Trump’s Impeachment : An indictment of Trump’s assault on democratic institutions
The second wave of populism, which in essence is a right-wing majoritarian one, enshrined in the Trump administration represents all that is contrary to a well-functioning democracy and “melting-pot” that the US claimed to be. The Trump administration has constantly legitimized attacks on immigrants from Mexico, spawned Islamophobia and labelled Muslims as terrorists, and pulled out of multilateral global negotiations without even consulting with all the other parties to the agreement.
Apart from all this, another aspect of the Trump administration’s assault on the US’s democratic institutions has been its blatant use of political office to target political opponents. In other words, we have been seeing the subversion of democratic structures and processes by Trump, as he seeks to use his office for personal electoral gains. The US House of Representatives recently impeached President Trump, thus making him the third President to be so indicted (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached, and Richard Nixon resigned from office before being tried for impeachment in the context of Watergate scandal).
Trump has been impeached for misusing his office to solicit help from Ukraine to influence the elections of 2020. Simply put, Trump used his power to try and force Ukraine to launch an investigation against his Democratic contender Joe Biden. Trump blocked $319 million military aid to Ukraine, which was part of an understanding between the two countries since 2014. This aid was then used by him as a bargain to reopen the discredited corruption charges on the former Vice-president, Joe Biden and the main contender for Presidential election facing incumbent Trump as well as his son Hunter Biden. This is done to influence and manipulate the public into favouring the Republicans in the 2020 polls. The two charges that the house unleashed against him are the abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and justice.
Parallels between Modi and Trump in terms of misuse of political office and destruction of democratic structures and processes are immense. In India, Narendra Modi has used the institutions such as the ED, CBI and the NIA to target leaders of the opposition and political opponents, the most recent being the case of P. Chidambaram. This has essentially destroyed the sanctity of eminent institutions of governance and converted them into mere tools and weapons in the hands of the powers-that-be. At another level, Modi also resorts to labelling his opponents as Pakistan-supporters, anti-nationals and so on. The same tactic is deployed by Trump to malign his political opponents even at the cost of compromising the fair constitutional and democratic processes. Both Modi and Trump revel in this strategy.
Trump hopes to use the narrative around the impeachment as a political attack on Mr Biden during the 2020 campaign; whether or not it can influence election results remains to be seen. But what is important to be underlined is that these authoritarian and anti-democratic leaders have taken for granted the people’s will which allowed them to hold on to power in the first place. Through various coercive as well as ideological means, they look forward to manufacturing consent in their own favour.
The phenomenon of manipulating the institutional processes of democracy to manufacture consent and opinion, with the aid of yellow-journalism in favour of right-wing populism and cultural nationalism has grown deep roots even in the oldest of democracies, so much so that the incumbents try to gain from it politically. These trends however disturbing as they are, also show a silver lining that there are no more false pretensions of “India First” and “make AMERICA great again”. These slogans have been exposed as a façade behind lie the narrow motives of retaining political office. This mutilation of constitutional democracy needs to be punished. The use of office for partisan politics (whether or not this use is successful) needs to be scrutinized by voters. In this context, the upcoming elections in the US would serve as a litmus-test for right-wing majoritarian politics the world over, because of the repercussions the polls would have globally. The battle at stake is a battle for democratic values, democratic and transparent structures.
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