Jimmy Carter was not a great president, but all Americans recognise that he is a great former president. The best former president, they say. We now know the worst former president in the history of the United States. It’s Donald Trump. It will be difficult in history and in the future to do worse than Trump. Fortunately, American institutions are strong and the system is stronger than the actors. It is because they are solid that Trump has been soluble for four years. Today, Trump is the worst former president because he is transforming the old American democracy into a Third World democracy. It is incredible that a president of the United States leaves the Oval Office taking along confidential archives and documents.
As in Third World democracies, police went to search the home of a probable candidate who accuses the judiciary and the police of having political motivations and acting under the dictates of the executive. The Trump rhetoric and strategy are exactly those found in Third World democracies, as was the case in Benin between President Talon and his predecessor, Yayi Boni. Since George Washington, the tradition has been that a former president retires from political life, writes his memoirs or becomes a sage who is consulted from time to time, or creates a foundation. The Trump phenomenon is proof of the weaknesses of democracies in the face of populism which allowed Corporal Adolph Hitler to take over Germany, the country that gave the world Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Beethoven. Corporal Hitler and his gang of Nazis seized the second-largest country of thought after Greece, thanks to terror and manipulation, to which democracies are so vulnerable.
Since terror cannot thrive in the United States, manipulation is Trump’s main weapon, along with his « alternative truths ». This manipulation of crowds, which is the main weapon of populists and which Thucydides already denounced as « that Athenian multitude that decides the affairs of the state without knowing anything about it », as Moses Finley recounts in his book The Invention of Politics. What Cicero would later call « a collection of universally incompetent, frustrated, and ignorant men ». Cicero did not put it so well because there is only audacity, ignorance accentuated by manipulation, that can explain the attack and desecration of the Capitol.
Even if Donald Trump has practices and methods of a Third World democracy, there is a big difference between the American democracy and those of most of the world, because in the United States we have, as Aristotle says, « the government of laws, not that of men ». Which is why no one, except Trump’s fanatical supporters, believes in the instrumentalisation of justice and police against him. Unfortunately, the return of Guru Trump in the White House is not to be excluded, as many were mistaken when he launched his candidacy, because in a democracy, they are those whom Cicero disdainfully calls « a collection of universally incompetent, frustrated, and ignorant men ». They are the ones who decide and are very vulnerable to manipulation. This is why the founding fathers of the United States immediately adopted a Constitution after the revolution, to curb popular ardour and instincts and show that they had moved from Democracy to the Republic. It was democracy that brought Trump into the Oval Office, but it is the Republic that will save America from the Trump threat.
