Donald Trump

In this file photo US President Donald Trump gestures after speaking during election night in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 4, 2020.

| AFP

Election parallels between Trump’s USA and Kenya

What you need to know:

  • Then there were allegations of planned rigging in the countdown to voting day
  • Unlike in Kenya’s case, the wide consensus in the US and abroad is that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won fair and square.

  • After the November 3 US elections, President Donald Trump and his supporters have re-enacted scenes from the Wild West, the period in the 19th century when gangsterism held sway in huge swathes of America.

Except for widespread physical violence, this year’s US moment of electoral madness resembles one in Kenya 13 years ago. The only difference is that while Americans quickly intervened to help us restore sanity – then US President George Bush immediately dispatched to Nairobi Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – Kenyans can only watch in amusement and perhaps pray for the outgoing president.

Now for the similarities: The stalemate in the US weeks after voting has its roots in the sudden happening of Trump on the US political scene five years ago.

When he first announced he would be seeking the Republican nomination in the 2016 election, everybody thought it a big joke and perhaps an extension of theatrics in his famous television show, The Apprentice. Others drew a comparison with another American tycoon, Mr Ross Perot, who contested as an independent in the 1992 election, not with the intention to win, but just to give the more serious candidates some food for thought.

To everybody’s consternation, Trump clinched the Republican ticket against all odds.

Many pundits expected the drama would end there. Most credible opinion polls predicted Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton was headed to the White House. She had everything in her favour. She was a Washington insider as a two-term First Lady; she had been senator of New York and Secretary of State; to cap it all, she had two great, and tested campaigners on her side – her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and President Barack Obama. Trump defied every prediction and every pundit to win in 2016.

So what happened?

Nobody saw Trump coming simply because he was not the conventional US presidential candidate. He didn’t talk, let alone pretend he would tackle any policy issue. He didn’t crunch numbers on this or that. And he didn’t show, or pretend to understand American foreign policy.

Simply put, he ignored all the stuff that interests pollsters and political pundits.

He knew his target audience didn’t care about that kind of stuff, and so he talked to them directly and shut his ears to whatever else was said.

The crowd Trump targeted – and it is huge – is what you would call “rural” Americans, for lack of a better word. Most have never even been to the capital Washington. Their entire world is confined to their respective states. They think “American”.

Toxic politics

In December 2001, I happened to have a brief contact with that type of American. It was at London’s Heathrow Airport where both of us waited for connecting flights home. He told me he came from Wisconsin (no mention of the US anywhere!) and I told him I was destined for Kenya. When my London to Nairobi flight was called, he innocently asked: “So you are passing through Nairobi before you proceed to Kenya?” I told him that was not necessary because Nairobi is the capital of Kenya. I quickly bade him farewell lest he convert the conversation into a geography class and I miss my flight.

Now that is Trump’s crowd for you – and they are there in great numbers. In the 2016 election, while Hillary foamed at the mouth talking policy and burned the midnight oil catching up on poll ratings, Trump played psychology on his base. He preyed on their fears through a mixture of gross exaggerations and fiction.

He told them Mexicans were coming to take away all the American jobs, but he would stop them by building a wall at the border, and have Mexico pay for it. Then he told them people from some Muslim-majority countries were enemies of the US and would no longer be welcome on American shores. Then, among other things, he talked of “illegal” immigrants from a “s***hole” continent he would soon get rid of.

In short, Trump’s campaign was that he was the candidate to save the “rural” American from all those “doomsday” scenarios. They believed him and gave him the votes he needed to get to the White House.

 **** ***

Somehow – and to Trump’s great surprise – the trick didn’t work the second time around. In the four years he has been in the White House, a significant number of those who voted for him fled. For that, he is a wounded and bitter man.

 “Us” versus “Them”

The toxic politics of “us” against “them” Trump applied to get to power in 2016 is exactly what drove Kenya to the brink a decade earlier. I was news editor of a weekly newspaper and witnessed it happen from my desk.

To the best of my recollection, the very first shot was publicly fired at a meeting in the North Rift region, where speaker after speaker said it would no longer be tenable that only one community “dominate” the country’s affairs. They talked about “removing weeds” from amongst them. Actually, it was at the meeting where the term “42 against 1” was first heard in public.

Then there were allegations of planned rigging in the countdown to voting day. Exactly the strategy applied by Trump in the countdown to November 3.

I spent the night in Kisumu town on the eve of election day and the atmosphere was really toxic. You could smell trouble all over. I had to ask the hotel manager whether it was safe to travel to Nairobi. He advised that I paste posters of the candidate who was popular in the area on my car and try to be in a convoy of other vehicles travelling in my direction. I safely got to Kericho, then Elburgon and finally Nairobi, in time to resume duty. As news editor, I assigned myself to camp at the KICC presidential vote tallying centre.

At some point we were all chased out of the press centre and the results announced in a room where only the state broadcaster, KBC, was allowed. The rest is sad history for Kenya. An independent commission of inquiry later ruled the 2007 election was so messy you couldn’t tell who won.

Postscript

Unlike in Kenya’s case, the wide consensus in the US and abroad is that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won fair and square.

But Donald Trump won’t concede, even though he recently allowed the transition to start. I asked a Kenyan diplomat who has just returned from tour of duty abroad what he thought of the goings-on in the US. He told me Trump knows he lost but wants a Samsonian conclusion to the matter. When the biblical Samson was finally cornered by his adversaries, he summoned all his strength to bring down the temple, and went down with everybody inside.

 The diplomat’s thinking is that in the window Trump has to January 20 – his last day at the White House – he will try to destroy a lot of what America has stood for, then quietly sneak out, as did President John Adams in the year 1800. The latter had refused to concede defeat to winner Thomas Jefferson, only to quietly sneak out of the White House one early morning a few days before his term officially expired.