News Analysis: Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
Under Donald Trump, the United States is fast approaching the dead end of a curious transactional presidency. Even the most treasured items of American nationhood and heritage are up for sale to the highest bidder in an bazaar as governance. This is an era where everything America does is reduced to one word: DEAL Indeed, if Trump has his way beyond this point, he may offer an unusual merchandise for auction. A scramble among his fellow billionaires is likely to ensue in a bid to cannibalize America’s heritage and hisotirc landmarks into items of merchasndise for the highest bidder. Will Trump auction Lady Liberty, the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island? Under Trump 2, the governance of America has degenerated into a giant bazaar, a huge transactional festival. The business of the state has been devalued and reduced to a series of deals, stripped of the ideals and creeds that inspired the very foundations of Americas. Buying loyalties and alliances, reducing international trade into tariff arm twisting and carting away treasures from pliant states or just shooting at nations as targets of a new Monroe Doctrine of the triumph of might. International relations is now a series of ‘deals’. Allies have become customers reduced to negotiating their way through complex tariff deals in which the US holds the ace. The American public is repeatedly fed figures and statistics of huge piles of trillions of dollars to be realized from ‘deals’ with foreign countries. Nations without commercial transactional value have no place in Trump’s calculus. If you have no rare earth minerals, oil and gas to be forcefully stolen or huge trade figures, Trump’s America has no time for you.
Easily the most invaluable import of America as a dominant civilizational power is a combination of order through strength and an all inclusive promise of freedom for all, Liberty for all and an open arm for immigrants to build a nation of the free. Democracy is the signpost of the American creed. America has until Trump been the gathering point and the final resort of citizens of different nations, people of diverse creeds, colours and backgrounds who seek freedom, liberty, democracy and opportunity. The unstated precondition of this open invitation is a certain subscription to the Puritan ethic of working hard to access the goodness of the American dream.
One physical symbol of what America means to the world is perhaps the Statue of liberty on Ellis Island, overlooking the New York Habour. It is a gigantic symbol of hope and promise for immigrants from all corners of the world. Freedom, democracy and infinite compassion for humanity in distress are the promises symbolized by this giant lady of steel. A towering robed woman literally rising from the sea over New York Habour, the Statue of Liberty is a gigantic figure, designed by Gustav Eiffel, famed architect of Paris’ Eiffel Tower and gifted to the United States by France to commemorate the end of and triumph in the American Revolution in 1886. Just as the Eiffel Tower celebrates man’s conquest of over the limitations of height and space, the Statue of Liberty is a tribute to man’s revolutionary spirit to conquer the arrogance of class and kingship as marked by the outcome of the American Revolution.
For the world, the Statue of Liberty has remained since its inauguration and gifting in 1886 the global emblem of universal fraternity, freedom, democracy, an open but conditional invitation to prosperity, freedom and diversity. The clarion call of Lady Liberty as inscribed on the pedestal of the statue has remained the embodiment of the American spirit: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ….’ had since then been the anthem of all peoples who
saw America as a place of ultimate hope for democracy and freedom.
Tragically, the major targets of Trump’s conservative lash out both in the US and around the world have ironically been the “tired, poor and hurdled masses” of the world. He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization (WHO). He has killed USAID and all its programs world wide. As a consequence, the sick and hungry around the world have either starved to death or been left to die avoidable deaths. In America itself, programs designed to sustain life among the poor and underprivileged have been spiked or defunded. For most Americans, a trip to the grocery store has become a journey into hades, a handshake with the unaffordability of the bare essentials of life.
To Trump, then, the values expressed on and symbolized by the Statue of Liberty ring hollow. For him, America’s belief in freedom is buried under the rubble of his authoritarian obsessions and actions. His appetite for autocracy is as unquenchable as his ego is gigantic. He has mistaken his pitiful weakness for strength and in a bid to display personal strength has weakened America in its traditional areas of strength- soft power as a global force for good.
A man who has an eternal appetite for monarchy has staged huge ego-driven ceremonial parades as they do in France, China and North Korea. Trump is blatantly ignorant of the historical origins of America’s democratic foundations in the rejection of kingship and a decisive choice of the Republican supremacy of the people. Americans have recently staged many ‘No Kings’ protests just to remind their despotic president of the origins of American exceptionalism and the democratic origins of his own ascendancy.
In defiance, Trump has drafted soldiers and national guard squads to all major American cities in the name of national security. Under the guise of immigration crackdown, ICE enforcers are invading homes, malls, schools, churches and dragging kids and women on the streets , dehumanizing them. Idi Amin would have been ashamed of such open displays of inhumanity against immigrants who trooped to the US in the belief that the truths embodied by the Statue of Liberty are eternal and inviolable. Immigrants are being backloaded in plane loads to countries they hardly know just as many others are detained in inhospitable places infested with dangerous reptiles.
Under the pretense of anti immigration, immigrants from the world’s most afflicted nations are being expelled and blocked from entering the United States. These are precisely the people who the authors of the poetic accompaniment of the Statue of Liberty envisaged would flock to America for succor and a better life. Trump’s sweeping immigration deportations and travel bans represent a tragic reversal of the aspirations of America’s founding fathers. It is a debasement of the enlightenment that informed the declaration of Independence and the integrity of the constitution of the United States.
While it remains the prerogative of every nation to regulate and control who enters their borders, immigration policy measures need to be guided by the founding ideals of the state in question and elementary considerations of compassion, law and human rights, including the rights of perceived villains. No pretension to sovereign power can justify a state’s regression to barbarism and the dehumanization of people just because they are considered ‘others’.
Ironically, the tragedy of the Trump regression is to mistake his inherent weakness for strength. There is something inherently weak about seeking to show strength by lashing out at vulnerable adversaries all guns drawn. Trump invaded Venezuela with over 22 war ships (including America’s largest aircraft carrier) plus over 150 of its most sophisticated war planes just to kidnap Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in the dead of night. Fear, cowardice and inherent weakness are better descriptions of this operation than strength and military sophistication!
At the international level, the actions of the Trump administration are isolationist, exclusionist and even racist, with an undisguised distaste for African and Third World nations with mostly black populations. Alleged victims of racist genocide in South Africa were granted automatic special refugee status with homes and jobs by Mr. Trump. But victims of alleged anti Christian genocide were rewarded with a blanket travel ban against all Nigerians in spite of the massive Nigerian contribution to the American economy.
Therefore, as things stand today, Trump’s perception of the essence of America’s civilizational mandate and mission hardly need the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty as a defining symbol. Everything it symbolizes has been eroded and shredded by the rapacious greed and reckless adventurism this mercantilist president.
There is no aspect of American life or foreign policy that has not come under the hammer of Trump’s street bazaar presidency. Even American citizenship by interested immigrants is now up for auction for a princely casino price of $5,000! An avowed pro- Christian president once sold gold embossed bibles for huge sums for campaign money. Trump once offered to evict the war traumatized residents of Gaza and buy up the strip for redevelopment as a real estate haven of luxury resorts and privileged residences.
For Trump, the most consequential people in the world are his fellow billionaires. He has converted the most powerful office in the world into a money spinning toll gate for himself, his family and business associates. His negotiating teams to the nation’s of the world often consist of his family, business errand boys and a few state officials.
He might therefore want to buy the Statue of Liberty for his insatiable collection of legacy treasure items and places. The list is already elongating: These include Kennedy Centre, the Centre for Peace, many streets, Gulf Courses, etc. are all being named after Trump in the first year of his second iteration.
In all this , Trump’s desperate mercantilist presidency has raised too many questions about the future of American democracy and its future as a credible global guarantor of democratic values and symbols for the world . He had ended his turbulent first term by violating the sanctity of the US Capitol with a rowdy invasion by his MAGA and associated thugs. He had attempted to stage a coup d’etat by ordering troops into Washington DC and trying to blackmail former Vice President Mike Pence to abuse his office by declaring him the winner of an election that Joe Biden clearly won. He had even tried to order the former Chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff to use the military to stop Biden’s inauguration and instead install him as the elected president.
In his current iteration, Trump has habitually ignored or arrogantly slighted the powers of Congress on a number of issues from funding the government to waging war against iran, Venezuela, Yemen etc.
Trump’s major achievement so far can be contemplated. A return to the primitive Monroe Doctrine phase of international relations. The strong will devour the weak. Greenland, Columbia and Cuba may be in Trump’s gunsights. In this process of mistaking might for strength, Trump may set off a bloody domino effect that could alter the world as we have come to know it. China may gobble up Taiwan while Russia could insist on taking over the whole of Ukraine. A wave of national and regional military build ups may ensue as we are beginning to see in Europe.
In America itself, a white supremacist culture may spark off rival movements as we saw with Black Lives Matter under Trump 1. The number of billionaires will increase just as their grip on the economy will degrade standards of living among the middle class and the poor. The attraction of the United States as a tourist and travel destination is likely to dim further. Politically, there is bound to be a sharper division between moderate and conservative Republicans on the one hand and between the Republicans and Democrats. The object of political struggles in the US in the post Trump years will be a battle to either deepen the erosions of America’s defining creed under Trump and the restoration of the American ideal as it once was.
Since Lady Liberty is now more of a landscape decorative piece devoid of its original symbolism, Trump might as well open a billionaires’ bid for the piece as unique art. Maybe Elon Musk could make an opening bid, followed by the various tech billionaires who are humouring Trump to stay in business. Or, better still, the Saudis could outbid Musk. Even better, the Qatar royals could buy the piece to send a signal to the Saudis. After all, they gifted Trump a clone version of Air Force One for his personal pleasure.
In what could be an interesting historic twist and befitting tragic anticlimax, the Chinese could offer to buy Lady Liberty at whatever price tag and insist it remains on Ellis Island since its symbolism has no place in their own authoritarian ethos. They could just pay for it, drape it in their national flag so that the message can be better appreciated: the road to authoritarianism leads from a betrayal of freedom and its emblems.
