Normalising abnormalities, the American way, as Trump returns to White House

A sculpture made by Indian sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik depicting former US President Donald Trump after he won a sweeping victory in the US presidential election in Puri of India's Odisha state on November 6, 2024. [AFP]

Teary-eyed Democrats emerged from a humiliating spectacle this week after being shown dust, kivumbi, to use our political lexicon, in the recently concluded polls that restored Donald Trump to the White House.

He’s the first US Prezzo to win non-concurrent terms in 120 years and he’s also the oldest. I won’t add the crudest because his office is busy looking for individuals to target for retaliation. Neither will I say he’s a convicted felon and a certified misogynist and bigot.

Let’s pause on the last element for a moment, because it goes to the root of Trump’s ideology. He gained national prominence as a top propagandist for Birtherism movement, whose gospel was that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was a Muslim.

And since a repeated lie can gain some truths over time, many Americans still believe our cousin Barry is a Muslim and a closeted Kenyan!

Trump harped on this fiction through Obama’s eight-year reign, before unleashing his MAGA (Make America Great Again) to infer that Obama, who was born of a Kenyan father and an American mother in Hawaii, was an aberration to Trump’s racial purity tosh.

He has persisted with this MAGA nonsense, directing it towards Kamala Harris, who was born of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. He blamed her and Prezzo Joe Biden for casting US borders wide open to let in black folks who were invariably rapists, criminals, and imbeciles.

Before Trump emerged with his fiction that Haitian refugees, who emigrated to the US under a special visa to escape execution from gangs in Port-au-Prince, were eating the dogs and cats roaming the streets of America, he claimed that criminals released from DRC jails were walking free in the US streets. This is arrant racism.

History teaches us that Haiti, the first independent black republic, dating over 200 years back, has been undermined by Washington since Toussaint Louverture led the Haitian revolution in 1791. And Washington subverted Patrice Lumumba’s hold on DRC over 60 years ago, when he threatened to disrupt uranium supply to the US.

After all, the uranium from DRC fired the American arms race, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to decisively end the Second World War. Now, it’s the coltan from DRC that makes computer and phone chips possible for the world.

Trump’s disdain for black people undergirds his indifference towards Africa and Africans. Even Joe Biden, the outgoing US Prezzo, has never set foot on the continent. His maiden trip to the continent is next January, in the last weeks of his presidency, when he’s expected to tour Angola.

So, it was perplexing to read that the folks who helped secure Trump in the White House, are black men and Latinos. Their twisted logic is rooted in the analogy offered by Malcolm X, the black civil rights activist who was assassinated in 1965.

Malcom X said a “kitchen nigger,” who was deployed to work in the white master’s house, identified with the master, and so would wail “our house is on fire,” if the edifice caught fire, unlike the “plantation nigger,” who would be fanning the flames.

The American blacks and Latinos who voted for Trump don’t see themselves as minorities, even though their ethnic and racial makeup mirrors those targeted by Trump. That is, until they are targeted.

The Kenyans jubilating about Trump’s return are as misguided. Joe Biden is no friends with Kenya Kwanza, even with the crap about Kenya as a major security ally; Biden was securing American interests in our country and region.

As for Meg Whitman, the US diplomat in Nairobi who was trolled this week, she may have erred for behaving like an MCA from UDA. But she, too, is an American first. Also, a Republican, like Trump!