Americans go to the poll today in the Iowa Caucuses, as their primaries to select the Republican and Democratic nominees for the presidential election coming up this November kick off. Iowa is the first of the early voting states, and a crucial turf for the aspirants to keep alive their hope of nomination. It is apparent, though, that both parties are up to two-way runs: between Secretary Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democrats, and between real estate billionaire Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz for the GOP.
The major point of interest for most Nigerians in the unfolding American process is the Republican frontrunner, Mr. Trump. His trademarks since he declared for the race mid-2015 have been bombast and bluster, xenophobic bullying and arrogant swagger never seen before. Many would swear that Trump’s affluence intoxicates him. He has taken potshots at every minority group in his country – from Latinos to Blacks and Muslims; and was unrelenting in picking an ego fight with Megyn Kelly of Fox News, which many see as signposting his hubris towards the womenfolk. He even countervailed his country’s historical narrative, declaring that Senator John McCain, who was taken prisoner in the Vietnam War, is no war hero as nationally regarded. The wonder that Americans themselves have grappled with is that none of his blow-ups hurt his poll ratings ahead of the caucuses; if anything at all, they enhanced his ratings and emboldened him.
Trump is so infamous for his outbursts that you could script his words on any of his xenophobic fancies, without him, and it would be veridical Trumpese. His speechwriters, if he uses any, must find their job less arduous than many others. But ‘Trumpscripting’ seems to have gone beyond the remit of Mr. Trump, and there are attributions that one needs to double-check whether he factually uttered them. There was one about African-Americans being lazy and good at nothing other than gallivanting, eating and making love. And he was quoted elsewhere as telling ‘Black Lives Matter’ advocates that: “If black lives matter, then go back to Africa. We’ll see how much they matter there.” Some fact-checking on these statements suggested that they were ‘Trumpscripts’ without Trump.
Another purported comment by Trump that interests us here is on Nigerians in the U.S., during an alleged rally in Wichita.
The presidential frontrunner reportedly said – in summary, because he is already widely quoted – that if he wins the race, he would get rid of Nigerians to make America great again. For good measure, he reportedly added: “Why can’t they stay in their own country? Why? I’ll tell you why. Because they are corrupt. Their Governments are so corrupt they rob the people blind and bring it all here to spend. And their people run away and come down here and take our jobs! We can’t have that!”
Since the story surfaced in January, one assumes that the Wichita rally must have held between last December and January. The alleged comment buzzed on social media sites, mostly Nigerian-related, and also in the mainstream media. Some talk show hosts in the Nigerian broadcast media indeed made it the subject of their phone-in programmes. But I didn’t get really worried until lately that ace journalism scholars and our teachers seem to consider the comment fit for serious discourse.
Curiosity, as they say, kills the cat; but curiosity is as well the serum of interrogative reflection. I was curious that Trump would make such statement and we only heard of it in distant-party reports. Apologies if anyone heard as much as a vague reference to it on reputed media channels that closely track Trump’s and other aspirants’ campaigns like the CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC or VoA, because I did not. I was curious that the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, if not indeed the government in Abuja, would play dumb on Trump – with not even an acknowledgment of the comment on the embassy’s site. When Trump spoke against Mexicans, the authorities in Mexico City swiftly excoriated him, while Latinos in the American homeland waylaid him at his rallies with ‘Dump Trump!’ banners. And when he called for a Muslim ban in the United States, the House of Commons in London rowdily debated whether he himself shouldn’t be banned from coming to the United Kingdom.
It was also curious actually that Trump, in the comment, alluded to a rally in Alaska that is not reflected in his official itinerary. When former governor of Alaska and establishment rogue, Sarah Palin, wanted to endorse him penultimate week, she came over to one of the Iowa rallies for a sensationalised outing.
This got me scouring the net for first-hand reports of the comment, but I didn’t find any. None on Trump’s official website. An authoritative local newspaper, The Wichita Eagle, had a January 21 report on a Trump rally – in Las Vegas, and not in Wichita – where he said the GOP establishment was warming up to his candidacy. And it wasn’t as if the paper has a blind spot for Nigerian news: on January 16, it published a report titled ‘Nigerian villagers: Cameroon troops are killing civilians,’ which it sourced from the Associated Press correspondent in Abuja. It was doubly curious that Trump would make such a comment under The Wichita Eagle’s nose and the paper would not even hint at it. Other than the Nigerian-related online sites, the closest to an alternative source that you would get was a YouTube voiceover of a Caucasian female that read out the exact text of the same online story. But it was again curious that the voiceover indicated no organisational domain, reflected no by-line or showed the image of the speaker.
I eventually came upon some sites that earlier reported the comment, and now returned to disclaim it as fake news. A couple of these sites gave their original source as ‘FNN,’ on its Payges website. I happened to have had some experience in the past with ‘FNN,’ and I know it is acronymic for ‘Fake News Nigeria.’ And FNN actually self-designates officially as a “Nigerian satire account.” I visited the Payges site, and guess what I found? It has a follow-up report attributing our President Muhammadu Buhari as threatening to repatriate every American in Nigeria! In the report partly titled ‘Buhari Replies Trump,’ the site parodies the President as vowing during his recent visit to the United Arab Emirates to respond in kind to what Trump has threatened. We won’t dignify the parody by recapping its content extensively here, only to say that the President allegedly advised Americans in Nigeria to pray that Trump doesn’t win! The site was mindful, though, to indicate at the far bottom of this particular report that it is “a work of fiction.”
The Trump comment on Nigerians, I make bold to say, is also a work of fiction. But there is, ironically, some regret to its falsity: what the braggart aspirant purportedly said about Nigerian governments and the consequence for Nigerians holds up a mirror image; and when you look in the mirror, you would found the image too truthful to what it reflects. If Trump had actually spoken, he couldn’t be faulted.