Editorial | Trump’s lesson for Jamaica

Last week’s arraignment of Donald Trump for attempting to subvert an election and cling to power in America says something positive about the United States, which Jamaica should want to emulate: though harried and badly stressed, the US governance system endured and worked. At least, up to now.

But there are also other lessons for Jamaica in the Donald Trump saga. One is that Jamaica’s democracy is not in bad shape. In some respects it is better than America’s. Another is that the institutions of democracy have to be consistently worked at and maintained. They can’t be taken for granted, lest, as was close to happening in the United States, they become strained and broken.

Which is why Jamaicans should be outraged over the Holness administration’s recent approach to amending the island’s constitution to raise the retirement age of the director of public prosecution (DPP) and the auditor general (AuG) from 60 to 65, in which it employed a strictly majoritarian construct of democracy.

It is also why people were right to be deeply offended and angered by Mark Golding’s, the opposition leader, “dead voters” faux pas, even if, as he claimed, it was merely an attempt at humour on the hustings.

The overarching point is that Jamaica ought not to trifle with its democracy. There is the lesson of how close the Americans, for the second time in 160 years, came to losing theirs.

Mr Trump was elected America’s 45th president on a nativist, inward-looking platform, a retreat from the USA’s long-standing tradition of holding itself out as the leader and bastion of global democracy, which others should follow. Mr Trump exhibited narcissistic and authoritarian tendencies, positing himself as the leader uniquely capable of “making America great again”.

RIGGED

Having lost his 2020 re-election bid to Joe Biden, Mr Trump insisted that the vote was rigged and that he had actually won the election. He went on a months-long campaign to nullify the outcome.

When he didn’t achieve his end via the courts, he conspired to pressure state officials to change vote counts in their jurisdictions to his favour. When that too failed, he agitated his supporters into an attack on Congress where, in the Senate Vice President Mike Pence was presiding over the ceremonial count of the Electoral College ballots to confirm Mr Biden’s victory.

Several people died during that storming of the Capitol building as Mr Trump’s supporters bayed for the hanging of Mike Pence.

Mr Pence said last week that Mr Trump actively attempted to persuade him to “overturn the election”, a power he never had.

“I was clear with President Trump throughout, all the way up to the morning (January 6, 2021)” of the counting of the Electoral College votes, Mr Pence told the conservative news channel, Fox News. “It wasn’t just that they asked for a pause. The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.”

In other words, by Mike Pence’s telling, and as alleged in the indictments, Mr Trump sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in a country that prided itself as the world’s most complete and iconic democracy.

What is significant therefore about Mr Trump’s behaviour, as highlighted in the indictments, was the cynicism that underpinned this campaign. Mr Trump and his key backers knew, or ought to have known, that he hadn’t won the election. The specific language of the charge against Mr Trump is that he was engaged in a “conspiracy to defraud the United States”, that he sought “obstruct official proceedings” and that he was part of a conspiracy to undermine voting rights.

In plain language Donald Trump is accused of attempting a coup d’etat in America.

Mr Trump’s attempted putsch ultimately failed because while they faltered, America’s political and legal institutions, the checks and balances, hung on. But it was a close call.

ISN’T OVER

It is clear, however, that the stress of the system, which creaked heavily when Donald Trump pressed against it, isn’t over. For, whatever the outcomes of myriad cases against Mr Trump, the consensus of the American polity is broken. The Republican party has reshaped itself in Mr Trump’s image.

Indeed, Donald Trump is very likely to be the Republican candidate in next year’s presidential election. He has a fair chance of winning.

So, to paraphrase Rex Nettleford, the Jamaican scholar, while one side of the polity plays baseball, the other is engaged in a game of football, on the same field, at the same time.

Jamaica has had its own problem of weak institutions. Politically-aligned gangs once corralled votes in so-called garrison communities and stuffed ballot boxes in favour of the party they supported. These behaviours, fortunately, never fundamentally altered the will of voters.

Importantly, too, Jamaica has maintained a strong tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, which, if undermined, is a gateway to a deep crisis of democratic governance. By and large, we have adhered to the rules in their large sense. Which brings us back to recent events in Jamaica.

The government may have had the procedural authority to amend the Constitution in the fashion it did. But the constitution, the supreme law, is sacrosanct. It should be treated as such – sacrosanct.

The Constitution oughtn’t to be amended almost on the fly, without public discussion and only passing notice to the political opposition. That erodes trust and weakens institutions of democracy and democratic governance.

When a political leader speaks glibly, even in jest, of resurrecting the dead to cast ballots, it’s a possible licence for people without institutional or philosophical constraints, to take it as a literal call to regression.