Ademola Araoye
The re-emergence of Donald J. Trump as the 47th President of the United States, backed by a vast electoral mandate that is unprecedented in recent times, is bound to elicit diverse analytical perspectives and at numerous planes of engagements. The analyses would range from the import of Trump’s massive victory in the context of the historic oscillations in the constant struggle for dominance by divergent American socio-political philosophical orientations. What is definitive is that the permanent contestations around the foundational precepts and fundamental values place the United States, despite the façade of undoubted stability, in a predictable permanent state of philosophical yo-yo. Electoral seasons can in regular periodicity thus be very revealing. Accordingly, in the constancy of this entrenched fluidity of political sensibilities nothing can be taken for granted. In this perspective the Trump phenomenon is not new, either in his first coming or in his resurgence as the 47th President of the United States. He is the contemporaneous human expression of the moral crisis that has afflicted the United States since its birth as a morally deformed nation. It was this moral crisis that culminated in the civil war of April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865 between the North and the confederate states. While the kinetic engagement between the protagonists ended, the political schism for the ascendance of contrasting versions of competing morality never ended. The constant return of the virtuous immorality of the Confederate South has punctuated American national life. It is often marked by the return of white supremacy as public policy. The public enactment of the Ku Klux Klan and the Oathkeepers, a violent far-right anti-government militia, as well as the Proud Boys who are firmly allied to Donald Trump is a good indicator of the morality of Donald J. Trump. The visit to the White House by Steward Rhodes, founder of the Oath keepers in the very first week of Trump as 47th President leaves no one in doubt of the true agenda of ultra-nationalism of the new American president. Against the background of the determined resistance to the movement to a true color blind nation, the United States thus acquired the epithet of “the melting pot that never melted”.
However, there is a magical wand. The singular incontestable strength, with no drawback, of the United States of America lies in the unassailability of its democratic constitutionalism. The American constitution has proven to be dynamic and resilient in the face of the moral assaults against morality. This is so even if there have been questionable callings by the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional imbroglios. The constitution easily overcomes the numerous deficiencies of the human gladiators, operatives and operators that may seek to overwhelm the integrity of democratic structures and its national institutions. As democratic constitutionalism is the ultimate mechanism for conflict resolution, the United States, as a state and a unique multicultural nation, is constantly poised to regain both its structural and procedural equilibrium, when these are threatened. The expected threats to the foundational principles of state and society occasioned by the cyclical electoral swings are however, unlike in less civilized climes, a constructive tension. The uncertainty by the electoral turns around generated enables periodic and necessary validation of the defining philosophy and core existential underpinnings of the United States of America. The constant tug of clashing worldviews, theologies of social engagements in the emerged multicultural environment at the domestic level, as well as antithetical conceptual liturgies directing the conduct of the interactions of the United States with the global universe cumulatively impact the differing perspectives on the very understandings of the character of the United States, both at the national and international levels. As there is no sanctified and given discernible status quo, America is permanently a work in progress, with its numerous victories, many trials and often frustrating tribulations.
The permanent confrontation of opposing philosophies of the management of humanity and its diverse communities, the breadth and limits of state power and most rational processes and efficient formulations of social organizations that defines the United States have come to the fore again, even if only in the short term: Constitutionalism versus Imperial-like state; Governance versus Governing; liberalism versus ultra-conservatism; globalism/liberal institutionalism against realism/nationalism; internationalism versus nativism are among the many opposing dichotomies of the principles of governing. The preeminence of the ultra-right disposition of the latest dispensation are already manifest as a result of the November 2024 presidential poll. A clear incipient revisionism or more appropriately repudiation of the evolved American liberal or a nominal post-modernist psyche or a regression of the accepted wisdom of the even barely modernist conception of the United States seems to be at play. Inherent in this development are paradoxes that are beginning to emerge. These unanticipated outcome of the massive rejection of the evolved liberalism of American domestic and international profiles may prove daunting in the short term. They in the 4 year interregnum may threaten the integrity of the evolved vision of American statehood as well as the declared mission of the American state and people as the ultimate society for the good of humankind and that beacon on the hill. All these are the outcome of the eventual materialization of what the American national liberal elite, its construction defying divisions across the major aisles of the main Republican and Democratic parties, saw threatening, but had hopefully imagined was impossible. The last meeting collaborative scheming along the margins proved too little too late. The lesson is that nothing is impossible when the masses, who may be barely appreciative of the stakes or barely informed of the nuances of a situation, are called upon to save themselves.
Donald J. Trump deserves credit for his adroitness, sure footedness and doggedness of his campaign in the face of the establishment’s desperate collusion against implanting his vision of America that seemed to have sown the wind of a rejected realignment of America’s national life the first time around. He however defied the kitchen sink and the commode thrown at him. The significance of the outcome of the election is reflected in the fact that 71 per cent of the electorate were made up of white voters. This might be the most critical factor of the election because it represents an increase in the white share of the electorate, since 1992. Before 2024, white voters had been on a steady decline since the turn of the century. In effect, white America saw Trump as the knight to Make America White Again (MAWA). MAWA objective of however is the enunciation of the tenets of the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) that defined all outside the WASP as illegitimate presence in the American universe. The goal is encapsulated in Making America Great Again, (MAGA). Accordingly, and not unexpectedly, Trump’s electoral victory in 2024 represents a reversal, in a wild swing of the mood of the American electorate, to an ultra-conservative pole. This mostly long rejected thrust of parochial state-society as well as unbalanced intra-communal relations reflect a throwback to the extreme end of a contentious founding right insular nationalist orientation that subsumed all else to the interests of a White machismo America. American progressivism had been defined by the slow, even sluggish, movement away from the antiquated mindset of white and protestant domination of the universe. In the process, there have been the occasional losses in momentum given the tenacity and persistence of contrarian forces.
The anachronistic national interests of the opposing pole are characterized by narrowly defined parameters that repudiate the evolution of universal humanistic values and significant transformation of the very concept of statehood in a vastly altered globalized world. The interactions of all these factors constitute the dynamic of the politics of the United States. Meanwhile, the internality of American national processes, from its politics through economy and technologic to social mores and global morality, has been vigorously assaulted by a world that has recognized the decisive strategic leverage of that country to sway the direction and outcome of everything and anything on the globe. The last presidential election was profound in the almost open interventions from a frightened circuit of European allies almost convinced of the potential loss of its predictable “funding” ally. To almost to a man, Europe, led by British Prime Minister Kier Stammer, disparaged the person and the very idea of the re-emergence of Donald Trump as the leader of the free world. Russia played its own games. Seemingly, the apprehensions on all sides were justified given the first day executive order of the 47th President of the United States.
The raft of first-day-in-office Executive proclamations coupled with the peculiar profiles of the prominent human agencies to drive policy implementation, (note the emphasis on implementation, contrasted with an inclusive policy formulation process that is central to governance) provides strong empirical basis for certain tentative conclusions about the very nature of the emerged governing principles of the second Trump administration. Policy formulation rests in one man and that is the imperial president of the United States. In this connection, it is significant that the rubber stamp Republican Party occupies at least 220 seats in House where the Democrats have 212 seats. Republicans also affirmed control of the U.S. Senate through a slew of victories by mainly loyalists of Donald Trump. The fact that the Republican Party holds a majority, even if a narrow one, in the U.S. House of Representatives and dominates the Senate gives Donald Trump and his proxies in the legislature control of the legislative branches of government. Accordingly, in its deficient numbers and the unfavorable balance of power in the legislature, the capacity of the Democrats to exert any significant influence on the power to resist the agenda of President Trump is severely constrained. Worse still, the historic comprehensive defeat of the Democratic Party in the last election would seem to have led to some disarray in its ranks, at least for now.
More critically though is that along with this institutional and structural advantages conferred by the outcome of the November 2024 polls, is the acknowledged reality that the Grand Old Party has been transformed into a mere club of Trump and Associates, at least in the interim. This implies that it is an imperative that most of the legislators in both the Senate and the House have to constantly exhibit unalloyed loyalty to the person and the often clearly articulated personal interests of the boss, Donald J. Trump. Under the circumstance, the threat to traditional constitutionalism is real as America veers toward an Imperial presidency. That is the crux that undoubtedly would and is already eliciting the deepest policy bifurcation in the United States polity and has given rise to the fiercest resistance to the attempt to assault the foundational pillars of the Republic. Not even the Supreme Court of the United States, the apex of the judiciary would choose to be an instrument for the desecration of the same Constitution from which it draws its immense powers. The Supreme Court, given its current configuration and recent pronouncements on seminal cases, is suspected to be ordinarily sympathetic to the conservative orientation of the Republican Party. In any case, the ethos of humanism and civility defining the conservatism of the Republican Party has been largely repudiated by the club of Donald J. Trump and Associates who now have appropriated the party of Abraham Lincoln- a founding father who fought and died to entrench the integrity of all shades of humanity as a fundamental creed of the new nation. Lincoln is idolized as a martyr and a national hero for his wartime leadership and for his determination to preserve the Union even while abolishing slavery against the tenacious and militant resistance of the Confederate states. He is ranked as the greatest president in American history. The potential threat to that vision of the United States has been responsible for the principled repudiation by key Republicans of this generation of the direction that Donald Trump has taken the party. Thus, they chose to vote for the candidate of the Democratic Party in the last poll.
Against this background, the United States under the Trump presidency is regressing back into core governing state-centric principles rather than adhering to the principles of public governance that have emerged as a post-modernist phenomenon in the face of the limitations of governing and the associated antiquated traditions of public administration. Governance, or more appropriately, governing, was, in the past, mostly erroneously understood to be a result of government activities. The term public governance has a slightly different meaning. However, the two concepts, governing and public governance, still remain conflated in popular discourse, outside the specialized circuits of academics and intellectuals engaged in rigorous interrogations. The distinction is crucial in light of the wide opposing, almost contradictory, fundamental assumptions of the two concepts and their differential implications for the policy formulation process and the dynamic of holistic social growth and economic development. The confusion around demarcating governing and associated practices in public administration from its conceptual antithesis in public governance has impeded the process of meaningful analysis of governance process and outcomes, including the conditions for efficient policy making and the crucial modalities of policy actualization; all within the critical imperative of a constitutional order as the bedrock of public governance. Governance is about the rules of collective decision making in an environment where there are a plurality of actors or organizations and where no formal control system can dictate the terms of relationship between these actors and organizations. Governance thus entails participation of all stakeholders in the political life of a state as well as across specific policy sectors, spanning the political and economic through the cultural to social spheres. These interactions take place in formal and informal settings to attain outcomes, both policy wise and the policy actuation process, forged through systemic osmotic influences. These influences, generated through all manner of interactions among stakeholders, are integral to the management of interdependent networks in particular policy spheres. In public governance inclusive participation in policy formulation naturally precludes premeditated policy outcomes or the impositions of determinate goals by state bureaucracy that is associated with governing. Given this character, public governance only functions within a democratic setting.
The emergence of the distinctive attributes of public governance, setting it apart from those associated with governing, has been driven by technological revolutions that have impacted the character of society and the very nature of doing things. The revolutions have fuelled tectonic changes in the political, social, cultural and economic realms across the globe. The impact of the revolutions has been to realign the traditional balance of influence in the policy making process between the hitherto coercive state associated with paradigms of governing and all other actors in society whose respective leverages for action in the policy making process have been phenomenally elevated in the practice of public governance. The upsetting of this traditional balance has been made possible and manifest in the integration of the global and national society, including individuals and groups, as well as the accentuation of humanistic global values that has come with radical shifts in the face of the convergence and fusion of the concerns of global society and national societies on numerous planes. The forces driving these changes have included intensified globalization in the fourth industrial revolution, and, in particular, transformative influence of digitalization in the orientations of society and the values of the individual. Digitalization and globalization have accelerated a widening consciousness of a transnational and transracial human identity as well as enhanced recognition of the ascendancy of democratization as the sin qua non for the protection of humanistic values globally. All these, however, don’t seem to count in the United States of America of today.
In matching the emerging governing paradigm and policies of the 47th president of the United States against the structure of his massive mandate, ironies emerge. The irony is that women, in particular white women, who voted 51 per cent in favor of Trump failed to understand the implications of the ultra-conservative profile of their icon for their own lives. One of the earliest priority of the Trump administration has been to assault the rights of women in divorce situations. Meanwhile, a small majority of white women picked Trump over the female candidate, Kamala Harris.
Katharina Buchholz writing for Statista documents that exit polls also showed that despite diversity growing in the U.S. population, voter turnout from Black and Hispanic Americans lagged. It estimates that 71 percent of voters nationwide were white in 2024, four percentage points more than in 2020. Meanwhile the share of Black and Hispanic voters sank by 1-2 percentage points to 11 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Voter apathy of the constituencies with critical interests in the outcome of the elections contributed significantly to the regression of the historic struggle to steadily advance social progressivism of an inclusive America that had consumed the likes of Martin Luther King.
Finally, as regards the protection of the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Americans, the challenge of the Attorney Generals of 18 states, the city of San Francisco and the District of Columbia of the Executive Order revoking birthright citizenship based on their parentage “as a flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands of American born children of their citizenship based on their parentage” seems to be only the beginning. Further, the attorneys contest “the authority of the President to rewrite or nullify a constitutional amendment or duly enacted statute”. They note that “the President is neither empowered by any other source of law to limit who receives United States citizenship at birth”. Later four additional states filed a similar suit asking the federal court to keep the executive order from being implemented or enforced. Their action brought the total number of challenges to the executive order to 22 states. The salvo of actions to protect constitutionalism that have been enacted in the few days of the first week in office of the 47th President is suggestive of the intense confrontation that actualizing the tenets of Trumpism would generate. The confrontations to its bid to move the United States away from the entrenched orbit of global liberal sensibilities in all its ramifications may define the era of the 47th presidency.