in situations that posed no threat whatsoever to the officers or public safety. He declared himself, shades of the odious Richard Nixon, the “law and order” candidate, on the way to becoming a “law and order” president.
Nor did he utter a word about justice. Justice has no place in Trump’s world, nor for that matter in the dark world of his adoring supporters.
Of the figures who endorsed Trump at the Convention, none was perhaps more tragic than Dr Ben Carson, the globally acclaimed retired neurosurgeon, or brain surgeon as they call that arcane occupation here in the United States.
Carson had entered the field as one of 18 candidates for the GOP ticket, and had, to his surprise and the surprise of those who all too easily get caught in the foam of events, quickly shot to the top of the pack, according to early polls taken ahead of the Iowa Caucus, the effective starting point of the race.
I was not impressed.
America, where large sections of the white population still cannot reconcile themselves to the reality of a black president, whom they perceive and depict cruelly as a usurper and a clueless one at that, is simply not ready for a black succession at the White House, whatever the polls may say. You have to be exceedingly obtuse to wager otherwise.
But the polls went into Carson’s head, and so did adoring whites who followed him on the hustings and sought eagerly to shake those famous Healing Hands and have him autograph their copies of his latest book, a sophomoric commentary on the Constitution of the United States
To them it was amazing to find an accomplished black member of the GOP confident enough to seek its presidential ticket. On television, the primary source of their information and images, they rarely see blacks as engineers and airline pilots and top-flight scientists and researchers, but mainly as athletes and entertainers and bad guys.
And now a black brain surgeon? This was an epiphany. They would not take the media’s word for it. They had to see him and touch him to believe that he was for real.
Besides, they found Carson’s biography compelling. Raised in poverty by a single parent who harboured no sense of entitlement and laid no claim on the munificence of the larger society, he had entered college without recourse to affirmative action. He went on to become a neurosurgeon of global renown, and at age 33 the youngest head of a major division at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Hospital, in Baltimore, Maryland.
There could be no better role model for black Americans
Carson’s fellow black Americans perceived him differently. They admired his brilliance and his professional accomplishments but detested his politics and his penchant for blaming them and not the long legacy of slavery and structural as well as systemic disempowerment for their woes.
They were aghast at his condescension, his utter lack of respect for President Barack Obama on Obama’s turf when Obama invited him to participate in a Prayer Breakfast at the White House. It was as if the opportunity he had been craving to openly identify with the lunatic fringe of the TEA Party had finally arrived.
On live television seen around the world, and with Obama and his wife Michelle sitting to his right, he launched a savage attack on Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Health Care Act that has provided health insurance for some 30 million citizens not previously covered, comparing it to “enslavement.”
This vile comparison was a desecration of the memory of the millions of Africans who perished on the way to enslavement or were enslaved in America and a wanton insult to their descendants, among whom Carson is numbered.
But it endeared Carson all the more to the Republicans and burnished his presidential prospects. He would go on to call Obama a “sociopath” at another forum.
He entered the first debate leading the GOP pack. After Iowa Caucus, he had slipped several places. He often came across as half awake and half asleep while talking, which led Donald Trump, he of the foul mouth, to characterise him as a person of “low energy.” The label stuck.
After Carson’s third outing, at the Nevada caucus, he was literally finished. True, Ted Cruise had inveigled Carson’s supporters into voting for Cruz or abstain, telling them that Carson had withdrawn from the contest. But even without that dirty trick, the game was over for Carson.
They floated his name as Trump’s potential running mate, but I am sure even Carson knew he had not a ghost of a chance there.
Perhaps as compensation, and to create the illusion of diversity in Trump’s camp, they invited Carson to speak on the Convention floor. He did not disappoint.
He said voting for the Democratic Party’s nominee, Hilary Clinton, would be voting to surrender America to Lucifer. Satan, no less.
How so?
Because, Carson said to tumultuous applause, Hillary Clinton is a great admirer of Saul Alinsky and had written her senior thesis on the author of Rules for Radicals, who in a preface to that book acknowledged Lucifer as the original radical who created his own kingdom.
A nuanced reading would suggest that down the ages, new kingdoms, including America, had indeed been founded by “original radicals.”
But Carson, like Trump, doesn’t do nuance. In their world, brutalism reigns supreme.
If Trump could get this far against all expectations, he can win the presidential election. The best forecasts I have seen give Clinton a 72 per cent chance of winning, as against Trump’s 28 per cent. That is a huge margin, but a 28 per cent chance is still a chance. Besides, the election is still some 12 weeks away, during which anything can happen.
But something tells me Trump will get a thorough shellacking.
Carson has his future well behind him. His foray into politics shows that you can be a great brain surgeon and be obtuse at the same time.
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