The return of Trump – a raw, grassroots postmortem 

Nov 10, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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…Hard truths

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News-  Vice President Kamala Harris did everything right during her election campaign.  She still came up short, and it was by more than the expected whisker.  In stark contrast, former president Donald Trump outdid himself in doing wrong in his appeals to American voters.  Yet he ended up being the one in the winner’s circle with the garland around his neck.  On the one hand, it is the beauty of democracy in action.  On the other, it is about the ugly monstrosity that is all too often part of that flawed beauty.

The imagination of my fellow Guyanese doesn’t have to run wild; doesn’t even have to traverse the skies and disembark in America.

There is jarring reality both there and here to bring them to their senses.  A bankrupt (a slur and a stigma in the United States) could ascend like this.  A convicted felon (the mark of the devil) could float to the top, proving that truism to be trumps (with no pun intended in this instance).  Indeed, America is about second chances, of restarting from scratch, and that also is proven.  But something else was proven in the Donald Trump victory: he could be a demented and deformed and deranged, but he is still embraceable by people who just may have had enough of a certain kind of people. After all of democracy’s ideals, the white American voters showed what values they cherish, what matters most to them.  Sanitize the neighbourhood is one of them.

Ideals are like abstractions: they come out of, they take up residence in, ivory towers.  Now here is a gut check for ‘aaal ah wee’: the closest that anything comes to the grassroots at those heights are from what lushly adorns even more exquisite flowerpots.  On occasion, some Chinese or Japanese bamboos may be tastefully arranged to add variety at those rarified elevations.

After two and a half centuries of self-government and self-empowerment, the white American voters said that this is what is wanted, Donald J. Trump is what must be had.  I lost out on expectations about maturity, decency, versatility that come from so much learning.  The conclusion in this neck of the woods was that some States are so abhorred that they just can’t be allowed to grow from spawn to serpent.  Well, there is President Trump and his Washington jungle from which to operate with a free hand.  He has been given that mandate.  Richard Nixon (“I am not a crook”) is avenged, and George H.W. Bush (he of Willie Horton fame) is resurrected to the pinnacle of American power.  One hundred and sixty years after the American Civil War, the Old South has risen again, and its kind of liberty is set to prevail.  The white American voter has spoken, and they are people to be listened to with the keenest attention. Take back America.

America for Americans.  Forget about mass deportation on the scale mentioned.  But what place for the colored man, the foreign woman, the forlorn children?  But all is not lost, for there is sure to be need for somebody to scrub all those floors and shine the many shoes that tramp along K Street and those of Wall Street.

The white women couldn’t come out for one of their own, admittedly more of a cappuccino color construction.  Even Uncle Joe did better than his VP.  As for the white men, when they dared to spend a moment on the possibilities of Kamala, the next thought that came was that it is time to activate the militia.  All of this is the stuff of banana republics and African and Latin American despots.  Except that the pull of the tribe, and the cult of a paranoid and perverse Jim Jones lives on, but with one noticeable difference.  Nobody is dead.

In thinking of Trump’s electoral success, almost too easy in some spots, I steer course for Guyana.  Like America, corruption doesn’t matter in Guyana.  Mr. Su, who the hell is he, why should he and his verbal deposits have any bearing on anything and anyone?  Like America, Guyana has its own replica of Donald Trump: one who has taken political savagery into the unknown, one who is at home with controversy and malignancy.  Due to a confluence of personnel and practices, and unlike America, the criminality that is personally thought to be here at many levels, doesn’t stick. Like America, the call of the tribe is what has the most enduring power, come hell or come all the convulsions brought about by Exxon.  Guyanese can be excused, as they have long been held to be backward and ignorant.  The arrival of oil only made those sentiments in the minds of aliens more pronounced.  The Bostonians could have drummed up a farce of a tea party and ended up freeing themselves from king and captivity.  Most Guyanese can’t even get their two feet together, come to grips with what could be their own manifest destiny.  In their minds, a 6-month entry stamp at Kennedy makes oil sheiks of them.  Finally, like America, there is the sense that the opposition is not well put together.

Trump it will be which is good for the PPP.  The whole outlook around Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro could change.  So could things here, too.  A wheeler, a stealer, and a dealer returns to the White House.  There are those of like kind right here.

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

(The return of Trump – a raw, grassroots postmortem) 

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• America, convicted felon, hard truths, Trump, United States

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