By Vishwamithra –

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time.” ~Homer – Odyssey

No US President, former or incumbent, has suffered the humiliation that Donald Trump, the 47^th President of the United States of America, is going through now. As per Associated Press report dated May 9, 2023, ‘A jury, consisting of six men and three women, found Donald Trump liable on Tuesday (May 9) for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5 million in a judgment that could haunt the former president as he campaigns to regain the White House’. It was further reported thus: The verdict was split: ‘Jurors rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped, finding Trump responsible for a lesser degree of sexual abuse. The judgment adds to Trump’s legal woes and offers vindication to Carroll, whose allegations had been mocked and dismissed by Trump for years’.

In 2016, the American public who voted for a sexual abuser to be their Executive President, had to wait virtually another seven years to find out that Donald Trump had committed sexual abuse. And that exposure was made possible by E Jean Carroll, the victim in this case, in an election year. The dawn of 2024 looks quite ominous for Trump and another string of court cases and their deep digging is waiting to be, if not concluded, at least a partial advance that would not spell favorable for this man for whom ‘truth’ is a totally alien reality.

Trump’s flirtation with the law and its grinding exposure to the public, its cruel reality, its unforgiving dynamics and its ultimate victory over falsehood is nearing closure; yet the perpetrator calling himself the ‘victim’ exists only in Trump’s universe. That universe is warped; it’s unkind machinations are valid and legitimate only to Trump and his blind loyalists. Brought up as unquestioning serfs whose very existence in turn depends solely on that blind and unquestioning adherence bordering on religious-like following has cost America’s leadership in the Western world and right-thinking minds in the rest of the international arena.

Yet one has to give credit to Trump for his genius-like ability to create a ‘brand’ that lasts a long time which touches on those who habitually dwell on societal fringes. That fringe is ever shrinking but still those who reside there do not seem to realize the long-term damage it causes to America. Trump does not seem to care. Being a victim of his own narcissism, having been caught up by advancing age and its consequent byproduct of vacillating verbiage, Trump is exposing himself more and more to the American public as a pathetic creature still in search of his own enigmatic persona and identity. It is indeed a sad story of human folly that has tormented man since his emergence as a civilized creature on earth.

But one must not forget, nor forgive such a man who has chosen to exploit his vast amount of wealth and ability to abuse it to the fullest possible extent in order to cloth himself in cosmetic glory and pageant. But the greater tragedy is not Trump’s unchecked ability to use and abuse all what he possesses , but in the human condition he has manged to create among extreme-minded US citizens; a sliver of fantasy and illusion that there are some people who are more equal than others has been created. In spite of it being written and affirmed in the ‘Declaration of Independence’ that all men are equal before the Law, Trump’s dog-whistle and its intrinsic appeal to White America, especially the ‘uneducated and semi-educated’ segment, is taking effect with each passing day of the election campaign.

Trump’s last challenger left on the Republican platform is Nikki Haley. Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa at Bamberg County Hospital in Bamberg, South Carolina to immigrant Sikh parents from Amritsar, Punjab, India. Her father, Ajit Singh Randhawa, was a professor at Punjab Agricultural University and her mother, Raj Kaur Randhawa, received her law degree from the University of Delhi. Her parents emigrated to Canada in 1964 and then to South Carolina, USA in 1969. Obsessed with identity politics, Trump could not help but mention in public that Haley is not qualified to contest the for President as her parents were not American citizens when Nikki was born. Nikki Haley is brown in skin color, born to Asian (Indian) parents. Not American white. It is highly unlikely, if not impossible for the Re[publican Party to nominate a non-white woman for President. Trump knows that; yet he has resorted to the crudest and most flagrant fashion in which to refer to Nikki Haley in her original name.

But, as I said, it will be a miracle if Nikki Haley would win the nomination race at this juncture. But she is a woman so is E Jean Carroll who won eighty three million dollars as compensatory and punitive damages in her defamation case against Trump.. The way Carroll described Trump’s demeanor inside the courthouse is  clever and the resultant disgust the American public would feel for Trump could be devastating. Carroll’s reducing Trump’s personality to ‘zero’ would not be taken lightly by this political beguiler whose priority in life has been self-aggrandizement.

There have been other tricksters who had been elected to Presidency in America. Not only in America, all over the world, mostly countries in the so-called third-world have produced many such despicable men and women. They were either elected by a majority of voters or assumed office by way of a coup d’etat. Sri Lanka did elect the Rajapaksas and R Premadasa who preached one set of principles of governance on election platform and after assuming power turned hundred and eighty degrees and suppressed the popular sentiments at every decisive moment in our own history. Some were thrown out at the next election while others retired from politics altogether and one single ruler, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was forced out of the country. The hope and wish of America is the ouster of Trump from the arena of politics, totally and completely so that he could never ever even dream of entering politics.

Being a successful marketer, his dependence on branding himself as a winner has taken a severe punishment; his brand has suffered beyond repair. Having built a cult around himself as a perpetual winner, today his winning has halted suddenly. Ever since he went out of office in 2020, at every election the Republican Party has lost. They lost the Senate and the House of Representatives in 2020; then their much decorated ‘Red Tsunami’ refused to flow. Instead of the people becoming tired of winning once he came to power are now increasingly getting sick with losing election after election, not to forget the absurd court cases. The winning ‘brand’ has all of a sudden turned into a constant losing phenomenon.

However, Trump’s main enemy, foible and character flaw is his irresistible temptation to lie. Uttering falsehoods comes to him naturally that is why they call him a pathological lair. Adhering religiously to  Gobble’s theory that repetition of a falsehood turns that falsehood into a truth has taken his persona completely and there comes a moment for every liar that the liar believes his own lies. It is not a random event for him. Fact-checking him is now as often as him making or uttering any sentence. The real tragedy is that such an abominable feature of one time President of the America is being taken for granted and been simply normalized as part of daily political conversation in the country. It is a prominent feature of a cult figure and a cult movement, religious or political.

What would happen  if and when he loses again at the elections. One wonders whether the fate that took care of Adolf Hitler at the end of the World War II is awaiting Donald Trump. A man who has never ever shown any allegiance or loyalty to the truth, a man for whom loyalty is a one-way street only and a man who has failed time and time again to show any compassion to any individual, partisan supporter or not, is not destined to finish his run well. All the bad that he has accumulated will one day consume him and he will be left with nobody or no-thing.

Yet in politics nothing can be ruled in or out. In the unlikeliest event of Trump being reelected in November 2024, such an unpredictable episode of American history tells us of a very unflattering trait of the American psyche. Being entrenched in the Hollywood characters such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and their heroics which exist only on celluloid, it may well have reached into the deepest bowels of the average White American’s fake patriotism; that may well have reached the superficial layer of his persona; it may well have created its own fake reality that once repeated over and over would ultimately regenerate that macho quality of heroism, martyrdom and eventual victor as a self-righteous champion. That indeed could be a dangerously harmful character not only of the collective body of white America, but United States as a nation.

One must understand that those who really change the world are those who always move to the middle, not towards the fringe like what Donald Trump pontificates. America cannot put up with another Neville Chamberlain. When Hitler attached Austria and Czechoslovakia the rest of the world thought they could put up with Hitler the same way Hindenburg accommodated Hitler in the Wiemar Republic. We cannot repeat the mistakes of our forefathers. The price we pay would be enormous and what we lose may not be redeemable ever. America had better be forearmed and forewarned.

*The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com