A president unhinged, leadership betrayal, and now ashes

Jan 10, 2021 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

>>>Encouraging Events, Disturbing Developments<<<

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – U.S. President, Donald Trump, invited supporters to Washington, D.C., where he stirred them into a frenzy, then having emboldened them, he unleashed them on America. The United States leader incited them to inflict the horrendous damage that resulted. It was more than physical, more than regrettable loss of life, for which the president is the prime perpetrator, as sure as if he had killed. On the world’s biggest stage, and before an appalled and repelled global audience, Donald Trump got his Times Square and Fifth Avenue moment. He got the theater that he craves and the consequences, blood, and wrath all should be piled on his sorry head.
The damage done by the president is the length of his legacy left to posterity. Somewhere, through whatever was swirling within his head, the pressures that he stoked and stoked to breaking point were never intended to be soothing, characterized by the peaceful, defined by the orderly. What happened in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday might as well have been premeditated and scripted by the president. It is his masterwork, which will live with him in infamy through eternity. He has wounded grievously, perhaps incurably, American claims to a superior democracy.
The president – unthinking, reckless, and dangerously – profaned the sacred institution of democracy itself, with all of its sacred pillars: 200 years of national history gone in the puff of an egomaniac’s unsavoury rhetoric, with my country’s reputation mutilated before a watching world, and dragged and shredded inside the precincts of one of America’s most untouchable spaces for all to see. It was Homeric in the mindless rage of Achilles, with the disfigured body of Hector lashed to his chariot and racing around the square until fury ebbed.
Like the Greek hero, the gods egged on the hubristic American leader with his self-serving myths, while playing games with his mind; and today the scattered pieces are all over the place, with a nation limping from its hurts, and wondering how and why it allowed things to get so out of hand. And out of hand they did get with the dam burst and all restraints gone. It is ironic that a country, which sees it fit to rearrange the world to its own smugly arrogant configurations, should be brought so low.
To say that I am disturbed would be the understatement of understatements. To say that I feel for the fallen president would be an unforgivable falsehood. I feel for America and all the many who come from all the corners of the world with hope in their hearts while pouring self into an idea and ideal, only to have it come to this. I am disturbed and disgusted that this Chief Executive holding the highest office in America, for all intents and purposes, stood as Field Marshall and High Priest of an unfettered army of White Supremacists (who didn’t even care to shed their neo-Nazi skins) and reinvigourated Confederates, engaged in what has been not inaccurately termed an ‘insurrection.” At bottom, MAGA (Make America Great Again) was code for ‘White power’ and Nordic bias. At bottom, this is not even about President Donald Trump, but of leadership betrayal for the worst of purposes, and the dirges that moan over a stricken land for leadership run amok, trust terribly betrayed.
I have always been terribly disturbed by what I discerned was not so much an unhinged individual, but a rasping, bristling bigot of a leader. It troubled people of colour and foreign origins, like me. Now the man is considered so dangerous that the Democrats want him out of office and town immediately, even though he has less than two weeks remaining in his term of office. Wherever that drive leads, this much is clear and unmistakable: poisonous seeds have been sown and they are all highly destructive to the present ambience and future prestige of the United States of America. This is the ugly record left by President Donald Trump.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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