OPINION: Harris-Trump debate: the test of fitness for leadership (applies here also)

Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 September 2024, 19:50 by Writer

by GHK Lall

I have always said and believed that it is how leaders react under the pressure of the moment that defines them. How leaders who hold themselves as the best thing since Solomon respond when backed into a corner, or are drawn out into a calculated exchange, or are compelled to deal with the facts at hand is what reveals the real essence of them, what they are about deep inside. Do they wilt and seek to cover that up with a whiplash of wrathful words? Do they rage when the stimuli of the issue or the sensitive moment goad them into uncontrolled frenzies? Former US president Donald J. Trump was exemplary in all of those in what was a do-or-die duel for political life. When he should have risen to the demands of the moment, he flayed and flopped. He flagellated himself. He just did not have what the hour required. And it took a little Black woman of foreign lineage to topple this white-bred perceived racist, misogynist, and distortionist to where he rightly belongs. In the dust and flat on his face. America does produce the great, the good, and the grotesque. I exclude Kamala Harris from the circle of the first. Donald Trump owns the last, and of that he should be most proud.

I cringe when I remember that I was about to vote for the New Yorker, as obnoxious and obstreperous as he was. This man doesn’t belong in a doghouse, let alone the White House. His performance, his true-to-form weaknesses, manifested itself on Tuesday night. He is not worthy of a debate relationship. Just like some in Guyana. The man is dishonest, a bigot, one who blusters his way forward with a combination of braggadocio and buffoonery and the brawn of a cheap bully, in the hope of carrying the day. He should remind a few leaders of what we have in Guyana, with one taking the honors. Rather than persuade with the weight of reason and intellect, the American and the Guyanese leaders settle for overpowering with the weight of their gut, cunning, and dishonesty. Donald Trump has long been a dishonest man. I have been privy to some of the papers and his maneuvers during my American life, how even the son of a US Supreme Court judge was embroiled in his machinations.

In Guyana, there are those who are his political children, and they are not limited to the tricksters in the PPP alone. They are some who do not have the fitness that leadership calls for, mandates, and about which there can be no equivocation, no ambiguity. My tension with Donald Trump is that he had his hand on the nuclear button and could still have found himself in that place again. It is downright frightening to contemplate a man given to paranoia and megalomania in that position. As a colored man, I cannot pretend not to know the priority issue at white hot temps that drive his tens of millions of totally committed supporters into moblike hysteria. I submit the most civil construction possible: there are simply too many damned non-white people in the United States. At the heart of the matter, immigration is more intense than the economy and inflation, probably at a rung or two above national defense, too. The other people are the crux of the fears, their energy and enterprise and success, though envied, still in the wrong place. If that possesses shades of what has grabbed hold of Guyana and doesn’t let go, it is. To make Guyana great and then still greater, boils down to the raw pungency of this: ahyuh waan dem black maan in deh again? From the privacy of the boardrooms to the intimacy of the bottom-houses, there is Guyana writ large, and with illustrious local Trumpian leaders to match.

Vice President Harris has her Achilles’ heel, but she was wise enough to stick to her knitting. Her needle was unsheathed at the right moments and stuck her debating opponent in just the right spots. The issue is not whether she did enough to sway the voters that matter, but whether Donald Trump self-destructed enough to indicate to America that he belongs right where he is. That is, in the dustbin and dung heap of American history. I will give him this: he is a leader of the rarest demagogic proportions. On any day that self-control and self-respect are abandoned, he is the best. He has some budding twins right here in this dear land of Guyana. I leave this closing note: I doubt that notwithstanding Kamala Harris’s performance, the contest will be easier, thrown wide open, come November. Fundamentalisms and fanaticisms have too much of a stranglehold on how men and women think in these, the most interesting of times. The world is in this grimmest of spaces today, with America not an exception. The times, the challenges and circumstances call for only those geared, those reared, those graced with the fitness for leadership. What applies to America is just as applicable to Guyana.