Kamala Harris, Donald Trump – and an existential crisis in the USA
By Femi Olugbile
On Tuesday, 5th of November 2024, most of the electorate in the United States of America will be going to the polls to elect their 47th President.
The elections, in which early voting has already commenced in many places, show all the evidence of being a ‘To be or not to be’ moment in the history of the USA.
The Founding Assumptions of the American Constitution are about to be tested, and its institutions put to the most exacting resilience examination.
Some important issues at stake are not discussed openly in the rhetoric of the principal gladiators – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Are all Men – and Women, truly equal? Is Liberal Democracy the best form of governance ever invented for human society? Who owns America? What is Freedom, and how much Freedom is too much Freedom? And – who owns God?
Donald Trump is a 78 year-old controversial and rather erratic businessman who was declared winner of a controversial election in 2016, and served as the 45th President of the USA from 2017 to 2021. A divisive figure, he is the personification of a right-wing tendency within the Republican party, a party which he has effectively taken over. In his language and his social demeanour, he is capricious, vindictive and amoral, showing no respect for principle or the law. Many American experts on human behaviour, including eminent psychologists and psychiatrists, have warned since 2016 of a real and present danger in allowing such a person to attain office as the most powerful man in the world. Living through his first presidency was a hoary experience for an America riven through the middle with virulent discord, as well as for much of the world, who found some of his pronouncements and decisions hard to endure.
When he lost the 2020 elections, many heaved a sigh of relief. He fought against the truth through legal and illegal means, including inspiring an insurrection that invaded the Capitol. His illegalities were legion. Assailed by multiple court cases, he has been indicted for criminal malfeasance, and some of his close aides have gone to prison. But nothing seems to stick to him. Nothing seems able to stop his relentless march. And nothing seems to shake the die-hard support of almost half of all America.
He was an unapologetic white-male-American champion in his first incarnation, Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint prepared for him recently by a conservative think tank, promises to take American to a new nadir in inequity and social fragmentation in his next Presidency – if he wins.
Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, is already the first woman, and the first Afro-Asian American to be Vice President. She is married to Doug Emhoff and has two stepchildren. She previously served as Attorney General in the State of California and won an election as Senator. She supports abortion protections, LGBTQ+ rights, gun control, climate change legislation, and increased border control combined with an earned pathway to citizenship for some immigrants. She supports aid to Ukraine and a two-state solution in Israel.
Kamala is still somewhat of an unknown quantity to many. The words that may point to the person behind the mask were uttered casually at a White House event.
‘You think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live, and what came before you…’
Kamala Harris is popular in mainstream Nigerian opinion, including the Nigerian diaspora, But Trump enjoys a surprisingly strong following in some Nigerian circles too. Femi Adebajo, a Nigerian psychiatrist practising in the UK, in a widely circulated social media piece, tried to psycho-analyse the phenomenon of Nigerian Trumpians. To him, many Nigerians are ‘deeply amoral and capricious’ and may see a kindred spirit in Trump. He also sees ‘ignorance’ and a mistaken sense of ‘Christian duty’ that makes some Nigerians, like the American Pentecostal Right, see Trump as ‘God’s imperfect vessel’ to do his work. Additionally, many Nigerians see themselves as part of a global neo-Liberal wave championed by Trump and some ‘strongman’ leaders around the world. There is a fear that social liberals and ‘Woke’ people have an agenda to make everyone homosexuals and transgenders, a fear propagated by Trump supporters, and abhorrent to African sensibilities. Finally, according to Dr Adebajo, many of his fellow Nigerians ‘lack self-confidence and desire to be led…by demagogues.’
It has been observed that some of the most significant Trump funders and supporters are, like Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel white men who grew up in South Africa, some of whom left in the wake of the overthrow of apartheid and the advent of Black Rule. The knee-jerk wave of white reaction in America that brought Trump to power after the Obama presidency casts Obama in the shape of a Nelson Mandela ending untrammelled white male power which Boers in South Africa, and whites in America, had enjoyed for generations. An ontological insecurity around loss of power and becoming numerically swamped may be at the heart of the ‘MAGA’ phobia about white men being ‘replaced’, and may also explain why they abhor ‘women who have no children’, like Kamala Harris.
There is too, the matter of the Jewish lobby, pouring millions of dollars into sponsorship of pro-Israel candidates for the Presidency and other elective positions. They may be conflicted on Harris, who is married to a Jewish man, supports Israel, but also supports a ‘Two-State Solution’. Would they prefer a Trump, who would support Netanyahu without blinking, and with whom the ‘Two-State Solution’ would be dead in the water? Paradoxically for them, Trump’s MAGA crowd also includes the most convinced neo-Nazi antisemitic people in the land.
Nothing, it seems, is as simple as it looks.
From Europe to Asia and Africa, from Ukraine to Gaza and to the Sudan, the world will reverberate with the impact of the choices that Americans make on the 5th of November 2024.
