Here’s the Man who can thump Trump, thanks to Covid-19

Covid-19 may well spell the end of Donald Trump in a political sense. The pandemic in America has exposed his infantile egotism and his haphazard management style.
Trump is a freak of (political) nature.

When he announced his candidature, political pundits calculated his chances of winning the Republican party’s nomination at zero per cent. But he won the nomination.

Recovering quickly from the shock, conventional wisdom proclaimed that he had as much chance of winning the presidency as a snowball in hell. He went on to beat Hillary Clinton. The rest is comical and dangerous history.

Conventional wisdom’s calculation was that the American electorate was historically disdainful of extreme leftwing or rightwing views.

No one realised that Christian rightwing ideology, which for years had existed on the fringes of American political life, had inched its way into the mainstream and had become a force within the Republican Party. The Christian right had joined forces with the rightwing of the Republican Party to form the most dominant voice within the party.

Rightwing ideology is informed by an antiquated view of the world.

American rightwing ideologues, Christian and secular, see growing multiculturalism as contaminating a pure American ethic. They claim the Anglo-Saxon culture built America, not immigrants from Africa, Mexico or Asia. They argue that wholesome family values on which America was built were being destroyed by unchristian ideas and practices.

With regard to foreign policy, rightwing ideology claims a special God-ordained destiny for America. Like Negritude ideologues who believed that the African race had a biologically-determined humanitarian character, rightwing ideologues claim that Americans are endowed with superior characteristics that set them apart.

Some American scholars call this God-given peculiarity “American exceptionalism”.

China and the developing world is now demanding equal say in the management of world affairs. They want a multilateral approach to solving the world’s problems, not unilateral actions informed by the outdated and delusional concept of American exceptionalism.

An America president occupies a unique position. He is in charge of the world’s biggest economic, military and technological power which has great influence on the state of the world. The position, therefore, presupposes a man or woman with a nuanced view of the world.

It requires a man or woman with a huge intellect like Barack Obama. It demands someone whose worldview is based on ideas of justice and equity. It needs a personable and empathetic person whose actions are informed by rational considerations.

The crisis has brought into the limelight a man who has the personal appeal, management skills, intellect and eloquence to beat Trump.
That man is not Joe Biden. The man, in my view, is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.