Sadly, the Trump presidency is ending the way it started…. By Chido Nwangwu

Special to USAfrica multimedia networks, Houston. usafricaonline.com

By Chido Nwangwu. @Chido247

The gradual but methodical counting and tabulation of the votes from the November 3 elections here in United States for the presidency,  instantly offered three things. 

The first as digital civic education. 

The second came as another opportunity to millions of Americans and people of the world to take in the contrasting personalities of the Republican and the Democrat seeking the mantle of leadership. To be sure, the incumbent Donald J Trump is very popular among some conservatives and especially the Christian Republicans and the working class whites Caucasians. There is no minimizing 70 million votes won by Mr. Trump, an unusual man with an instinct for wasteful confrontation and reckless abandonment of the greatest opportunity offered to him by history for potential greatness. But Biden has won more than 74 million votes. Biden also won 290 of the electoral votes to Mr. Trump’s 214. 

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” were the explosive words of the 45th president of the United States, Donald J Trump,  on Thursday evening November 5, 2020. Especially significant were two words he amplified for his efforts to discredit and delegitimize what was emerging as the inevitable success and victory for his opponent Joe Biden. He called an unproven allegation and partisan categorization “illegal votes.” To spice things up even for that he claimed that if those votes are counted, then “they can try to steal the election from us.”  

On the other hand, former vice president Biden politely called for respect for the institution of democracy in America and commitment to the fact that all the lawfully cast votes must be counted.

It is important to note that Donald Trump’s presidency is ending, sadly, how and where it started in January 2016. President Trump and his enablers decided from the beginning that they will force-feed Americans and the world a sweetened but toxic porridge of bold and bald lies as daily requirements and operational instruments for governance. It has been almost Orwellian — where bronze is gold, bad is good and lie is truth. Particularly, the lies about COVID-19 and the coronavirus! 

Mr. Trump started his embattled presidency with harsh ideological bifurcation and overdose off racially polarizing vernacular, and is ending with the same as reflected in his dog whistle messages. Consequently, despite some of the important things he is doing, because of his weighty but corrosive words before and especially on September 29, 2020, history — as written by folks like me and others — will denote him as the only man who had the privilege, the rare privilege of serving as the president of the United States but chose, willfully and giddily, to impress, acknowledge, embrace and give validation to neo-Nazis, skinheads, and certified racists such as the so-called ‘Proud Boys.’   

He began in 2016 with his daily tweets of mean-spirited nonsense, indecent chunk of time wasted on self-serving glorifications and stream of caustic xenophobia. He’s ending his presidency in a cacophony of incendiary misuse of the power and privilege of the presidency of the United States. 

Evidently, Mr. Trump exemplifies the wise saying that the leopard does not change its spots. 

————   

*Dr. Chido Nwangwu,  the author of the January 2021 book, MLK, Mandela & Achebe: Power, Leadership and Identity,  serves as Founder & Publisher of the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper on the internet, USAfricaonline.com, and established USAfrica in 1992 in Houston. He is recipient  of several public policy and journalism excellence honors, civic engagement  and community empowerment awards and has appeared as an analyst on CNN and SKYnews. He served as an adviser on Africa business to Houston’s former Mayor Lee Brown. Chido247 at Gmail.com