Will Trump survive ninety days ?

Abu Hena :
With another ninety odd days to go in the run up to the US presidential election on 8 November, the big question is now being asked : “Will Trump survive another ninety odd days?” In all probability the answer is “no”. Most Americans think that Trump is not a normal candidate. He is a political rampage charging ever more wildly out of control. He can neither be changed nor contained because he is “psychologically off the chain”. With each passing day he displays the ‘classic symptoms of medium-grade-mania’ in more disturbing forms: inflated self-esteem, impulsiveness, aggression and compulsiveness. In an article in International New York Times, David Brooks writes: His speech patterns are like something straight out of a psychiatric text book. Manics display something called “flight of ideas.” Trump insults Paul Ryan and John McCain, undermines NATO and raises the specter of nuclear war. He makes fun of a grieving mother of a dead war hero and has no feelings for her pain. He hears a baby crying and is unable to perceive the child’s discomfort and share the worried mother’s concern for her baby. Trump is insensible, insensitive, insinuating, intriguing, inciting, unbalanced, unpredictable and incommunicable— all in one person.
Donald Trump is impulsive, arrogant and boastful harboring a hawkish attitude which may induce him to use the military to make a show of force abandoning the principles which the American public cherish. By inciting violence against his opponent by the US Gun Lobby he has shown how much lower he could go. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he has already shown but whether there is worse to come if he is allowed to indulge his whims. Some people compare Trump to the great authoritarians of history, which is wrong. Trump is not Napoleon or Frederick II. They had grandiose plans and great ability to lead the army and the nation. Trump is a delinquent whose reckless aberrations can drum up war frenzy to cause violence and anarchy. He simply behaved like an insane man when he took a Purple Heart, America’s highest military decoration, as a gift from a Veteran and said mockingly,”I always wanted one, but this way getting is much easier”.
It’s a shame that the American people are still tolerating this cynic who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons. He has insulted the American war heroes who dedicated their lives for their nation and for the cause of humanity. Like an ordinary offender, his psychology is obvious. He sees no reason why he should not get what he wants by stealth or by force.
Trump made his intentions clear when he told his foreign policy adviser that it is pointless to have the nuclear weapon and not use it.
There are many instances in history when a war-monger’s compulsive motivation led to armed aggression. Frederick increased his army after becoming the king, picked a quarrel with Austria and invaded Austria. He was in turn attacked by Austria, Sweden, Russia and France and at the end Prussia was in ruins.
He was a well-intentioned ruler, yet when he became obsessed by a huge army, he turned tyrant. Napoleon underlines the same human folly. He established ‘Code Napoleon’ which gave all men equal rights under the law. But his desire to play at soldiers led him to reveal that he was no exception. In 1812 he marched into Russia with an army of half a million men. The Russian winter brought his doom and only eighteen thousand of his men survived and staggered back to France. The same insane behavior drove Hitler to hysteria and brought down his downfall.
In 1945, the Russians fought their way into Berlin and Hitler said, “The German people are not worthy of me”. Reading the story of Frederick, Napoleon and Hitler, it is difficult to disbelieve that an invisible spirit was at work to teach the human race the wisdom of restraint. Donald Trump never learnt the lesson of restraint. Neither the United States nor its military is safe in his hand. All indications are there that Trump will expose the world’s only superpower to grave dangers to raise himself above the ambivalence that shrouds his life.
Trump is permanently tainting the Republican Party and the great men and women who have built and served it. Events have forced Republicans off the fence. For the past sixteen months Republican leaders have condemned Trump while sticking with him only for the sake of the party. But Trump is unmoved. He lacks the virtuosity of accommodation, moderation and humility, and like Hitler, he may say when he is crushed,
“the American people are not worthy of me.” Throughout the Roman history, despotic rulers have shown their personal traits through their conduct. In Nero we encounter inhuman insensitivity, Marius was paranoid, Tiberius was a sadist, Caligula was insane. Trump is the modern representation of all of them. In contrast, Aurelius was a stoic who believed that man’s only chance of escaping shipwreck was through reason and self-discipline. In the murderous history of the Roman Emperors he stands out to be the beacon of moral virtue. Trump is the opposite of him. He is governed by passions and is locked up inside own frame, unable to penetrate into the areas of others. One passion in particular never ceases to delight him and that is the feeling of superiority over other men.
Republican leaders have now concluded that Donald Trump is a threat to the party’s fortunes and have begun distancing themselves from the presidential nominee. They now treat Trump’s defeat as a given and urge voters to send Republicans to Congress as a check on a Hillary Clinton presidency.
At a recent conference of Republican donors, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, warned that even the party’s substantial majority in that chamber might be in jeopardy. With such an erratic and belligerent candidate leading their panel, many in the party have long seen a go-your-own-way strategy as inevitable.
Trump is already a loser and he is planning a pre-emptive uprising. Almost sure of a certain defeat in November, Trump has signaled that he would bring down American democracy with him. His comment, “I am afraid ,the election is going to be rigged, “, is the opening move in a scheme to delegitimize the election result.
The outcome is acceptable only if Trump wins. Trump’s political operative Roger Stone has declared, “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in.” So far, Trump has crossed all limits of civility and decency, from launching an openly racist campaign to loose talk about nuclear weapons. He has challenged the independence of the judiciary, and prescribed religious test for entry into the United States. With this latest tactic he has vowed to destabilize the country and prove that democracy has failed in America.
Donald Trump has hijacked the Republican Party, clinching the nomination spending $60 million from his own coffer. Now he has raised $82 more not to win the election but to discredit the democratic system of the United States, the leader of the free world. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is his Best friend. Tom Graham, George W. Bush’s top national adviser on Russia, says, the real aim of the hacking of the DNC emails may not have been to help Trump or hurt Clinton but simply to publicize the unseemly side of US politics.”
Graham conjures a nightmare scenario of waking up on Nov.9 to an astounding result from one or two states, perhaps a 20-point victory for Trump in California. “If someone wanted to do great damage to the US, this is the way they could do it.” Graham says, “Russia has the capability to do something like this. And you can be sure they are probing in a very active way the vulnerabilities.”
“There’s nothing surprising about the idea of Russia collecting information by clandestine means and leaking it for political effect,” says Ed Lucas, author of The New Cold War, ” What would be new is that they’re doing it to try to swing an election in America. And that is quite a big deal.”
Donald Trump is the man who has made the ‘big deal’. He tweeted for his mentor, the Russian strongman: “Putin has become a big hero in Russia with an all-time high popularity.” Earlier, the Russian “bear”, the FSB, main successor to the KGB, had nosed around in the computer networks of the White House, State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then the “Fancy Bear”, which is run out of Russia’s military intelligence, breached the DNC. Now the “paranoid” President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB chief, has set the most sinister move in motion from Kremlin, targeting the most important US presidential election in November, with the support of “Agent Trump.” So ,’God Save the United States’.
 [Writer who was elected MP in the 7th and the 8th Parliaments of Bangladesh is an author and columnist]