Big lessons from America

America – that is, the United States of America – is experiencing an unusual political autumn which began on Tuesday, November 3 of 2020 – the Super Tuesday of the presidential election of the super great nation currently amply uncertain of its super electoral greatness. Objective or subjective evidence before the world has confirmed that Trump’s and Biden’s respective pursuits are re-handwriting the democratic vision of the founding fathers of the world’s bastion of presidential democracy.

Since the presidential electoral results in the respective states of the Union of America called and universally known as the United States of America started pouring in since the afore-said Super Tuesday of the country’s presidential election, the soundly beaten Republican President Mr. Donald Trump and some of his fellow Grand Old Party (GOP) senators and personages have been behaving like negatively inspired heads of governments and politicians from some banana republics in Central America and Africa. In fact, the outgoing President Trump who does not want to go out of the American political scene in this delicate autumn of his life has rejected his loss of the presidential election with a bang. His tweets of pain, discontent and loss are banging about the social space of America.

Of course, well before the election, Donald Trump had blown his trumpet of expected or foreseen defeat and loss. Several times he had announced to his constituencies in his electoral campaigns that he would fraudulently be made to lose the election, and if that happened he would contest the outcome of the election. In other words, unless he won the election, he would not accept defeat and concede the election to his major opponent and prime challenger Mr. Joe Biden, the candidate of the Democratic Party, he is now treating as an enemy. With a bang, Trump went to town with the news that the Supreme Court would determine the winner or loser of the election. In other words, the US Supreme Court would not allow his electoral victory to be stolen from him by electoral thieves.

Ostensibly, President Trump knew what he was doing. The Supreme Court is a Republican-minted Supreme Court, as it currently is, of six conservative, that is, Republican-appointed Justices, to three progressive, that is, Democratic Justices. And of the six conservative Justices, Mr. Trump, as a sitting president, has appointed two of them within a period of one year ably backed by a super partisan Republican-controlled Senate that declined former President Barack Hussein Obama to appoint a Justice to the Supreme Court in 2016 on the spurious excuse or grounds that on a presidential election year it was politically indecent for him to submit any name for the Senate to consider. Of course, it was baneful right politics of the GOP. President Trump appointed a GOP partisan Justice when he defeated Hillary Clinton. And a fortnight to the recent presidential election the Republican-controlled Senate endorsed Mr. Trump’s appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and she was sworn-in just before the presidential election. What double standard politics of the Republicans that do not recognize that what is good for the goose must be good for the gander and vice versa!

Where am I heading to? It is crystal clear that President Trump is expecting the Supreme Court dominated by Republican partisans to wrench the 2020 presidential electoral victory from the President-elect Joe Biden and give it to him. Will this be possible? Is President Trump telling the whole world that the US Supreme Court will bake him victory in the long run with or without evidence to substantiate his claim and allegation of electoral fraud in states he lost to Biden? And will the Supreme Court stoop so low to revise or re-write the law to suit the whims and caprices of President Trump and Republicans presumably putting pressure on the majority of the Justices, especially on the partisans, now to toss victory to the direction of the president? Is this how justice now works in America? These are pertinent questions if we view them against the backdrop of what Mr. Biden now President-elect and Mrs. Kamala Harris now Vice President-elect did or said against two Justices of the Supreme Court at different times in the past against their respective confirmations and appointments as Supreme Court Justices.

Will they, including the newly confirmed and appointed conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who Kamala Harris and her Democrat colleagues in the Senate allegedly horribly treated, now have their revenge on the Democratic President-elect and Vice-President elect? If the Supreme Court Justices base their eventual decision or judgment on vendetta, then it must be crystal clear to the whole world that there is no justice in the world’s so-called super supreme or super golden bastion of electoral democracy after all.

When the Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election against all expectations, they did not, despite their reservations, hesitate to congratulate the Republicans and their victorious candidate once the US media made the victory call on behalf of Mr. Trump. Mrs. Clinton the presidential candidate of the Democrats did not play the role of a sore loser as Mr. Trump is now doing. Mrs. Clinton and her fellow Democrats did not incite their rank and file and constituents against Mr. Trump and his victorious party. They also did not falsely accuse electoral officials across the US of any kind of electoral deception, trickery, or cheating deliberately employed to the disadvantage of Hillary Clinton and her party.

What profile of American politics has Mr. Trump drawn for us in Nigeria now? What profile of American politics are the Republicans drawing for us in Nigeria now? Can we in Nigeria now not rightly say, not exactly say that despite our whole range of vicissitudes, we are better off than America after all? We do not claim to be the best political animals to be observed every now and then by European and American electoral observers any time elections of different kinds are due in our country. But with the present attitude of President Trump and his Republican cohorts we can festoon ourselves with decorative chains of flowers, ribbons and designs of electoral observers sent or invited to America in future in spite of our short-comings. Human being everywhere are essentially the same.

Yet I must say as follows: At the end of the day Americans are Americans. Regardless of President Trump’s pre-election and post-election intimidation Americans were committed to removing the most divisive and nepotistic president in their modern history. And they did. Americans were committed to getting rid of the political disease and political disaster called Donald Trump. And they did.

The mistake they made in 2016 by choosing Trump in the Electoral College over Hillary Clinton who won the popular vote, they now corrected on Super Tuesday, 3 November, 2020. The freedom to reject a no-good president, no matter how he tried to revise and hide his tracks, or no matter how he tried to cow the people with severe acts of intimidation, or no matter how he tried (and still tries) to hoodwink them with questionable or ugly rhetoric of inspiration, Americans demonstrated to the whole world in this year’s presidential election. These are positively fat, big and healthy lessons for us in Nigeria.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.