Biodun Jeyifo
HERE is the background to Trump’s attempt this past week to impose an incipient martial law on the United States. This background is by now well-known, but all the same, it is worthy of being recapitulated here. By Friday, May 29, 2020, protests and demonstrations against the heinous extra-judicial slaying of George Floyd by policemen had spread to dozens of cities in America. These demonstrations and protests were the most troubling expressions of civil disobedience in America in more than fifty years.
Generally, in the daytime they were orderly and peaceful, with only a little bit of violence between the protestors and the police. But at night, chaos seemed to descend on the cities – looting, destruction of police stations, arson, entire blocks of streets, businesses and public buildings in flames. To think of this in Nigerian terms, it is like having cities across the whole country including Lagos and Ibadan, Abeokuta and Benin City, Onitsha and Aba, Asaba and Owerri, Calabar and Ikot Ekpene, Kano and Kaduna, Jos and Sokoto all convulsed with outbreaks of wild social unrest. Finally, these manifestations of what appeared to be Armageddon reached the White House itself. As the whole nation watched in great suspense, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Lafayette Park located just outside the perimeter of the official residence of American presidents. Hurriedly, the U.S. Secret Service moved Trump and his wife and youngest son, Barron, into a fortified bunker in the basement of the White House.
For a whole day, Trump could not be seen in public, a very rare occurrence. While this lasted, rumours began to circulate widely and wildly that Trump was terrified, that he had agreed to have himself and some members of his family bunkered because he is a chicken-hearted ruler, as much as he likes to project his public image in the cast of dictatorial strongmen of the developing world. Which is probably why, when Trump emerged from the bunker on Monday, June 1, he was full of bloated machismo and infantile bluster. He felt that he had to let people know that he was not a coward, not a weakling. He felt he had to let America and the world know that he is the most powerful man in the world, that he is in control of the most awesome concentrations of soldiery and weaponry of destruction in the world. And so, he declared himself not only the “president of law and order” but the Commander-in-Chief who can and will now use American military might to impose law and order on his country.
And that is exactly what Trump did. Or, rather, tried to do. He deployed men and women of the American military, complete with militarized Humvees, tanks and helicopters around the White House itself and, more generally, the whole of Washington, DC. And far more portentously, he threatened that he would invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, to authorize the use of these forces and weapons of war – on American soil and against Americans – if the social unrest precipitated by the protests over Gorge Floyd’s killing proved too much for the regular police forces and the National Guard to control.
Regular American police are some of the most militarized police forces in the world. In training, armaments and professional culture, they are really fully paramilitary. However, although they do carry lethal weapons, they are constitutionally expected to use their lethal weapons only in defense, never in offense. Their constitutionally sanctioned aim is to put down violent social disorder by arrests, not by killing protestors, looters or arsonists; it is completely outside their legal leeway to kill anyone, except strictly for self-defense, each incident of which is expected to be thoroughly investigated. And if they are ever overwhelmed by riotous protestors, they can be reinforced by reservist units of the State National Guards controlled by State Governors. These National Guard units also cannot make any arrests, they cannot and must not use their weapons on civilians; they are there only to serve as a backup to the regular policemen and women in whom resides primary responsibility for managing all acts and expressions of civil unrest in the country. These are the reasons why Trump’s deployment of soldiers of the regular army this past week and his threat to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to authorize the use of military forces in quelling domestic or internal unrest more or less amounted to a declaration of martial war in America. So far, it has failed.
It failed for several reasons. First, there was swift and scathing condemnation of the attempt by some of the most decorated, most revered retired generals of the American military. Without exception, they all declared that no American president has never and should ever deploy American troops against Americans on American soil. To grant any American president such powers, they added, would be to turn him into a dictator. Secondly, Trump had banked on support from the Republican Party, his own party, together with members of his administration and his supporters. Instead, what he got was embarrassed silence, with a few actually publicly stating their opposition to the move, like Trump’s own Defense Secretary, Mike Esper. Thirdly, Trump himself had been extremely clumsy, almost oafish, in the manner in which he made the attempt. He had police and National Guard reservists attack unarmed and peaceful demonstrators with tear gas, flash bangers and batons to clear the way for him to go and have a picture of himself taken in front of the iconic “Church of Presidents” near the White House, with a bible in his right hand – with the bible held upside down and Trump himself looking not like a dictatorial strongman but a clown, in the manner in which Charlie Chaplin performed Hitler in the “The Great Dictator”.
The fourth reason why Trump failed in successfully declaring and enforcing martial law in America is the one that should concern us the most – in my opinion. It is sort of complicated, but I will try to deal with it in this piece as simply and as lucidly as I can. So, here goes. Americans and their culture are saturated with a glorification of the military and militarism to a degree that is unequalled in any of the other Western liberal democracies, indeed possibly more than any other country in the world. Per capita, Americans personally own guns, including rapid-action lethal assault weapons, more than any other country on the planet. American films, American music, American pop culture sensationalize and glorify gun violence more than any other national culture in the world. And abroad in the world, the American military has been one of the greatest war-mongers of modern history, primarily because the country has been a democratic republic that is also the most avid imperialist nation in the last two hundred years of world history.
But in spite of all this – and this is fundamental – America has been obsessed by an aversion to ever having its military might deployed at home, on American soil and against Americans. Abraham Lincoln tried everything he could to avert the Civil War. The Insurrection Act of 1807, the invocation and actualization of which is the only basis on which war by the American military could be carried out within America itself, is seldom used. This is because though the so-called “culture wars” of American politics often come close to cold war pitting one political party and one community of the faithful against another, they are seldom ever allowed to develop into hot wars that are fought in the American heartland itself. This is the Olympian obstacle that Trump confronted this week in his gamble to transform himself from elected president to martial law strongman. Thus, he failed because he did not know the depth of this quintessential aversion of Americans to war at home by the American military against a section, any section of American society against another. The failure was nothing short of spectacular, as I have indicated in the title of this piece.
Is that the end of the story? No, far from it. There is a coda, an epilogue, and possibly a lurking sequel to the story. Anyone who knows Trump knows that embarrassment and failure are no deterrents to him. The only thing which deters him is failure upon failure upon failure, that’s all. I suspect very strongly that Trump is biding his time. His real purpose is to find and use any pretext, any excuse to have the presidential elections of this year to be either postponed or cancelled. He is badly trailing Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate nominee, in the polls. Trump has already been searching for any basis on which to delegitimize his defeat in the elections. One method is – why have any elections at all? And the best means of achieving this is – successful imposition of martial law.
What implications does our recapitulation of Trump’s failure to impose martial law, to impose a neo-fascist right-wing dictatorship in America have for the rest of the world? This is the location of my real interest in this piece. Think of it, dear reader: Americans never, never want to experience what their military does in other parts of the world. In fact, only to the extent that these wars abroad amount to a colossal and unending drain on American economic power and add to a never-ending community of veterans who come home from wars abroad and must then be rehabilitated at great monetary and psychological expense to the country, only to that extent do Americans have a taste of what their soldiers do in other parts of the world. Many, too many, are the peoples of other nations of the world that American soldiers have robbed of democracy, of the right to choose their own rulers. Many, too many, are the adventurers, tin-gods and crackpot psychopaths and sociopaths that American soldiers have helped to seize and hang on to power in the developing world. These and much more are some of the things that American warfare abroad has planted on the soil of many countries of the world. Thus, when Americans write into their Constitution clauses or amendments that stipulate that they never wish to see the American soldiers do at home the things that they do abroad, they know what they are talking about.
But think of the following adages, dear reader. Item: The evil that you do unto others, you do also to others. [J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians]. Item: “What goes round comes round” [An American slangy saying] Like all American presidents before him, Trump knows the thing that American soldiers do abroad. More than any other president before him, he likes these things that American soldiers do abroad, especially things that have to do with propping up dictators, tyrants and fascists of the right. There is not the slightest doubt about it: he has a consuming wish to be able to do in America the things that all these strongmen do in their countries. Already, he has caused Americans more social and moral grief than any other American president in history. Do not think that his failure this week to install an incipient martial law in America will stop him from still pursuing this desire. As I stated earlier in this piece, the only thing that would ever make Trump be checkmated by failure is failure upon failure upon failure, to the nth degree. But fortunately for Americans and the world, only five months with about one or two more failures remain for him.
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