A question of legitimacy

Poised to become the 45th president of the United States of America, Donald Trump has a cloud of mistrust and suspicion hanging over him, due to the fact that he owes his victory not to the popular vote, which he lost by 3 million, and not even to the archaic and undemocratic Electoral College which should have been done away with decades ago, but to a series of hacks carried out against his opponent, Hillary Clinton, a series of attacks directed with surgical precision not against the Republican party but against the Democratic party.

President-elect Donald Trump has flat out rejected any suggestions of Russian hacking with an obvious intent to influence the presidential election despite the CIA and other government agencies concluding that Russia acted to help Trump win. But what is Trump supposed to say or comment regarding this? That he accepts the conclusions of the intelligence agencies of the US federal government of foreign interference in the USA presidential elections, and thus accepting that his victory is tainted to such a degree that if he accepts the presidency by taking the oath of office he is essentially cheating the  American public and becoming an illegitimate President? Of course Donald Trump will deny any such foreign intervention in US politics, he will deny anything that depicts his victory as illegitimate. Such denial is quite predictable, especially after he himself asked Russia (i.e. the Russian government) from his podium for help with the hacking of US e-mails in order to discredit his opponent Hillary Clinton and make her lose the election.

There is widening perception that Donald Trump owes his triumph to a hacked election, and if this is so, his victory is the result of an illegal intrusion, which in turns makes his victory illegitimate. Let’s put aside for the time being the claim that the Russian government was responsible for the hacking that helped Donald Trump win. The problem with US democracy is that, even if a presidential candidate owes his triumph to some irregular or even illegal maneuver, there is no arbiter to pass judgment on the facts and thereby order a new election to be carried out. The result of the first presidential election is the only valid result accepted, there is no second presidential election in case there was something phony in the first run. This is not what happens with other endeavors of life. Take the Olympics, for example. If any athlete is caught cheating, he is stripped from his medals by the Olympic Committee -which by the way is an International Olympic Committee- acting as an arbiter. There is an ample list of medals that have been stripped from cheating athletes. Yet in one of the most important competitions we can think of, and despite claims of having the best system of democracy in the entire world, the USA does not have an arbiter to rule on such things. At least Congress does not seem to have a Constitutional empowerment to declare a certain presidential election null and avoid and call for a new election to be held. Thus, in spite of the issue of hacking or interference by a foreign government in an election where the margin of difference between the main candidates was so close that almost anything -legal or illegal- could make the delicate balance tip either way, in the USA there is no recourse of appeal to annul the presidential election held November 8th and call for a new election. However, this does not mean that every American will accept the victory of Donald Trump as a legitimate victory, this does not mean that every American will accept him as President. Indeed, many voters are protesting with posters and tweets against Donald Trump by saying quite explicitly about Donald Trump “Not my President”.

The question of legitimacy is not a trivial one, even after Donald Trump is sworn in as President; far from that, it may actually determine the decisions and the actions of someone who is unsure of the respect he commands based on the way he feels he is perceived by others as a legitimate individual or as a fake. If he believes many perceive him as a fake who is unworthy to hold the position of power he holds, there is this possibility that he may try to earn his legitimacy by taking unprecedented and spectacular actions that will show to others he was worth it. In this respect, here in Mexico we had an experience with Felipe Calderón after the presidential election of 2006, an experience that should ring alarm bells in the USA.

In the year 2005, with the Mayor of Mexico City Andrés Manuel López Obrador enjoying an ample lead in the polls, the Mexican President Vicente Fox and his PAN party actually tried to stop him with the support of the PRI party, by first resorting to a silly impeachment procedure. In Mexico, a person who has been in jail, whatever the reason, cannot compete for the presidency, he is barred by the Mexican Constitution from doing so. Once a person is impeached and once his fuero privilege has been removed as a result of the impeachment procedure (the impeachment procedure in Mexico does not strip a person from his/her office, it merely takes away from the person the capacity to avoid being arrested for whatever reason and thrown in jail), the next logical step was to send him to jail and thus remove him from the list of potential presidential candidates, leaving the room wide open for the PRI and the governing PAN to compete against themselves. The dirty maneuver backfired, and Vicente Fox himself had no choice but to order his Prosecutor General, General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, to stop all procedures which could end up throwing Lopez Obrador into jail, an order which finally led to the resignation of Macedo de la Concha himself. Besides the failed desafuero granted by the Mexican Congress controlled by the PRI and PAN parties, a dirty media campaign was also started against Lopez Obrador accusing him of being a danger to Mexico, and this intense propaganda besides other dirty maneuvers as had an effect eroding his ample lead, but he still kept a lead in the polls.

The leader of the then arbiter of the presidential election, the Instituto Federal Electoral or IFE (of which there is no equivalent in the USA), Luis Carlos Ugalde, who had political ambitions of his own and was eager to please the then ruling party PAN and the Mexican President Vicente Fox, had promised that the very same night the presidential elections were to be held on Sunday July 2, the IFE would give a detailed account of the tally of votes. But when such a day came and once the polls had been closed, instead of providing the Mexican public with the tally of votes as it proceeded, the figures were not released, thus breaking up the promise that had been given by Luis Carlos Ugalde. The excuse given for not complying with the promise was that the results between the two main contenders, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD party and Felipe Calderon of the PAN party, were too close to call and it was best to wait until a more statistically significant difference could be recorded. Of course, this was just a stupid excuse, for even if the two main contenders were just one vote apart at a certain point in time, the Mexican people had a right to know, and Luis Carlos Ugalde had promised it would be so. Suspicions began to grow over an impending fraud after Monday.

When the IFE released official data of the poll results, it was only near the end when such data gave Felipe Calderon a very slim majority over Lopez Obrador. But further down the road, it was discovered that from the very beginning it was Lopez Obrador who held the lead, not by a large majority, but he was ahead of Felipe Calderon, and kept ahead of  him consistently until, at the very end, a mysterious twist occurred and all of the sudden Felipe Calderon came out as the winner by a very small margin of 0.65% of the votes. The data has been analyzed by statistical experts, and many of them have concluded that there were reasons to believe that the voting data had been tampered with. Lopez Obrador called for a recount of the presidential votes, he demanded the sealed ballot boxes be opened with a full recount following in his now famous demand “Voto por voto, casilla por casilla” (Vote by vote, polling place by polling place) to make every single vote count. His petition was rejected, Felipe Calderon was crowned as President of Mexico, and in the end all the ballot boxes were burned by official decree, thus making it impossible to verify if the claims of Lopez Obrador were true indeed.

Thus, in the end, Felipe Calderon was invested as President of Mexico, with only a 0.65% lead, far less than any margin of error even professional pollsters such as Gallup would admit as a basis to predict the outcome of any election. Even to date, the accusations against Felipe Calderon as an illegitimate President still linger, with all of the controversies generated by his more than doubtful triumph hanging around his neck.

Desperately seeking  legitimacy as President in the eyes of all Mexicans, desperately seeking to gain their acceptance, Felipe Calderon took what he considered to be a very bold and spectacular decision, carrying US President Nixon’s war on drugs one step further, turning it into a real true war, by taking the Mexican soldiers out of their barracks and quarters and sending them to the streets to combat drug trafficking, a task usually carried out not by soldiers but by policemen, freely putting soldiers into the streets of Mexico with orders to seek out drug traffickers and engage in combat with the henchmen of the drug lords. Just imagine what would happen if some US President ordered the US Army and the US Marines to go out into the streets to engage with drug traffickers. This is precisely what Felipe Calderon did. In response, the drug lords armed themselves with military style weaponry -courtesy of Mexico’s next door neighbor the biggest arms producer in the planet- and launched a counteroffensive, besides fighting it out between themselves in order to gain control of the lucrative US market. If this sounds crazy, the mere thought of having in the US presidency an entertainer who knows nothing of international and national politics and who  thinks he knows everything and is better than everybody else appears just as crazy. Yet, both Felipe Calderon and Donald Trump achieved what everybody else including the so-called pundits believed unthinkable or impossible.

The result of Felipe Calderon’s decision to start an all out war on drugs by sending the troops to detain and engage the drug traffickers is that is has been one of the worst disasters in the history of modern Mexico. That war on the streets of Mexico is still being waged under conditions that make it extremely difficult if not impossible to return the Mexican soldiers to their quarters. The toll upon the Mexican Army has been so high that recently the Secretary of Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos, has complained by stating he would be the first one to raise both hands raised as a sign of approval for a return of the Mexican troops to their quarters. The human cost of Calderon’s war have likely been enormous, with upwards of 120 thousand dead -in contrast the Vietnam war took on the USA a toll of 58,209 Americans- and 27 thousand missing, much more than the human casualties of the US in Iraq. And today, at this very moment, the illegal drugs trade is more lucrative than ever. All the money spent by the government -the Mexican taxpayer- and all the lives lost were for naught. All this to give some legitimacy to Felipe Calderon. He appears to have no conscience of what he did, nor does his wife Margarita Zavala who supported him all along and believes she herself is fit to become the next President of Mexico after Enrique Peña Nieto. And Felipe Calderon firmly believes that he became and always was a fully legitimate President.

So, what does the Felipe Calderon catastrophic fiasco with his failed war on drugs have to do nowadays with Donald Trump? It turns out, quite a lot.

Donald Trump is in a position no different from the position Felipe Calderon faced after being proclaimed triumphant in the presidential election. Even though the effect of the hacking on the US presidential election in deciding who the winner would be is unmeasurable, the mere fact that this issue casts a very dark shadow of doubt over his legitimacy also provides an enticement for Donald Trump to earn his legitimacy in the same way Felipe Calderon tried to do, by taking some spectacular and bold action which will leave everyone with his mouth wide open, without really considering the long range consequences of what may very well end up being a crazy antic carried out by a desperado seeking legitimacy.

The list of possible things Donald Trump might attempt to do to legitimate himself, with an eye towards the presidential reelection, is vast. Using his enormous power as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and his full control over the attache that provides the nuclear codes is one of them. Among the many possibilities of how Donald Trump could flex his muscle as Commander in Chief to try to gain acceptance and legitimacy in a deeply divided society -a division for which he himself has a lot of blame- is what he will do with North Korea. Just this Sunday January 1st, Kim Jong-un announced that his country was making final preparations to conduct its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, simply saying “We have reached the final stage in preparations to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic rocket”. If successful, North Korea would have the means to throw and deliver a nuclear missile pointed directly at the United States. This is now very serious stuff. All previous acts of defiance of Kim Jong-un have gone unpunished, and the UN condemnations of the provocations of North Korea have not deterred Kim Jong-un from pushing ahead with his ambitious plans to turn North Korea into one of the biggest threats the United States has faced in its history. So far there have been no signs of gratitude whatsoever from North Korea in gratitude to the international response that helped save North Korea from total collapse when it faced a famine of unprecedented proportions. That’s what you get from helping an enemy in distress when the enemy is North Korea.

A US military invasion of North Korea is out of the question unless a high number of casualties is to be accepted by the American public. If an US attack upon North Korea is preemptive and not provoked by an act of war, it is unlikely that South Korea would be willing to participate in such a military offensive, despite the ill-blood between North Korea and South Korea. If an invasion carried out by putting first troops on the ground is out of the question, that leaves Donald Trump with just one option: a series of strategic nuclear strikes with the first strike directed at Pyongyang. We are talking about an action that will snuff out the lives of millions of North Koreans. But Donald Trump has boasted all along that he opposed the US invasion of Iraq! Not since Word War Two has the nuclear bomb ever been used in a war, the only US president in history to issue such an order was Harry Truman, and this was justified then under the premise that with the Pearl Harbor attack Japan had declared war upon the USA, and in this case the US Congress issued a declaration of war. The main reason given to justify dropping two atom bombs over Japan was that in the end this would force Japan to surrender and thus would prevent many U.S. military casualties. The pros and cons on this issue are still a matter of controversy, but what is not debatable is the fact that at the time the USA was engaged in an all out war with Japan. If Donald Trump, seeking legitimacy as Felipe Calderon once did, decides to “put an end once and for all to the threat posed by North Korea” by ordering a nuclear attack, something that he can do at any moment since he will have at any moment as President close to him the launch codes for the US ICBM’s, the outlook for mankind as a whole will be even gloomier than with the current status quo, with a full scale development of nuclear arsenals by countries which hitherto had restrained themselves from doing so, and the entire globe may end up running towards its final Apocalypse.

An option over the North Korean threat, instead of ordering an all out nuclear attack upon North Korea, would be to first send the entire fleet of US aircraft carriers and submarines to the Korean peninsula, and “start talking tough”, warning Kim Jong-un of an inevitable US assault over North Korea unless North Korea abides to the terms and conditions set forth by President Donald Trump. He is, after all, the “man of the deal”, right? He prides himself of “knowing how to do it” because on many issues he knows better than anyone else, right? The problem with Kim Jong-un is that in many issues he is unpredictable, just like Trump. And when two unpredictable men overfilled with pride and confidence face each other as armchair generals, almost anything can happen, and according to the history books it usually does. Kim Jong-un can try to provoke the anger of a Donald Trump who is seldom in a good mood, but if he does he will find out that this guy is completely different from all the former US presidents who tolerated all the antics of Kim Jong-un and his forebears. And the fear of shame will preclude both leaders from “winking an eye” in a Mexican standoff that will not last long.

An option not mentioned above is for Donald Trump as President to do nothing in regards to the North Korea threat, doing exactly the same thing that was done by his predecessors with the exception of a few symbolic sanctions that have proved worthless against North Korea. But Donald Trump is perhaps the last man in the USA who wants to be remembered as a weakling. Quite the contrary, he wants to prove he is a tough guy to deal with, even tougher than Kim Jong-un. So the option of sitting in the bench while doing nothing is no option at all, at least not for Donald Trump; he has precluded himself from this option by his own words and his own actions.

Yes, many things can happen. All of them, in order to give legitimacy to a man soon to be sworn in as US President against the wishes of the popular vote. And when they do begin to happen, perhaps Trump will feel he has won his legitimacy by proving himself. Just as Felipe Calderon truly believes he won his own legitimacy by resorting to a catastrophic all-out war on drugs he ordered on his own initiative.

For the time being, as events begin to develop, here’s some food for thought: there is this Bulgarian clairvoyant whose name is Vangeliya Pandeva Dimitrov, better known as Baba Vanga. She actually predicted that the 44th President of the USA would be a Black American, something that at the time was considered to be nearly impossible (she died in 1996, long before Barack Obama or any other Black American for that matter could even be aspire to be considered as a likely prospect to become a US President). But according to Professor Velichko Dobriyanov from Sofia Suggestology Institute at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, as cited by the Web portal Pravda, that is not the only thing Baba Vanga foresaw. The prediction of a Black American as the 44th US President was not the only thing that Baba Vanga saw coming. She foresaw something else. Besides foreseeing that the 44th US President would be the last President, this would come to pass before the country ends up descending into a deep abyss, finally up breaking apart. If she got it right, and this remains a big if, with Donald Trump in the US presidency we (all of us around the globe, not just Americans) may already be reaching the end of the road. And if such a thing happens, I personally will not blame Donald Trump for it. I place the blame entirely upon the shoulders of all those who voted for him.