As Trump II arrives

Tomorrow at noon, the 45th President of the United States will do the improbable.  He will put up his hand and be sworn in as the 47th President.

For the 20th day of January 2025, this was not his plan: continuing in office in 2021, was.  But he lost the election to Joe Biden, the opponent for whom he had shown so much disdain.

So, Trump resorted to an old strategy of his: deny, deny, deny.  Biden, he screamed into every microphone and in front of every camera that was switched on, had not won the 2020 election.

He screamed the same message in many a courtroom in the United States—at least 60 of them—as well.  But he could provide no proof of anything that would have meaningfully changed the outcome of the election.

So, he moved to the next phase. He invited his most ardent supporters to Washington, DC. The task: to march on the Capitol and disrupt the constitutional certification of the election results.

The violence that ensued saw as much as $2.7m in destruction at the capitol. One policeman died, at least 140 were injured, and four died by suicide soon afterwards. Over time, at least 950 defendants of the rioters were arrested and charged.

And yes, Congress did reconvene on the night to certify the election, and Biden took office two weeks later.

In the weeks that followed, Trump faced a bleak legal and political future.  Many top Republicans castigated him for what became known as a conspiracy and an insurrection.

It was also discovered that on his way out the door, he had illegally taken a large cache of classified documents.

Soon, he faced formidable personal peril as the list of legal cases against him grew.  He needed lawyers, fast.  He had already become the first president to be impeached twice.  If he was not to become the first former president to be put in jail, he needed a lot of lawyers.

And yet that same man, three months ago, remarkably won the 2023 presidential election.  Deploying a determined strategy of deny and denounce and delay, helped by a Department of Justice that was eager not to be seen to be unjust or unfair, and a conservative Supreme Court he had enshrined in his first term, only his cases in New York made headway: his federal cases were pinned to the ground while he pinned his opponents to the wall.

The inauguration will see frigid arctic tomorrow, the coldest in decades, with temperatures expected to be in the low- to mid-20s, and wind chill factors, at noon, between 12ºF and 14ºF.

It is safe to say that while the guests at the ceremony may require extra measures to stay warm, Trump will not.

He has beaten all the odds already, and he will now taste his gravy.

But what will that gravy be like?  He made a lot of promises that appeared to resonate with an American electorate hungry for drama and tumult.

News reports say there will be plenty, beginning right after the inauguration with a slew of executive orders.

One of them concerns Trump’s deportation plan.  Given that this involves his desired elements of shock and drama, it is expected to start immediately in some of America’s largest cities.

Trump’s cherished tariffs are also on their way, as is a deeper list of Muslim and “shithole” nations, among policies that are certain to inflict a deep mark on such nations as Nigeria.

The question is whether we are ready.  Should hundreds of Nigerians be deported into Abuja, is the Bola Tinubu APC government—which appears to harbour a ravenous appetite for repeated, consumption by its top officials—ready?

Let us remember: the last time we had Nigerians return home in a hurry, each of the 1,100 returnees received only $100.00 from a budget of $8.5m for 5000 people.  And then we forgot all about them.

There are a lot of Nigerians in the United States, but even during this problematic period, we do not have an ambassador, thanks to Tinubu’s collapse on the diplomatic front in September 2023.

Prior to that, his predecessor had suffered deep, self-inflicted injuries in the US.  Within weeks of his ascension to the presidency in 2015, Buhari was received in Washington, DC by the US government.  Deceived by Buhari as most had been, President Barak Obama treated him like a cult hero, describing him as assuming office “with a reputation for integrity and a very clear agenda and that is to make sure that he is bringing safety and security and peace to his country.”

He would be proved wrong.

Still, later that year at the United Nations in New York, Obama took a meeting with the Nigerian leader again.  He spoke of “a sense of urgency to make sure that we’ve done everything we can to put in place the framework for cooperation and partnership for many years to come.”

Obama left office a few months later, with Buhari unable to summon the will to take advantage of that and other pledges of support.

Worse still, in January 2017, a Nigerian Air Force fighter jet supposedly trying to fight Boko Haram in the northeast bombed a refugee camp, killing over 100 refugees and aid workers.  It was another in a series of such “mistakes,” and it led the US to reconsider plans to sell 12 Super Tucano jets to us.

In April 2018, Donald Trump (I) came face to face with Buhari during another state visit.  It was one year after Buhari had appointed a fragile 83-year-old to be his ambassador in Washington, and after the US decided to sell the Super Tucano aircraft to Nigeria.

At home, it would emerge that the Buhari government had arbitrarily withdrawn $1bn from the Excess Crude Account for the transaction, unknown to the National Assembly or the National Security Adviser.

The Nigerian leader embarrassingly arrived at the White House with little more than a sense of worship, calling Trump “Excellency” ad nauseam.  Despite the US leader affirming that he enjoyed hearing it very much, it was confirmed that he loathed Buhari’s presence, affirming that he never wanted to meet such a “lifeless” person again.

This is the background to the re-enthronement tomorrow of Trump II.  As everyone knows, he has a very specific view of China, one of the sources from which Nigeria continues to obtain dubious loans, including $254.76m last week, and the $2.25b “closest to a free lunch” from the World Bank six months ago.

Last September, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Tinubu declared that they had elevated the relationship between their countries to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” which could become important in the near future.

I do not necessarily object to such a relationship, but the previous APC government, on which Tinubu’s models itself, was comprehensively weak and dishonest.

But this point in time is exactly where opportunity meets temptation.  Is a nation which does not believe in history or in institutions, and where we are scrubbing out character good for its citizens, or better for Trump II?