The World’s Election

It’s that time again. Another four years, another US election, which means the White House might soon be a dramatically different place, which means the world might soon be.

There’s a reason no other election captures the world’s attention half as much as the American presidential one, why people everywhere follow the ridiculously long campaign season, why they all feel they have a stake in who a country with just 4% of the global population chooses as its leader. America’s internationalism, its preeminent power, its preeminent wealth, its unique position at the forefront of technology, education, and pop culture means that what happens there reverberates far beyond its borders.

But you could say that of any US election, and this election is anything but normal. All my life, I’d regarded America, along with other liberal democracies, as a politically “safe” country. Yes, one major political party might be better than another, but whilst people in, say, my home country of Malaysia could find their tax money embezzled and their last vestiges of democracy torn away if the wrong party took power, Americans could be complacent in the assurance that, whoever won, there was a limit to how bad things could get, that even if they elected the worse candidate, he’d at least take his office seriously, that he’d at least respect what are supposed to be common American values of freedom, liberty, and democracy.

That all changed a few years ago with Donald Trump’s candidacy. It’s telling that when he was elected president, many of the people I knew with authoritarian sympathies were crowing, gleefully pointing to it as evidence that America was hypocritical, that liberal democracy would destroy itself. They could sense, as I could, that Trump’s presidency was the antithesis to the great American republican experiment.

He didn’t disappoint them. It’s shocking to see how far the US has degenerated into a banana republic in less than four years under Trump, how the kinds of things I thought only happened in corrupt dictatorships like Malaysia but could never happen in a country like America have happened there. Trump has abused his office to enrich himself, refusing to divest from his businesses, booking some 885 (sometimes completely unnecessary) stays at his various properties for himself and members of his administration and making taxpayers foot the bill, even trying to host the 2020 G7 summit at his struggling Miami hotel. He has abused his office to remain in power, obstructing investigations into his misconduct, soliciting a bribe from a foreign government to try to hurt a political opponent, and firing patriotic dissenters and whistleblowers. He behaves like a dictator, or somebody who wishes he were one, threatening to neuter the press for covering him unfavorably, and refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the coming election. He is trying to turn the Voice of America, for decades a trusted news source for people living under authoritarian regimes, into his personal propaganda machine. He panders to the lowest common denominators of fear and prejudice, scapegoating minorities to rally his base. His utter disregard for inconvenient facts and science, even in the face of a pandemic, is one of the main reasons why America’s coronavirus situation is the kind you’d expect to see in a third-world country. His antics disgrace and diminish America every day he’s in office.