I will miss Trump — on Twitter

Donald John Trump got himself impeached again, the second time in less than a year, and seven days before he was to leave office. This seems like carelessness.

It was always a given that the Democratic Party would not let him get away with the attempt to stage a coup d’etat through insurrection as he tried to do on January 6, and his ignominious fall was always in the works. Now the rest of the world is waiting to see what happens next.

Chances are nothing much will happen immediately, for Mr Trump still has to stand trial in the Senate and the threshold for ouster in that chamber is extremely high, considering that a two-thirds majority has to approve, an almost impossible task in a House evenly composed of Democrats and Republicans.

But experts say the damage that Mr Trump has caused what is left of the Grand Old Party is so deep that only a miracle can cure it.

The latest saga concerning Mr Trump happened last Wednesday when hordes of extreme right-wing activists descended on the country’s Capitol Building, which seats Congress, the legislative arm of the US government.

They stormed it in an apparent attempt to lynch Vice-President Mike Pence and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and destroy the votes delivered by States. They were mostly interested in stopping the formal process of ratifying President-elect Joe Biden’s decisive victory last year.

Impeachment

As the Senate President, Mr Pence resisted his boss’s fervent appeal to reject the count and thus thwart the will of the people. Therefore, when Mr Trump egged on his fanatical followers — Maga extremists and other deplorables— to take back their country from “left-wing radical” Democrats, the coup attempt was only thwarted when Mr Pence called in the National Guard to retake the Capitol from the mob.

Now Trump has to pay the price, and it is likely to be quite stiff, because the Democrats are hell-bent on seeing that he never again runs for office.

Wednesday’s impeachment was just the first step, and this not counting all the lawsuits awaiting him. So Mr Trump will go down in history as the only American president to be impeached twice—and there have been 45 of them in 245 years—simply because he could not stomach the idea of losing to a man he kept deriding as “Slow Joe” throughout the campaign period.

The moment he fomented the riot in the Capitol, during which his supporters vandalised the building, attacked policemen and caused the death of five people in an attempt to force lawmakers to overturn the results of the election alleging massive vote fraud despite all the evidence to the contrary, is the moment that even some of his diehard supporters decided the man had been unhinged by his loss.

But how did this come about? How was Trump elected in the first place, instead of Mrs Hillary Clinton, symbol of the establishment who all along had been expected to win and actually did, beating Trump by more than three million votes?

This will remain one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and the phenomenon that is Donald Trump will be the subject of study by historians and behaviourists for eons to come.

However, in hindsight, there should have been pointers to the kind of president the man would become.

Mr Trump, who is expected to leave the White House in the next four days, apparently suffers from an incurable personality disorder known as narcissism. This is a condition in which the subject has an inflated sense of self-worth in which he or she is the centre of the universe.

To thrive, such a person typically pairs with a clueless partner who becomes a victim. Such people lack empathy for others and are even overjoyed when their partners suffer setbacks. This means that such a person will always blame someone else when things go wrong.

Votes stolen

How does this apply to Mr Trump? First, a narcissist is always a winner. If he does lose, it is because someone else caused it. That is why Mr Trump believed there was no way he could have lost unless his votes were stolen. Unfortunately, he convinced millions of his followers to believe the same lie, hence the violence on January 6.

Second, a narcissist is ill-equipped to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. So when thousands of his compatriots were dying from Covid-19 daily, he did little, initially, to mitigate the disaster, and in fact just stopped short of ordering them to shun masks.

We have not heard the last of Mr Trump, especially if he is not barred from holding public office. My only regret is that the man has been banned for life by Twitter, denying both his admirers and detractors a platform to read how his mind works. For those of us not directly affected, it was a sad loss. But at least now he cannot incite anyone to take power by force.

Mr Ngwiri is a consultant editor; [email protected]