It may be a mean case of schadenfreude — and for this sin I will seek Easter forgiveness — but the optics of a grumpy Donald Trump before court on his criminal trial had a redemptive effect on me.
I am mindful of the strictures on forgiving one’s enemies taught by the Palestinian youth whose resurrection is being feted worldwide this weekend, but he did not say we should forget their wrongs.
And many have been the wrongs authored by the former POTUS, who still wants to revisit the scene of his crimes come next year.
But the source of my pleasure is located thousands of miles away from that court in New York, and my reason has nothing to do with what Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, et al might have against the man who attempted to refuse to accept his electoral defeat against the current POTUS.
My reason is that Trump had all along given some justification for our arrogant rulers on the African continent who think they have the divine right to rule and who clothe themselves in impunity and lord it over their unlucky citizens who cannot get rid of them.
Criminal charges
Now at least our rulers will see that impunity in some countries has a limit, and that one day the good precedent of a former president being pursued on criminal charges might cross the Atlantic.
Our rulers are given to uttering things to the effect that justice and human rights cannot be found even in the United Sates, as if that country were the exemplar of those attributes.
I have always said no to these justifications. The American political system is fraught with so many inconsistencies that it is hardly the idyll sought by those who hunger for a thoroughgoing equitable dispensation in a polity.
Founded on plunder, loot and rape, the system has embedded in itself so many shortcomings that it could hardly ever have the right to lecture anyone else in the world about democracy, and its citizens readily keep themselves away from such lectures.
Above the law
But at least they can say that, in certain instances, their leaders are not above the law.
We know that Trump had not intended to vacate the White House after losing the election to Joe Biden, but that he had been compelled to do so by knowing the detailed arrangements in place and ready to be activated in case he had tried to be funny.
The desperate January 6 attack on the Capitol was carried out because of the frustration the man felt at being so utterly powerless to erase the “shame” of defeat.
There is something in the man that approximates weakness with evil, and so losing an election equals weakness, equals evil, and it is not for him, the victor in everything he does, even if it is only in his fertile imagination.
Arrest or shoot
An African in Trump’s shoes would have shuttered himself in his palace and sent out troops to arrest or shoot anyone refusing to recognise him as winner in the just-ended election, which is seldom necessary because the rigging is always so thorough that there can be no possibility of a “wrong” result declared.
There is hardly an election that is credible in our countries, and one past president was famously recorded saying that it was only a foolish president who lost an election he himself had organised.
So, at least a wayward (former) president can be brought to book, and at least that is something sane minds should be celebrating and wishing to happen in our countries.
But the charges so far brought against Trump sound like the lightest that could have been preferred. Paying off a high-class prostitute to keep her mouth shut does not sound so egregious for a man who famously said he could shoot a man on high street in broad daylight and walk scot-free.
But it looks like his past sins will soon catch up with him, and before long he might be ruing the misfortune which did no make him president — or former president — of one of those sh*thole countries of his.
Hefty pension
Had he been that, he might have remained in office no matter the results of any election, or he might be living on a hefty pension and whatever else he had stolen from the treasury.
African rulers enjoy privileges that rulers anywhere else can only imagine.
Unfortunately for Trump, his country does not have that patience with its rulers, and it may want to make history by sending him to jail, if only to atone for the cardinal sin it committed when it elected him head of state seven years ago.
I suspect there exist quarters of the American citizenry who will be overjoyed by this cathartic punishment.
With voyeuristic eagerness, the world will follow the course of Trump’s trial(s), partly to learn how the American criminal justice works, but partly to observe the discomfiture of a man who must surely have put all the three Ss in “narcissist.”
Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]
