It's a classic joke people tell in a situation when life has become unbearable in all respects that only a total change of environment promises a sporting chance of surviving. Or you did something so terribly embarrassing that you can't bear the thought of meeting anybody who knows you and what you've done. So you want to be some place else where no one can recognize you.
First of all, if there were microbes in Mars they'd be able to recognize Donald Trump. The man's notoriety is universal. Great statesmen labor their entire lives painstakingly crafting a body of work that defines their legacy. But not Donald Trump, he doesn't even have to try. He is remembered for everything he did, and adds daily to that bottomless archive of faux pas with everything he does.
Winston Churchill was the icon of British stiff-upper lip feistiness in the face of daunting adversity. He personified utter defiance to the enemy, and an irreverence towards insurmountable odds. He was the kind of man who, finding himself aboard a plane about to crash, would be sitting out on the wing flapping his arms. If Donald Trump had only applied that kind of gutsiness against the corona virus, he could start arranging the chairs for his reelection inaugural ball by now.
The fact that he envisions being incompatible with American society if he loses shows the great disconnect between pre- and post-Trump America. In four short years, he managed to totally deconstruct the United States of America that it is now virtually unrecognizable abroad. Worse, nobody bothers to make an effort to distinguish America from Donald Trump. To the community of nations, Donald Trump is America--because that's what even the Americans conditioned themselves to believe. Donald Trump appropriated the state's brand for himself and no one could stop him. No one would even try.
For example, no US President has ever accepted his party's nomination standing under the porticos of the Whitehouse. It's not a simple matter of inappropriate venue. The cold fusion between the man, his office and his party sends the message that the American president is rather like God: an inseparable Trinity---the essence of one is the substance of all three.
Some of that is actually true, from the legal standpoint. A sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution because he is the head of the state which enacts the law giving the right to prosecute. There can be no right against the authority that enacted the law that gave the right. Of course the man is not the state. But the President--especially in a federal setup--is the point of singularity common to all the states. For all practical intents and purposes, the Chief Executive is the State. If you have doubts about that, provoke a state to war and watch which top government official will command the military forces that will vanquish your challenge. However, this comixtion between man and office is short-lived.
The moment a president steps down from office, he can be indicted for anything from a traffic ticket to genocide. He loses the cloak of immunity because that is not personal garment he can bring home. Stripped of the armor of state invincibility, a former president goes back to parity with the ordinary citizen because that's all he is now.
Public office is a public trust. No man ascends public office because of his personal virtue, but because he represents a system of values that his political party publicly stands for. Before a man can aspire for high office, he must first pass muster by the vetting criteria of his political party.
This is where the American model of democracy is worthy of copying; It simplified political philosophy by splitting it into two poles--thesis and anti-thesis. It is not difficult to distinguish the Republican from the Democratic party. You don't need to study both systems--only one, keeping in mind that the other party stands for the opposite of everything.
There are proud innovators around the world that think they can experiment with homegrown hybrid models of democracy that comes in "Fifty Shades of Grey." The Philippines, with its multi-party system complicated by highly-manipulable sectoral partylist representatives, is one of them.
But in America, social and political principles are strictly black-and-white. The Democrats stand for social welfare, trade unionism, soak-the-rich taxation, planned parenthood, immigration tolerance and global free trade, among other things. Republicans, the opposite: personal insurance, big business, pass-on taxation and tax breaks, anti-abortion, restricted borders and trade protectionism.
Someone who carries a party's official nomination pledges to run the government with these philosophical filters when he shoots for the unionwide mandate. However, it has rarely happened that all fifty US states toe the same party line (Ronald Reagan came very close, winning 49 of all 50 states in his re-election in 1984), so that even the political party is still only a moral subset of the body politic, the entirety of which is invested in the presidency.
The correlation is therefore clear: a man is only a component of his political party, which is only a component of the presidency, which is only a component of the Government, which is only an element of the federal United States.
That is not Donald Trump's understanding. To him, "when you are President your power is total." That's why he speaks of the State in the first person, warning several times that if state governors do not act, he (not the State) will act. Donald Trump warns of a looming tide of socialism when his own administration is nothing short of despotism. There's only one dictator America needs to be leery about, and it's Donald Trump. And he doesn't even understand what all dictators do: that they only rule roughshod over frightful humans--viruses generally ignore them.
If Donald Trump loses this November, it is not only he who might find comfort in the thought of moving to another country. America will find its own government and political system shredded to strands, its dynamics out of level and plumb it would need nothing short of a total overhaul. Even if they don't pack their bags and follow Trump, they would still be wondering, "What country are we in now?"
Systems of checks-and-balances have to be retrieved from storage and dusted off. Vital offices left vacant have to be cranked back to life--starting with reviving several inspector general (IG) offices slain in record numbers by Trump.
The State department probably has to do an inventory of America's foreign policy initiatives and commitments that were left in limbo by "America First" It has to count how many treaties and international agreements the US has either breached or completely forgotten. It might even have to do a headcount of exactly how many allies it still has left, and reevaluate its posturing in the many theaters of conflict around the world, especially the middle east.
The US has catch-up work to do on climate change and global warming. If it puts a little effort into it, America might even remember it used to stand for human rights protection and the eradication of poverty and world hunger--tough to do when it has starved the very body that was fighting it, the United Nations with its FAO relief missions. It might finally awaken from its COVID-19 stupor and think about picking up the slack in the international campaign to fight this existentialist threat to the human race--again, tough to do after it castrated the World Health Organization.
Whatever the social and political landscape would look like in a post-Trump America, the post-deconstruction repair work the nation faces will make everyone Trump leaves behind envy his luxury of a quick escape plan.
If I were Donald Trump's campaign strategist, for lack of any better alternatives, I would advise him to tailor his campaign speeches this way: "In 2016 I told you I'm the only one with the solutions. Well, folks, not everything went as planned. Which is why you should vote for me again, because I'm the only one who can fix the mess I made. You don't want to be the one to do it!"Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
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