Trump and the Granger Playbook

Nov 06, 2020 Editorial

Kaieteur News – At the time of the writing of this editorial, although the election has not yet officially been decided or projected, from all reasonable indications, it seems that the incumbent Donald Trump has lost the American elections to his opponent, former Vice President, Joe Biden.

It is not a situation that he is taking lightly by any measure. One of his tweets yesterday afternoon was a simple, manic, in all caps, “STOP THE FRAUD!” one that Twitter helpfully labeled with a disclaimer that reads “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading in an election or other civic process.”

A damning preliminary report by a European Union Parliamentary observer team sent to monitor the US elections sums up the general trend of Trump’s pronouncements and their impact: “Such statements by an incumbent president weaken public confidence in state institutions and were perceived by many as increasing the potential for politically motivated violence after the elections.”

If these words sound familiar to Guyanese, it is because the sentiments they embody are still fresh in our minds in the wake of our own former incumbent administration’s attempts to desperately and indecently retain power, despite clearly and convincingly losing our national elections earlier this year. Even as Trump’s administration was instrumental (with considerable bipartisan support in Congress) in pressuring the David Granger administration into finally relinquishing power, it appears with increasing clarity that the American President is drawing directly from the Granger playbook in seeking to reverse the will of the people in his favour even as he undermines public confidence in the democratic process as a whole.

The fundamental similarities between the bombastic Trump and the reclusive Granger are more than initially apparent. Both men, despite being in their seventies, are relatively late newcomers to formal politics; both rely on trite sloganeering over actual substantive policies, leaving the legwork to incompetent underlings; both are obsessed with self-branding; both see no issue in blurring the lines between the partisan political bodies they control and the state; both are thin-skinned and petulant, more comfortable with sycophants and hacks than with professionals in the public service; both were elected on promises of fighting public corruption and ended up encouraging it; and both are more concerned with pomp and ceremony than actual functionality in government.

Worse than all of this however is that both, though democratically elected, have displayed the same propensity for discarding the democratic process in their attempts to stay in power. In keeping with Granger’s playbook in that regard, the easiest line of attack of course for Trump has been false claims of pro-Trump votes being manipulated or discarded. For example, Eric Trump, the President’s son, tweeted a video of a man supposedly burning Trump ballots, a video that was found to be a hoax with the ballots being burned not real but sample ballots. Guyanese of course, will remember the fiasco of false claims of discarded votes by Granger, including – during the recount – in boxes that had not yet been reopened.

Then there was the Granger campaign’s false claim of dead voters, including the bogus presentation of names and death certificates, all debunked by this newspaper’s reporting. Right on cue, America was yesterday treated by Trump surrogates, including Rudy Giuliani, claiming without evidence that dead people had voted in the US elections.

The most alarming mimicry of David Granger by Trump was during his rambling press conference last night in which he said he would win easily if only “legal votes” are counted, right in line with Granger’s convenient declaration of a victory on “only valid votes,” with ‘invalid’ votes being defined merely by virtue of the votes his machinery decided that were not valid in sufficient quantity to reelect him. And this after claiming that his Statements of Poll were identical to those concocted by Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo, which included 20,000 votes that did not exist – the public should perhaps be reminded at this point that Granger has still failed to show those SOPs.

The comparison between the two men however has its limitations, one that should be considered by both democracies going forward. While, for example, Trump is trying to undermine democratic structures in the United States, he is largely failing to do so, hence his increasing reliance on misinformation and false rhetoric – Granger on the other hand deliberately and preemptively created an infrastructure that in effect infiltrated the critical democratic infrastructure, with key officers in the Guyana Elections Commission deliberately thwarting the process, from Mingo to Roxanne Meyers to Keith Lowenfield conspiring with political players officials like Volda Lawrence and Carol Smith-Joseph to ensure that the will of the people was not reflected in the final official count.

For Guyanese citizens, constitutional reform – electoral system reform in particular – has to be something that is pushed on the political agenda going forward. Even as the largely vexatious suits filed by Granger served somewhat to allow the legal system to clarify fundamental areas of electoral law, enough remains in the current infrastructure for someone like a Trump or Granger, someone with that sort of manic, delusional political will, to simply decide to not want to give up power and to push the envelope as far as possible to retain it until some external force spanks some sense into him. For American citizens, and citizens of smaller, more vulnerable democracies – what needs to be considered is that no such ultimate failsafe mechanism exists for the United States.