Editorial | Avoid Trump’s Armageddon

Jamaica was right, as was tweeted by Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith, to be concerned about what happened in Washington on Wednesday and to hope for a “prompt return to normalcy” in the United States of America.

But as a member in good standing of the club of democratic nations, Jamaica needs to go further than this statement, and its intended signal of comity with the incoming Joe Biden presidency, after an unnecessarily pally relationship with Donald Trump’s administration. Prime Minister Andrew Holness must order Mrs Johnson Smith to call in the US ambassador, Donald Tapia, or whoever is in charge of the embassy if Mr Tapia has already left, for a note denouncing Mr Trump’s attempted putsch to keep himself in power, having lost a democratic election. Further, Jamaica should immediately move a resolution at the Organization of American States condemning Mr Trump’s anti-democratic behaviour.

At the same time, the US vice-president, Mike Pence, and Mr Trump’s cabinet, must, as a matter of national and global emergency, invoke the 25th Amendment of America’s Constitution to remove the president from office for endangerment of the United States and the world. Our point is that America’s crisis has so worsened, and the danger of Mr Trump being in office for another 12 days so gravely incalculable, that it overrides our earlier call for his impeachment. For even if impeachment led to his removal from office, it is a potentially lengthy process.

Regarding what ought to be Jamaica’s attitude towards Mr Trump, there is more than moral equivalency between his behaviour and what Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, was accused of doing that caused our Government to join the United States and the Lima Group in 2019 in rejecting Mr Maduro’s re-election in a disputed poll and the de facto recognition of Juan Guaidó, the then head of the National Assembly, as the country’s interim president. Indeed, viewed in its larger context, Mr Trump’s behaviour was perhaps more egregious.

First, the United States is beyond Mrs Johnson Smith’s description as an “important neighbour and democracy in the Western Hemisphere”. It is a close friend of Jamaica. The US is also the world’s pre-eminent economic and military power and, for the better part of three-quarter of a century, the moral arbiter of global democracy. The sense that the United States was the acme of democratic freedoms, whose political institutions did not falter, was as important as the other factors in sustaining its global power. Until Donald Trump.

NARCISSISTIC AUTHORITARIANISM

Mr Trump, from a relatively narrow, but exceedingly loyal base, with the enablement of the Republican party, assaulted institutional and democratic norms in a display of narcissistic authoritarianism. Leading up to last November’s presidential elections, he argued that if he lost it would be because of fraud. Having lost, he has spent the past two months attacking the integrity of the polls, despite the evidence to the contrary and rejection by the courts of scores of challenges.

The last fling by Mr Trump and his enablers is what happened on Wednesday, when the US Congress was counting the votes of the Electoral College, normally a formality. Some Republican members of the House and Senate challenged the count. Mr Trump urged Mr Pence to use his role as the session’s presiding officer to vitiate Electoral College votes of some states.

Mr Trump also encouraged his supporters to come to Washington to protest. Many did – to be incited by the president, with claims that the election was stolen, and declaration that he would “never concede”, as well as this prompt: “We will not take it anymore.”

It is hardly surprising that, prepped for months, demonstrators overran Congress, disrupting its sessions, forcing legislators and their staff into hiding for several hours. At least four people were killed, others injured. Mr Trump did little to quell the behaviour. When he finally told his supporters to back off, it was coated in grievances and claims of being cheated. In fact, it was other officials, not Mr Trump, who mobilised law-enforcement officers to take back the Congress and protect legislators.

Donald Trump, by interpretation of these concepts, encouraged and facilitated sedition and insurrection. He seems intent, if he cannot have the White House, to pursue a scorched earth policy. He appears to have lost rationality. We fear what he might do, in the remaining days, if he retains executive authority. The worse, however, can be avoided if Mr Pence and the majority of the Cabinet go to the Congress, with instruments for his removal from office for incapacity to do the job. Armageddon can happen in 12 days.