How Kenya played a role in the triumph of ‘Trumpism’ in America

Kenya has played a role in the rise of Donald Trump as the Republican party presidential nominee. Trump’s foray into American politics started in earnest in 2008 as the voice of Birtherism, the movement that questioned Barack Obama’s American citizenship because his father was Kenyan. His otherwise fruitless efforts to find Obama’s “real” birth certificate gained him notoriety and credibility on the extreme right of American politics. Eight years later he would launch his own presidential run under the mantra, “Make America Great Again,” which insinuated that the Black presidency had tarnished America’s perceived white greatness.

This is not the first time Kenya has fuelled the presidential ambitions of a Republican candidate. The rise of Sarah Palin followed her public blessings by Reverend Timothy Muthee in a Wasila Church in Alaska at which he asked Jesus to pave her way in politics and rain millions into her pockets. Palin subsequently became John McCain’s running mate but they lost the presidential bid to Obama in 2008. But Palin’s fortunes were transformed.

Palin, who applauded Trump’s detective ventures searching for Obama’s birth certificate, is currently one of his most prominent supporters. Other supporters include members of the Ku Klax Klan (KKK), a movement founded on the ideology of white supremacy. Historically, the Klan is associated with lynching African Americans soon after emancipation and the American Civil war. The strange fruits hanging from Southern trees that Billie Holiday sings about were the black bodies.

Most of the media and the political class ignored Birtherism or treated it as a joke. That’s why its offspring, Trumpism, baffles media pundits who now shake their heads and claim not to know what to make of it. Trumpism is a product and a reflection of all the entwined but sometimes contradictory strands and values embedded in the very fabric of American history and culture.

The most obvious is racism whose formative roots were in plantation slavery. Reference to America’s past greatness alludes to an empire built on slave labour. American capitalism developed on absolutely free labour of enslaved Africans.

Trumpism may not guarantee the American return to the paradise of three centuries of maximum profit and full employment of free labour but it promises to approximate it by ensuring low wages and less taxation on profit.

The revolt against free slave labour was weakened by incarceration and socially engineered divisions among the working population. Today, Trumpism calls for more toughness on crime—not reform in the criminal justice system—which can only add to a prison population currently estimated at more than three million.

Of this, African-Americans and Hispanics account for nearly 60 per cent of those behind bars, although they form only a quarter of the US national population. A majority are in jail for misdemeanours like drug use, but they remain in custody partly because it makes business sense: US prison systems are run by private corporations associated with America’s business and political elite that Trump personifies.

Trumpism also pledges to deport approximately 11 million undocumented workers. Some people joke that Trump will start by deporting himself since all Americans, except Native Americans and African-Americans, are children of illegal immigrants. The threat has sinister echoes of American history where, following the 1830 Indian Removal policy, Native populations were forcibly removed from their lands to Oklahoma, in what is now known as “the trail of tears.”

Historian David Stannard, writing in American Holocaust, has documented repeated patterns of massacres of native peoples. Trumpism also promises the special policing of America’s Muslim population, which has sinister echoes of 20th Century horrors in Europe.

These cancerous policies have been packaged in a political parody that draws from some dominant moralities in American popular culture. The figure of the cowboy, the central character in the film genre known as the Western, celebrates the heroics of the rugged individual and disparages values of organised resistance. The cowboy turns up in a city where a helpless population lives under terror of the bad guys. Alone, our cowboy takes out the enemy. At the end grateful men and women come out of hiding to see the hero ride into the sunset.

One of Trump’s heroes is the late gun-slinging John Wayne whose daughter Aissa Wayne has endorsed him. In appreciation, Trump said the cowboy represented strength and power. Wayne shares his popular name Duke, with the Klansman, David Duke, who has also endorsed Trump.

Trumpism also draws from the morality of reality shows where treachery even against a supposed friend is good as long as it leads to a win. Reality shows may blunt people’s moral sensitivities.

Trump has learnt from modern television and music video where a screen image does not last more than a few seconds. Similarly, he moves rapidly from issue to issue, providing catchy, if reckless sound-bites to dominate the news cycle. To add to Trump’s rhetorical devices, he lampoons his opponents by appending labels to their names: Low Energy Bush, Little Marc, Lying Ted, and currently Crooked Hillary. This helps reduce their humanity.

Having numbed his followers to moral negatives, Trump then calls upon them to trust him in order to bring them heaven. The millionaire as a material and moral value is an American invention. Trumpism hints of making everyone an instant millionaire, like himself.

All this would be of no concern to anyone but Americans, except that the USA has military, economic and cultural presence in the world. It invented nuclear weapons, and it remains the most nuclearised in the world. When the USA sneezes, the rest of the world may not always catch the cold, but it can be rattled badly.

Now only democratic opponents remain as barrier to his march to power. If they are tempted to fight him from the middle, they may well want to remember that Trump’s Atlantic Casino was the site of Mike Tyson boxing fights, and he may have learnt to use a combination of right and left hooks. If Trump towers over America, he may soon tower over the world. Republican histrionics about Kenya as Obama’s birthland, it seems, have morphed into the world’s veritable nightmare.