“Humpty Trumpty sat on a wall,

(The Capitol, not the border wall)

Humpty Trumpty had a great fall;

(Inciting an insurrection)

All the king's horses and all the king's men

(Republican Party enablers)

Couldn't put Trumpty together again.”

(Destroyed legacy of a president and his party)

*With sincere apologies to the original author

When billionaire businessman Donald Trump took office as the 45th President of the United States of America four years ago, the world paused and took note. Here, was a complete outsider to the close-knit Washington political establishment, taking on the giants and winning, by a “landslide” in his own words. The world looked up in awe at the prospects that America’s five-star democracy had to offer, and the respect and admiration for the leader of the “free world” grew by leaps and bounds.

But it did not take long for cracks to begin to appear in the American political edifice, and each time Donald Trump opened his mouth, the cracks widened. His unconventional approach to politics and governance won the admiration of many in the initial stages, purely for having the gumption to take on the notoriously protective Washington political establishment, but this political capital and goodwill dissipated in no time owing to the President’s brash, abrasive style on the domestic front while mollycoddling adversaries like North Korea, Russia, and China on the international front.

Soon enough, the President’s unconventional style of governance and hire and fire policy made famous by his long-running association with the TV serial “The Apprentice”, began to appear more as a liability than an asset owing to internal dissention within the White House itself. So, it would not be off the mark to assume that early on into his term, the pangs of insecurity began to pull at him and the perceived solution was to pander to his base, the extremist right, in order to consolidate his power. Ever since, there’s been no turning back.

Although Trump may not have fathered the extremist far-right movement that is now shaking America’s democratic foundations, he has certainly gone farther than any other US President in recent history to nurture and nourish it during the past four years. It has grown into something that Trump takes pride in, well at least until last week. Having spoon fed and mollycoddled what seemed an innocent, harmless little baby, Trump realised to his horror that the baby had now grown into a monster of which he had little control. It is this monster created by Trump as his insurance policy for re-election that has destroyed not only him and his legacy, but that of American democracy itself, laying waste to decades of painstaking work by his predecessors.

With what has now become the single most notorious act of instigating pumped up insurrectionists to march to the seat of American power, The Capitol, Trump in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to cling on to power by preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, has managed to destroy America’s moral authority as the leader of the free world. In the words of influential former Republican President George W. Bush, America has descended to the level of a banana republic.

The irony of it all is that here is a nation with a defence budget of $ 721.5 billion for 2020, nearly 10 times the GDP of Sri Lanka, and a mob armed with sticks and other primitive paraphernalia were able to simply march in, break open the doors and windows, and vandalise what should be the most heavily guarded building in that country. Television images of mobsters seated on the House Speaker’s Chair and mobsters vandalising the inner sanctum of the building, will surely haunt the defence establishment for decades. America will have to search its soul as to how things have come to this in such a short time.

Trump’s legacy in office will be defined exclusively by what has transpired since the 3 November presidential election which he lost fair and square but continues to dispute for reasons best known to him. If as Trump claims, the 2016 election was squeaky clean and the 2020 election was rigged, does it not imply that he has failed in his job and primary duty of safeguarding the people’s franchise, which is the cornerstone of democracy itself?

Other than making baseless claims, Trump and his fellow travellers in the Republican establishment have failed to produce any evidence to back their claims that could have been admissible in a court of law in that country. As a result, every one of the lawsuits filed in key states disputing the results have been thrown out lock, stock, and barrel by judges appointed by Trump himself and even by presiding election officials of his own Republican Party. The final nail in the coffin came from the man who had so far slavishly stood by his boss, Vice President Mike Pence, who, for probably the first and only time in the past four years, refused to cow down to the President’s insistence on not certifying the final result in Congress, amidst the carnage wrought upon by the President’s supporters.

It is said that what happens in America reverberates across the world and sets the tone for democratic governance. What happens from now on is unchartered territory with a leaderless democratic world left to its own devices. In that respect, Joe Biden already has his work cut out and the challenge before him is certainly a daunting one. Having taken cognisance of the situation, world leaders on every continent have taken the unprecedented step of speaking out with disdain against the sitting US President and his culpability in the assault on America’s democracy which is bound to have profound implications far beyond Donald Trump’s tunnel vision.

The lessons to the world at large and more specifically to us in Sri Lanka from the rise and fall of the Trump presidency are many. The most profound among them is that pandering to extremists for political expediency has its price and sooner rather than later, one has to either pay it or face the resultant carnage. The underlying message is that when the baby becomes a monster, none will be able to control it.

We have our own lessons in our relatively short post-Independence history. S.W.R.D Bandaranaike, in attempting to short-cut his way to power, propagated the idea of nationalism and even though that was good enough for him to sweep the election in 1956; two years later, it cost him his life.

The LTTE that waged war in Sri Lanka for three decades, causing untold misery in the country and destroying an entire generation of youths, was nurtured by India’s Indira Gandhi and ultimately was responsible for killing her son and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The examples are many and we cannot help but be reminded of what history has painfully taught in an era when the highest echelons of government seem to be pursuing an agenda of actively supporting extreme nationalists much to the consternation and discomfort of the minority communities. Let us hope that the Trump legacy will offer food for thought to our own leaders on both sides of the political divide. What must be remembered is the fact that people don’t elect governments; they reject them. As a consequence, the alternative triumphs by default. The last two elections of 2015 and 2019 in Sri Lanka and 2020 in America are noteworthy examples of how the mighty fall.